Obviously there are lots of potential improvements on GPS Insight — 2010 will really be our best year in terms of moving forward with them (and the first 10 days so far, we’ve introduced 5 distinct enhanced/new capabilities — posted speed limit reports (will be released out of beta next week), route dashlet, dashlet map landmarks, better driver-to-vehicle mapping algorithms, and speed graphs for our speeding reports).

The roadmap for 2010 has a LOT on it.

Our strategy is to add even more functionality, keep the price consistent in 2010, if not slightly higher, and cater to customers who understand it is worth paying a premium for a premium product. If you want dots on a map at half the price, there is no shortage of low end products willing to give it away.

100% ROI on $25 a month does NOT beat 1000% ROI on $35-45 a month, as you and I (and most of our customers) both know.

Rob.

Especially when dealing with relatively short distance, local routing, the average person thinks they can do it just as well with personal local “common sense”, but in fact it seldom works ut that way.

My weakness was, the service could nly be “after the fact” with the systems I was working with. That’s also a distinct waekness of one of the big names in the business, ESRI’s ArcLogistics Routeâ„¢. (unless they have developed a real time link to a tracking system they didn’t have previously).

Your service beats this sort of solution, hands down … great for rapid response, send the truck to the first client location and then re-route on the fly as service calls or pick up orders come in duting the day. Neat.

2 weeks ago a brand new customer let us know that within a few days of installing devices on his vehicles, he got an “odd hours” alert. He looked to see his driver back at the warehouse (these drivers take the vehicles home at night).

The next day he brought the driver in and told him “they had installed cameras in the yard” (so word wouldn’t get out about the tracking devices). He asked the driver if he had something to tell him about why he was there last night.

The driver admitted he had been stealing copper weekly. This was costing the company roughly $600 a month.

The company told us that just firing that one individual and fixing that problem easily paid for the product.

On another note, a security customer of ours just fired an entire crew after installing GPS on their vehicles. They were sleeping & generally not doing their job to secure the people they were being paid to protect.

Right before the holidays, not the greatest Christmas present to be fired. But neither is having your pockets picked by your employees.

Rob.

Turns out this client had a time-sensitive product that could be returned for credit by retail outlets if it wasn’t sold. The employee who was in charge of picking up the returned product was seen to be making stops every day at an unknown location. Turned out to be a self-storage warehouse.

Yep, you guessed it, the trusted employee was taking the returned product, doctoring the company’s accounting records (a huge issue in and of itself, that was overlooked until the GPS tracking highlighted it) and then merrily selling the outdated product out of the warehouse, via the Internet.

Turns out other branches of the company had almost identical problems,, overall losses were huge … and a trial installation of a $500 GPS tracker was the ‘detective’ that rooted it all out. Talk about ROI!

Pretty good testimony to your systems reserve capacity too. New units going through their initial ‘bedding’ down in the system at the same would presumably cause more load than 1.00 units already in the system would cause. Nice work.

If In-N-Out Burger is a company authorized stop, I think I should go search for your “Employment Application” form. Are you already working on the report that will document burgers consumed per stop?

I also once had a client who called me with a problem … he said the units I had sold him were not recording stops at clients by his salesmen .. a main tool that he had brought the system for.

Upon investigation, we found, by laboriously looking at the track of each problem vehicle, that the sales force _was_ driving to the client locations as they were being told to, but they were leaving the vehicles running outside the clients’ stores while they dashed in and dashed back out to their vehicles in the winter cold. Not only were they thus giving the client short-shrift, but the theft/liability issues of the unattended vehicles was huge.

What was that line from the “3rd Rock From the Sun” song, “… He leaves the car running, he’ll only be a minute; the car speeds away, teenagers in it…” or something like that?

I also had another client once with a “speeding in School Zones” issue. He wanted a daily report of each school zone passage by each vehicle and the speed traveled. I couldn’t do it with the reporting technology I had available, but it looks like your system could handle that as well.