GPS Insight includes the ability to group vehicles and assign shapes to them, and also color-codes them based on what their activity is.

Now that works on most mobile mapping platforms – but NOT on the iPhone, which isn’t up to date yet

Additionally, we reduced the length of the URL you need to type (once) to get to your vehicles on GPS Insight on your smart phone.

Here are some screenshots:

Here is a list of your vehicles — scroll and choose one to drill down to see it on the map:

New Shapes, Colors, and Directional Arrows in Mobile Maps

Viewing many vehicles, most stopped > 1 hour (red) at GPS Insight headquarters.  No idea what Google thinks “House Hangout” is.

Lots of stopped vehicles at GPS Insight Headquarters

Note that now we show the direction of travel on the phone as well with an arrow:

One moving up in Seattle

Clicking through gives more information:

Detailed information about a vehicle

If you are a GPS Insight user, here is how you access the administration area to create your unique URL which you can then use to see current locations of your vehicles on your phone running Google Mobile Maps (most phones):

GPS Insight Mobile Map Administration

Enjoy!

Rob.

How true, again from our favorite geek comic strip, XKCD.

GPS Navigation Humor

Original here:

http://xkcd.com/783/

This happens to me all the time, & it drives me crazy.  Except then inevitably they live on some crazy brand new street and I wind up calling them for directions anyway…

Rob.

One of our employees who drives our GPS Insight Scion in a car pool took it Saturday morning to a remote area of the desert to go for a run.

He parked off the road, on a pull-out which was nowhere near where cars drive.

He came back to this $90 parking ticket (with my name on it since it’s my car officially…):

$90 ridiculous parking ticket

So here’s how you prove that Maricopa County Sheriff’s are scrounging around for money for our broke County, using GPS Insight:

Quickly run a 3D vehicle history for the Scion for that day

Open the “Time Slider” to the first trip of the day & show just the dots (green) on the map corresponding to the drive to the first stop and 45 minute stop (yellow):

History shows the drive to go to an early AM run

Then Zoom down & see the vehicle was parked off the road itself:

Parking off the road yields a $90 ticket

Then go to Street View mode & see that it’s a paved pull-off.  Why wouldn’t it be ok to park there to go for a run/ride/hike?

Did they pave it just to lure people in to give them $90 parking tickets?  Thanks Deputy Thompson.

Street View shows this is nowhere near the road

I’ve paid it since it’s got my name on it, but I will definitely send a copy of the blog article to the Judge & see if we can get it refunded.

How ridiculous, though.

Even though politics and a County with financial issues trumps GPS evidence sometimes, at least you can clear the suspicion that your driver did the wrong thing.

Also, using our DriverID, you know which driver was in the vehicle at the time of the ticket so you know who to talk with, if the original got “lost.”

Rob.

We are very happy to make the prestigious 2010 Inc. 500 list of fastest growing privately held companies in America.  Here is the link to our Company Listing.

We made the list at #281 with 3 year growth of 1,075.7% growth and 2009 revenues of $7.7 million.

GPS Insight included in this year's Inc. 500 List

My “words of wisdom” were somehow chosen as #1 on that page:

* Rob Donat will not be held responsible if you take these words of advice and drown, literally or figuratively...

And, drum roll please, here is the citation:

GPS Insight in the Inc. 500 at #281

We’re in good company:

Past Inc. 500 Honorees

Huge thanks to everyone who has helped us make this list, and more importantly, grow and thrive in this miserable economy, as we have — self-funded and privately held.

Thanks to our Customers, Employees, Partners, Families, and Friends.

Now on to trying to stay on this list for next year… (we may slip to the Inc. 5000 — 1075% 3 year growth is hard to sustain — just ask Google.)

Thanks!

Rob.

We recently (sometime Friday) sent our 2,000,000th alert.

This is after checking 1.742 BILLION times for our customers over the years.

Email I receive nightly which shows how many alerts have been processed

Really, the majority of those checks have taken place over the past year or so, since we started making the power of our alerts more known to customers.

Since you can create an alert and let us do the heavy lifting, every minute of every day, this provides what I call “Unattended ROI.”

Remember that with GPS Insight, you can send alerts straight to the drivers themselves, as well as to supervisors.

So if a driver speeds, idles too long, stops too long somewhere he/she shouldn’t be, is using the vehicle off-hours, or out of where they should be (or doing several other things we can monitor with alerts), THAT DRIVER WILL RECEIVE AN INSTANT ALERT PROMPTING THEM TO CORRECT THEIR BEHAVIOR!

This is useful since GPS Insight becomes “the bad guy.”  You don’t necessarily need to talk to your drivers yourself — we are the “anonymous” reminder which helps them to know they need to correct their behavior, whether it’s speeding, idling, or not being where they’re supposed to be.

We have sent out Two Million Alerts so far — if you haven’t already set yours up, do so!  They’re part of the basic GPS Insight package & unlimited, unlike many competitors’ alerts.

Plus, you can “combine” our alerts to ensure you don’t get false alerts.

Good examples include:

• Sending idling alerts only during business hours and only when the vehicle is outside the maintenance yards, to avoid pestering the driver if work is being performed on the vehicle
• Sending a driver a “what is the holdup?” email/SMS text message whenever they stop for more than 30 minutes at a supplier
• Sending a driver a “is your vehicle being stolen?” alert if it moves late at night and leaves the driver’s home, to avoid waking him up if the spouse needed to move it in from the street or out of the way
• Sending Speeding alerts based on lower thresholds only during night time hours

Alerts are one of the best tools for saving money using GPS Insight.  We’re glad we’ve processed almost two billion of them, and have sent over two million out so far!

Thanks,

Rob.

I was at Bass Pro Shop today getting some fishing things for my boys who want to go fishing.

I had to take a picture of this guy & his shirt.

Real Cowboys Don't Need GPS

I guess that is the end of our steer tracking initiative…

Hilarious!

[p.s. I checked online to see where to get this for those of you who can't wait to own your own.

Here you go: http://www.fortwestern.com/store/product.php?productid=421243&cat=509&page=5

Real Cowboys don't need GPS

Real Cowboys don't need GPS

Only $14.98…

Rob.

My wife loves the fact that she’s a guinea pig and has a GPS tracking device in her car… (not really)

But it comes in handy really often to know where she & the kids are.  This article shows how quick and convenient it is to use GPS Insight to answer real questions in a useful way, daily.

I was heading out of the office, waiting at the light to head to the store, and a car that looked like hers drove by toward our home.  All the cars in Scottsdale look the same and all the windows are tinted, and we don’t have a vanity license plate I can remember (which probably is the way to know it’s my car…).  I wasn’t sure if it was her heading home from somewhere or just one of the other thousand SUV’s in town.

I thought maybe she would want to turn around and grab dinner with the kids where I was going.

But I didn’t know if it was her car or not, so I pulled out my iPhone & checked the map of all our vehicles.

Within seconds, I knew it was her, thanks to the GPS Insight fleet tracking product.

Here’s how I did it in 10 seconds:

I simply refreshed the link for GPS Insight’s “Mobile Maps” then “zoomed down” to my location using the “zoom to me” button (I don’t know what it’s called, but I have an arrow pointing to it below).  Clicking on the vehicle just North of the intersection shows it’s my wife’s vehicle (Nav2):

Quick map tells me it was my wife (Nav2) who just drove by

Then just to show I’m really at the light waiting to turn left, I click on the pin there (I have 2 devices in my car so both are me):

Me at the light waiting to turn left

Then I can show where the cars & the office are using Google Maps’ street view (by pressing the little orange guy shown above):

Google mobile Maps shows the intersection where I'm sitting, etc.

This isn’t life & death or even business, but gives a good illustration of how fast you can answer questions about where people are at (or perhaps which of your techs just blew a red light in front of you a second ago).

10 seconds, and you’ve got your answer.

Rob.

We have recently added a really good new Idle Detail Report & Map.

Scrutinizing idle times and improving driver behavior as a result saves our customers a lot of money.  Knowing this we added this functionality to allow individual vehicles’ idle times to be examined more closely.  Improvements have also been made to the Idle Time Report (to include the ability to “drill down” from the summary to the detail for a particular vehicle/driver).

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Report

The Idle Detail Report can be run on an individual vehicle or a group of vehicles.  It will display individual idle events for each selected vehicle, along with the driver, address, and greenhouse gas emissions information for that event.  (The odometer values are also shown in the exportable spreadsheet version.)  Most of the columns are sortable – note the blue column headers shown below.

The Idle Time Report now allows more columns to be sorted too, including the % Idle column.  Clicking on individual vehicle labels will open an Idle Detail Report for the vehicle, with the same parameters that were previously selected.  Here is a sample detail report (note that one vehicle idled over 9 HOURS!):

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Report

After pressing the button for “Google Earth” all idle stops in the report are shown on a map (this one is 30 minutes or more):

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Map

Zooming down on another mapped idle stop shows the vehicle in a school parking lot:

New GPS Insight Idle Detail Map

This new report and associated mapping functionality will really help you understand who is idling your vehicles and costing you fuel and wear and tear, and let you instantly drill down to see where & in what context the vehicles are being left on when they’re not moving.

It is available for all customers & can be run for a month at a time.

It is extremely fast — running it for a full month for a customer with 279 vehicles only takes 2 seconds to finish.

Enjoy!

Thanks,

Rob.

That seems like I’m stating the obvious, but GPS does not equal accurate odometer readings.

Many of our competitors don’t even give you that information — just the # of miles driven.

Here at GPS Insight, we have recently released a VERY ACCURATE odometer calibration mechanism to ensure that no matter what type of vehicle or GPS Tracking device you use, your odometer readings will be about 99.8% accurate.  This is a big improvement from the typical 98% “best” we see with competitors.

If your vehicle drives 10,000 miles a quarter, we may be off 20 miles.  They may be off 200!  Even so, that’s not going to cause an engine blowout, but if you are billing or charging departments based on accurate mileage, GPS Insight will help you avoid the inevitable questions once GPS mileages are scrutinized.

A year and a half ago, we allowed our customers to enter multiple historical corrections, which is much better than the single “offset” which most companies provide.

Now we have improved this in 2 ways:

• Offsets (corrections) are “spread out” historically to avoid spikes in mileage
• Corrections are used going forward as a calibration to more accurately depict odometer readings so odometer corrections are much less necessary & can be done once or twice a year, vs. once or twice a month.

This was surprisingly a HUGE amount of work, which explains why none of the other providers we’ve seen have ever bothered to fix this fundamental flaw in GPS tracking devices.

Here’s why they’re not accurate, by the way:

GPS Tracking devices typically pull mileage from “GPS Interpolation” — since they know where a vehicle is at any point, they can compute the mileage between points.  Our GPS-based odometer calculations take place 4 times a second, but they are still slightly off — typically 1-3% lower than reality.  This is also because we are adding to mileage when a vehicle is in reverse, even though the odometer isn’t incrementing.

Some devices, such as our LD-3500, pull odometer readings as a function of data from the engine’s computer — but not the odometer reading itself.  Again, this is typically 1-2% off, overstating mileage.

There are all sorts of nightmarish billing and leasing problems which we’ve heard about from our customers when odometer readings aren’t 100% (or at least 99.8%) within GPS Insight, so we made these changes.  After a few weeks since the newest, now “calibrated” adjustment, my vehicle is within 1 mile of accuracy, which is partly due to the rounding on this report.  I probably won’t need to adjust the odometer again all year as a result of these changes — here is what GPS Insight thinks my odometer is for each device, when my actual odometer reading is 35,482.  By the way, some people claim GPS is MORE accurate, since tire pressure & size, as well as tire slippage can throw off an odometer.  Good luck proving that one though.  The reality is everyone goes by the odometer reading & we need to ensure we’re as close to that as possible.

off by 1 mile with 2 different types of device installed

Show historical odometer correction history:

Historical odometer corrections

Here is the new interface for viewing and editing historical odometer corrections, along with a really cool new graphing mechanism we’ll be using within the site going forward for other things:

New Odometer Graphing/Editing Interface

So, to summarize, just know that GPS Insight is working very hard to ensure your data is as accurate as humanly possible, given technical limitations which exist with GPS Tracking devices.  By the way, the good news is that Heavy Duty Vehicles (J-1939/1708) using our 3500-HD have always had 100% accurate odometer readings since that is the only device available which gets real odometer readings from the engine.

Enough about Odometer Readings — I’m very glad this project is over — very important but not the most exciting thing in the world…

On to more interesting things now (like user-definable categories & attributes for vehicles, drivers, landmarks, users, stops, and trips)!

Rob.

After our new “Late Arrival Alert” was launched last week, we got some feedback & changed it a bit to make it easier to read.  The time it SHOULD HAVE TAKEN is now shown (e.g. “…taken less than 6 min.” in this alert).

new alert additions

Additionally, a map is now shown for the start/end points which generated the alert, so you can easily see the context of the alert.  We embed maps in all location-based alerts (e.g. odd-hours, speeding, etc.).

This alert was generated because I took 18 minutes getting from my house to the office today, since I took “the long way” to stop by and pick up something at a convenience store.

This caused me to take 18 minutes vs. 6 to make it the 4.5 miles to the office from my home, and trip this alert.

Here’s a map of the “out of the way” route I took to get to work today (just to get a few things done before I head out of town for the week):

extra stop at a convenience store

You can see the way the red line starts “thin and light” and gets “thick and dark” with the direction of travel, which makes it easy to see the activity at a  glance.  I clicked on the yellow “pin” which shows all stops less than 60 minutes.  It shows I stopped for 1 minute.

The red pin down at the bottom is my car stopped for > 1 hour.

It’s Sunday & I’m heading home now to hop in the pool & get ready for my trip, but wanted to show off this new alert functionality first.

By the way, here are the 2 alerts I got which now are “obsoleted” by this alert — I had one for every time I enter/exit either home or work — now I can see ONLY when I get to work when it’s too long of a trip. (not that I really need to track myself — it just makes for good examples when showing our functionality to customers):

RobHouse & GPS Insight Headquarters arrival alerts

Rob.

A customer needed an alert to let them know whenever a vehicle took to long getting from A to B.

We put the new “Late Arrival Alert” into the product as a result:

New "Late Arrival" Alert

Here’s what it does:

You can enter an origination and destination landmark or group of landmarks.  Maybe it’s all your customers & all your vendors.  Or just your headquarters & the first stops on each of your drivers’ routes.  Or in my case, my home, & the office.

Then you enter how many minutes MAXIMUM it should take to get from the originating point to the destination point.

Here is one I created on myself, for my 7 minute (typical) commute from home to the office:

From Home to Work should take 7 minutes

Now, whenever it takes me more than 7 minutes to get from home to work, I get an alert about it.  You can optionally send the driver an alert to their cell phone/email (blackberry, etc.) as well.

I purposely took a long way to work today to trip the alert & here is the email I received:

New GPS Insight "Late Arrival Alert" via Email

New "Late Arrival Alert" via SMS

Since I have 2 devices on my vehicle, and the “Robgroup” includes them both, it “consolidated” both alerts into a single email for me.

This will be good for companies which want to know their drivers aren’t taking their time between vendors and customers, and even highly custom applications such as golf management.  If a player’s cart which is being tracked takes more than 30 minutes to get from the 1st tee to the 4th green (or fairway, etc.), you can alert the ranger to go work on speeding up the pace of play.  There are hundreds of applications for this alert, particularly if you group all your landmarks intelligently & generically apply this logic to them.

Call us to see how we can help you and your business to detect and fix inefficient driving patterns using this alert and others we offer.

Thanks,

Rob.

Although our iPhone app works, the iPad gives us many more capabilities, so we will be developing an app for it soon.  In the meantime, search the app store for “GPS Insight” and download it for free.

The first screenshot for the iPad app is shown below:

GPS Insight iPad App coming soon

There is a lot of potential for this app, so please let us know what would be convenient for you, and we will make sure to consider it for inclusion.

Thanks,

Rob.

We have new Mapping and Dashlet functionality for users of touch-pad devices such as the iPad and iPhone.

Touchpad clients such as the iPad and iPhone do not allow the same “drag and drop” or “pan” capabilities as a mouse and a browser, so we had to make a few additions.

The new scroll arrows allow you to easily move through a Mapping Dashlet. Clicking the middle square button will zoom to fit the vehicles on the map, or vehicle/group that is shown within that map (such as the “WEST” group here):

New Scroll Arrows

We added a new arrow “popup” which allows you to move Dashlets around within your dashboard. Click up, down, left, or right and the Dashlet will move accordingly. To access this feature just click on the icon.  Then to close it, click that icon again.

New Arrow Popup

Here is an example of the new navigational features on an iPhone:

New Features on an iPhone

Bear in mind that on an iPhone, the main product is functional, but you will need to zoom/pan around since the resolution is pretty small.  On an iPad you will still need to zoom a bit in order to ensure your finger “clicks” the appropriate icons/vehicles, etc.

We also added a new feature to the Dashlet Dock, called “Add-Dashlet”. You will now notice a plus sign (+) to the right of each Dashlet name. Clicking the plus sign will load the Dashlet. Originally, to add a new Dashlet you would have to drag and drop. Now both options are available.

Dashlet Dock with new "Add-Dashlet" functionality

These new features are available to everyone, but were added specifically for touch-pad users. If you have a suggestion for a new feature or for a specific device, please let us know.

Thanks,

Rob.

We now offer a new option to “hide” Vehicle Labels on all Dashlet Maps. Simply open the Dashlet edit settings by clicking on the pencil icon, find “Vehicle Labels” and then choose “None” from the drop-down menu. By utilizing this new option, you can avoid extra clutter on the map, especially when viewing a large number of vehicles.

Select "None" from the Vehicle Labels drop-down menu

Below are examples of the same mapping Dashlets with and without labels:

Following Vehicle Dashlet

Mapping Dashlet displaying large number of Vehicles

Mapping Dashlet displaying specific Vehicle Group

We also allow the vehicle icons to be clicked, which will then open up an information box. To remove the box, just click on it.

Click on Vehicle icon for information box

Vehicle information box

This new feature went from “customer request” to “in production” in just seven days! Always feel free to give us a call if you have a suggestion for a new feature by calling 866-477-4321.

Thanks,

Rob.

We have finally received “approval” from Apple so our new iPhone app (version 1) is available to anyone with an iPhone running OS version 3.1.3 here:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gps-insight/id376128487?mt=8

Here are some screen shots:  Bear in mind you’ll need your login & password to make this work for your account.

See lists of your vehicles with colors to represent their status

Pick a single vehicle to see details about it

Use our "Quick View" to see only the vehicles need to right then

Then show them on a map & zoom down/use Satellite Mode

This is just the first version of the app, and we have much more planned for both iPhone and iPad (as well as Android and Blackberry, depending on customer requests).

Please download and play around with it for your account.  It is a free app.

Be sure to give us a good rating!

Thanks,

Rob.

We added some functionality to our product to help a customer with a recent IRS reality:

Personal usage of take-home vehicles is taxable as income.

Now it’s pretty easy to quantify just how much of that usage is taxable using GPS Insight.

We have a new way to choose which hours of the day for several reports, to include the drive time summary (down to 5 minute levels):

New Time Selection capability within GPS Insight Reports

So when you run a month-long report with the default (00:00 through 00:00), which is what we used to allow (just a full day, not just certain hours of the day), you would get this:

Run a GPS Insight Drive Time Summary for All of May

This shows 193,887 TOTAL miles

Now run it for JUST personal hours (this would vary based on your company’s schedule of course):

Choose your exact hours for the report

The options allow you to specify the time “band” (e.g. 7PM until 5AM in this case) as well as whether to include or exclude trips which happen only partially within that time.  Also, you can apply this to EVERY day or just the start/ending days by clicking “Apply Each Day.”

We will soon have a 3rd “split trips” option which literally split activity in half at the exact time you specify — e.g. if you say 19:00 and a trip starts at 18:00 and ends at 21:00, it will only report 2, not 3 hours & the mileage of those 2 hours.

Additionally, there will be weekend support as well, which will help quantify personal usage (although we already do this in our odd-hours/weekends report.

Here is the result of that particular “personal hours” report:

Quickly determine how many miles need to be taxed

The personal usage miles, based on the 7PM-5AM filter are 29,074 for May, 15% of total miles driven.

A) you may want to curb this usage, since it’s costing your company money for fuel & wear and tear

B) you need to report this as income if it fits the IRS’s definition, and avoid putting your employees in a bad position of owing taxes if/when you/they are audited.

The IRS just announced an audit of all State of California take-home vehicles, reported by Government Fleet Magazine:

IRS is auditing California take home vehicle usage

Here is the link to that article.

Be prepared!  Start quantifying your vehicle usage.  Also, know that GPS Insight stores 3-5 years of your data, so an 18 month audit will take you no time at all to complete.  Good luck with most other GPS providers which only give you 3-6 months of data.  If you want that data, they will usually charge you thousands of dollars for archived data requests.  Not us though…

Rob.

We have had roughly 1400% 4 year growth since 2006, and have applied for inclusion on the Inc Magazine “Inc 500″ — we think we may make the top 100 (we’ll see).  We received word today that we were chosen as their “Applicant of the day.”

We find out in July where we wind up on this list of large, fast-growing companies.

GPS Insight is the Inc. 500 applicant of the day on Facebook

And on Twitter

You can visit their pages at:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Friends-of-Inc-5000#!/pages/Friends-of-Inc-5000/10150132658680187?ref=ts

and

http://twitter.com/inc5000

Thanks, Inc. Magazine!

Rob.

Here is a really good article about how GPS works, and the new satellites going up to replace the aging ones out there now:

GPS has become critical to EVERYTHING (to include GPS Insight...)

It’s really worth reading if you are interested in this world-changing technology.

Rob.

A couple weeks ago, a customer with ambulances asked if we could give them a dashlet which showed a list of recent landmark visits.

Presumably they wanted to know when their medical personnel arrived/left certain hospitals.

That was too “specific” to just their one particular request, so we opened the requirement up to fit more than just that one need.

I had our developers work on an “alert ticker” (we call it “Recent Alerts” on the Dashboard).

It looks like this:

GPS Insight Alerts ticker

Like all dashlets, you drag and drop it onto the dashboard where you want it to go.

Then you configure the settings (which vehicle group, which alert (or all alerts), how far back you want to see, and how many lines you want to see at once):

New GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashlet

You will notice that for our account, we have multiple redundant alerts, and many of our devices are temporary so they go “out of range” since they aren’t installed into our vehicles permanently since we’re constantly testing on our own vehicles (e.g. they lose power when we shut the vehicle off).  This is why there are some duplicate alerts and we have a few “Out of Range” alerts, battery voltage alerts, etc.

The point though is to show you that when alerts are triggered, you can see them on the dashboard as well as receive them on your cell phone/email.

In fact, we made it so that you no longer need to send alerts to an email/SMS phone # — you can leave that blank, & they’ll only be viewable on this dashlet.

Since our “fleet” of employees tends not to idle or drive off-hours (at least not right now for me to show you), I pulled up another customer & they had a few recent problems with their drivers.  Notice that I “hid” the Alert Type column, since it’s only there until you figure out what the various colors represent, and can be “unchecked” along with “Alert Name” in the edit properties area (click on the pencil to get there):

Odd Hours & idling alerts on the GPS Insight Recent Alerts Dashboard Dashlet

If you want, you can create a dashboard full of these for all of your various alerts, and segment them into different areas:

This one I created quickly for our account:

GPS Insight Multiple Alert History Dashboard

And always remember to save your dashboard!

Save your Dashboard after creating it!

So now next time you log in you can recall it!

This is a pretty useful capability.  And it took us only 5 days to create based on this requirement — make sure to ask us in case you ever have a need you would like help with.  Usually it’s in the product, where you might not know we do what you require, and if it isn’t, we’ll typically put it on the list of new capabilities and sometimes get to it as quickly as within the week.  We’re really that quick!

To learn more about GPS Fleet Tracking Alerts visit  our website.

Thanks,

Rob.

I finally received my 3G iPads today for myself & a few developers (and my wife…).  The iPad is VERY cool.  I’ll still stick to my Kindle for reading (minimally my constant emails will distract me from the Kindle App), but everything else will be iPad.

Using GPS Insight on the iPad works pretty well.

Here are a few screen shots:

GPS Insight dashboard, reports, maps, & landmark creation screens on the iPad

The dashboard allows you to run reports, click to zoom into specific vehicles, minimize and delete dashlets, as well as edit properties:

GPS Insight dashboard on an iPad

Edit dashlet properties within GPS Insight on an iPad

Running and clicking through reports, creating landmarks, and several other capabilities are all supported natively.

Right now you can’t add or move dashlets, since that requires a “drag” action which isn’t really available on a touchscreen Apple device.

So we will add functionality to allow customers to do that — a simple click event on the available dashlets, as well as arrow buttons on each dashlet and map will help to fix that limitation of these devices.

I’m not sure how many of our customers use iPads (we’ve had several requests for support though).  They should be happy once this is complete (maybe by the end of this week).

We also have an iPhone App which is installable through iTunes — we haven’t gotten it on the App Store yet, but it’s a simple install if  you want to contact us for a copy.

Here are a couple more screenshots of GPS Insight on the iPad (note this vehicle is parked slightly outside the landmark — easy to adjust though, with or without an iPad):

GPS Insight mapping on the iPad

Editing a complex landmark within GPS Insight on the iPad

Let us know how you like using the iPad within GPS Insight.

One tip: set up your dashboards in advance, then choose between them on the iPad — it’s easy to pull up several saved dashboards.

Thanks,

Rob.

This is a REALLY exciting report, and is the culmination of months of work on top of years of getting ready for this report.

>>> REALLY — It’s A BIG DEAL <<<

This suite of reports will essentially pinpoint your inefficient drivers on an overall as well as a trip-by-trip basis.

Here’s a an early version (the final reports are on the way & will also include an overall vehicle-by-vehicle comparison/summary):

Run the Efficiency Summary Report:

New GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Report

Up comes a graph showing all your drivers’ trips for that period of time (a work week in this case) & how efficient they are relative to both SHORTEST and FASTEST routes which we determine WOULD HAVE BEEN IDEAL:

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Graph

Then looking at the detail, we pick on the top “most inefficient” driver (sorting on # of unnecessary miles beyond the fastest route from A to B):

GPS Insight Trip Efficiency Detail

Then hovering over an entry, it tells us that the “James – Garmin” vehicle went 34.2 miles, but only needed to go 19.03.

Difference between actual and ideal fastest route

By clicking on the 3 entries, we instantly pull up the actual (pink), shortest (red), and fastest (blue) routes for a visual comparison:

Visual Representation of Driver Inefficiency

In reality, the “turnaround” out of the way is where several of our employees meet to car pool every day:

Reason for inefficient driving is a carpool drop-off

So this behavior is all right, since it saves a lot of miles and cars on the road.

But look at #2 and #3 on the list (and there are countless more inefficient trips):

Driving way out of way (in Purple) to get from A to B

Driving way out of way (in Orange ) to get from A to B vs. fastest/shortest routes in blue & red

These are our employees & our own cars, so it’s not exactly the end of the world that we’re sometimes driving all over the place inefficiently, & we have our reasons.

But if you run this against your fleet, you will find drivers who:

• Get Lost
• Make Wrong Turns
• Intentionally Take the Long Way (padding hours)
• Literally Drive In Circles (and should be probably be fired for fraudulent wasting of fuel/mileage and padding of hours)

This report will be available in late May, and is going to surprise a lot of customers.  And probably a lot of drivers too.

It will save our customers a HUGE amount of money on drivers they didn’t know were this inefficient, or were specifically defrauding them of labor hours.

Additionally, it will be available in June as a real-time alert to supervisors as well as drivers to “coach” them on better ways to complete their trips when they do so inefficiently.

Oh, and by the way, on a slow development server, for all 50 of our vehicles for a full work week, that report only took 1/3 of a second to run:

FAST (.36 second) Report

Look forward to it soon!

For more information on our main GPS Fleet Tracking Reports visit our website.

Thanks,

Rob.

From our support page:

We just added several new reports so that you will know which of your DRIVERS (not just vehicles) were associated with certain activity:

Drivers Are Now Shown in Most Utilized Reports

Driver-to Vehicle assignment information is now shown on the majority of our most utilized reports and maps.

(If you’d like to learn more about Drivers, please read Driver-to-Vehicle Mapping!)

The Driver was previously an option to be shown in dashlets on the website and to be listed in the Activity Detail Report:

Map and Location Dashlets

Activity Detail Report

The Driver information has been newly added to four more reports:

Begin/End of Day Report

Drive Time Summary Report (It replaced the VIN on this report.)

Run Time Report

Stop Detail Report (It appears only in the exported spreadsheet version of this report.)

GPS Insight allows you to assign drivers 5 different ways:

• Web Interface
• Automatic DriverID fob/reader
• Garmin login capability
• SMS Text Message from driver “assigning” himself/herself to the vehicle
• Application Programming Interface (API) to allow your systems to automate the assignment of your vehicles to your employees

This makes reporting much more useful if your drivers aren’t always tied to the same vehicle.

Rob.

New “Magnifying Glass” Toggles between Pan and Zoom on 2D Current Map

2D Current Maps have a new feature that allows custom zooming and re-centering of the map to a chosen area. Clicking the new “magnifying glass” icon, underneath the zoom-level tool, toggles between panning and zooming functions on the map.

When zoom is selected, you can drag a box around a specified area to quickly zoom in to that location.

You can then make a box around another area to zoom again, if needed, …

…to get to the zoom level you prefer:

As always, the middle mouse scroll wheel allows you to rapidly zoom down & back out.  Double-clicking and double-right-clicking will also zoom you down/up one level at a time.

We’re always working on making the mapping better, easier, and faster.  As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks,

Rob.

Now if you have Garmin integrated into your GPS Insight implementation, you can optimize a list of addresses or landmarks, then send that entire route via wireless to your driver’s Garmin on his or her dashboard.  It’s this easy:

Route a Set of Addresses to a Garmin as well as Add Landmarks to a Route

A route made from a list of addresses, and some landmarks, can be sent to a Garmin. Using the Route Dashlet, addresses can be pasted to create a list of destinations that are not yet landmarked:

Additional destinations for the route can be added from the list of landmarks on the account:

An optimized route is then created by clicking Get Route:

The Route is sent to the specified Garmin by selecting the vehicle with an attached Garmin and clicking Send:

If you would like to look at the route, you can click on “Map This” to show it on a map and adjust/email it if necessary:

Once you “Send” the route to a Garmin, the NUMBERED stops show up with the Route Name for you to easily determine where to go and in what order. You may call them “Monday,” “Tuesday,” etc. in order to help distinguish. Note that they should not be a very long name since Garmin screens aren’t always wide enough to show the full name (as in the case with my small, inexpensive Nuvi 205).

Here are screen shots of the Garmin when it receives the route:
The “Stop” icon shows up and the Garmin “dings” to let you know you have a new stop (or multiple stops).  Click on it to show your stops in numbered order:

Then, you can click on the one you want to go to (ideally in the order specified, or based on whichever one is closest to your existing location (which is shown in the right column) [note I had to edit the image since my nuvi didn't have enough space for the full number -- why you should buy a W model (which stands for widescreen)]:

After clicking on it with your finger, you get more details, and can choose to “Go” there at this point:

At that point, the Garmin will take you there with turn by turn audible and visible instructions. If you have a Traffic enabled Garmin, it will optimize for existing traffic.

Note that addresses, latitude/longitude, and Landmarks may be combined within the GPS Insight route dashlet.

This is a real time-saver and using GPS Insight to get the route order optimized will absolutely save you miles — 5-10% is reasonable, and more if your dispatcher really doesn’t have a way to visualize the order on a map.

Down the road, we will start allowing customers to save routes & compare the route SENT to the actual route DRIVEN.

Bear in mind that the GPS Insight GPSI-4000 and newly introduced GPSI-3900 are our 2 Garmin capable devices.

Click for more information on our Garmin Integration.

Rob.

6 of us just got back from NAFA 2010 in Detroit.  NAFA is the National Association of Fleet Administration (now known as the “Fleet Management Association”).

It’s a great conference for us to meet with existing and new customers, as well as partner vendors.

We were so busy this year, that for the first time, we forgot to get a group photo!  Doh.  Better than being bored I suppose.

Here are a couple photos of our booth this year:

GPS Insight exhibits at NAFA 2010 in Detroit

GPS Insight exhibits at NAFA 2010 in Detroit

Sorry to Alissa & Evelyn who didn’t make it into the picture (Evelyn was taking it).

All I got was the back of my head this year.

Here are some articles about the past 2 two years (Salt Lake & New Orleans)

Rob.

Since most of our GPS Insight Vehicle Tracking devices are slightly inaccurate when it comes to actual miles driven, we have made some recent changes to:

• Make it easy to import corrections via Excel Spreadsheet from a Fleet Management System
• Use these corrections to “calibrate” the device, taking them from 98-99% to 99.8-99.9% accurate

Vehicle odometer and/or label information can now be uploaded via spreadsheet to update the website. First, open the Spreadsheet Importer from the top of the website:

Next, select either Update Odometer Waypoints or Update Vehicle Labels, browse for, and click Upload Spreadsheet to load the file with vehicle information (such as vehicle label, licens plate, color, make, model, etc.):

The spreadsheet should contain the vehicle information to be updated, with one row per vehicle. If odometers are being updated, the Odometer readings and corresponding reading Timestamps should be in columns next to either the VIN, serial number, or vehicle label – as shown below. If vehicle labels are being updated, new values for Vehicle Label, Color, License, License Country, and License State can be in ordered columns next to either the VIN or serial number of the vehicle.

Note that the Timestamp allows you to update as of a particular time, so that even if the vehicle starts to drive after you take the reading, it will still make it accurate.

Uploading the spreadsheet will allow you to preview the import and match the correct column definitions to the spreadsheet’s columns. When complete, click on Preview the Import:

All rows of the spreadsheet and its data are then shown in the manner they will be imported. Green check marks indicate that the row will be imported. After verifying the information appears correctly, click on Proceed with Import:

Vehicle labels and odometer readings will then be instantly updated.
Very shortly, GPS Insight will introduce an automated “odometer factor” which will make future odometer readings much more accurate, based on historical adjustments.
For instance, a typical device odometer (with either an LD 3500 or GPSI-3900/4000) is off by 1-2% [typical, since GPS, and light duty OBD-II odometer readings are not 100% accurate]. After 500 miles, the device may show 490 or 510. If this is adjusted, the 2% adjustment factor is used moving forward, so that after the next 500 miles, the device will most likely show 999 or 1001. This feature will make odometer adjustments far less necessary. Only one or two reasonably spaced odometer adjustments is necessary to “calibrate” the device to the vehicle. Exceptional situations, such as a running vehicle being towed, or excessive backing up or start/stop may cause odometer readings to differ, but GPS Insight makes it easy to adjust those odometer readings to reality, and “allocates” the error to the prior miles in a way which avoids “jumpy” odometer adjustments.
Note that most other GPS tracking companies do not even track odometer reading – they only track absolute miles driven, which does not help with preventative maintenance schedules such as GPS Insight’s or 3rd party FMS software, which GPS Insight supports via API.

Using GPS Insight’s odometer readings, as well as our automated updates and “smart” calibration, you can ensure that your Preventative Maintenance (PM’s) will be done at just the right time, and that mileage billable will be accurate and accountable.

Rob.

Obviously I am pretty dependent on GPS for just about everything when it comes to getting around [also for money...].

I have 3 GPS Navigation devices with me when I drive my car (factory installed, Garmin, & my iPhone) so I never print directions any more.

So, on the way out to Long Beach a couple weeks ago, my family and I took our 3 month old car with Ford’s/Microsoft’s “Sync” system (with GPS Navigation).  No directions, just our factory installed GPS navigation unit.

Just outside of town it crashed on us.  I figured out how to do a factory reset and get it back up & running.

Here’s the point:  AFTER RESETTING IT, I FORGOT TO TELL IT “FASTEST” & NOT “SHORTEST” when optimizing our route.  DOH!

We took the 10 out to LA area, but then it took me through some really sketchy, slow-moving areas.

On the way home, I thought about it, & realized I needed to change my GPS setting to FASTEST from SHORTEST.

I was curious how much longer it took me time-wise to get there than to get back, so I ran a 3D history report & saw very quickly that it was twice as long (60 vs. 30 minutes):

Run a week long history for our trip to/from Long Beach

Slow, direct route vs. Fast, indirect route

All I had to do is look at the 2 points where the route deviates then converges again, and compare times and distances:

Where I took a GPS dictated "dumb turn"

The times/mileages are:

Going there: 17:47 & 4571.6 miles to 18:53 & 4602.5 miles

Coming back: 10:26 4618.8 miles & 10:58 & 4656.3 miles

Doing the quick math, it took 31 miles & 66 minutes there the “short” way, & 37.5 miles & 32 minutes (half as long) the “long way.”

So to save 6.5 miles, I wasted 34 minutes of my life, praying we didn’t get car-jacked.  At least if we did, I would know where the car went…

Anyway, I thought of this the other day & was curious just how much extra time it took us because of that one GPS setting on my (Factory Installed — not GPS Insight…) navigation device.

Because I track that vehicle, it took me about a minute to figure it out using GPS Insight.

Oddly enough, while I was writing this, my new Microsoft Windows 7 box crashed Google Earth as well.  It knew I was badmouthing Microsoft.  Sooner or later, all things Microsoft eventually crash.

I’m really glad we don’t run our systems on Microsoft products.

I just checked and our two “primary” servers which our customers rely upon (with lots of auxiliary and backup servers, of course) have been up for two years to two years & 3 months:

GPS Insight servers run for years without incident

I’m glad most of our competitors run Microsoft though…

Rob.

Today, 4/15/2010, is the “legal” 5th birthday of GPS Insight (as a product we celebrated back in August).  I “spun off” GPS Insight from my consulting company as its own legal entity 4/15/2005.

In that time, we have grown from one customer & 286 trucks to having sold over 1,000 customers & over 20,000 tracking devices.

We have gone from 3 employees to over 30, and now have 8 digit revenues and are sustainably profitable (much better than 5 digit revenues and 6 digit losses back 5 years ago…)

My wife was nice enough to remember the “birthday” and send this bouquet of cookies to the office:

GPS Insight 5th birthday

Many Heartfelt Thanks to everyone who has helped us make it to this important milestone. It has been challenging for everyone through the past few years with the economy like it is, and we are proud to have helped our customers save money, identify problems, and keep their drivers and businesses safe with GPS Insight’s GPS fleet tracking product.

Here’s to the next 5 years!

Rob

This is very to the point:

Our reports and proactive alerts help you to ensure your drivers are not idling.

It’s both wasteful and impacts our environment.

I pulled up a relatively new customer at random & ran an idling report for them & was happy to see that they CUT THEIR IDLING 75% WITH PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT!

Here is how I ran the report:

Run a GPS Insight Idle Time History Report

The report came up in 1.6 seconds & quantified 33,400 hours of driving since January, and the Purple Line (the important line) shows a marked decrease from a high of 20% idling to a current low of 5%:

75% Reduction in idling percentage

The full report shows all the particulars & shows very clearly the effects of both using GPS Insight as well as managing the drivers to stop idling:

Decrease from 20% to 5% idling over 3 months

Note that this is only one of our thousand customers, and only 234 vehicles. I like the fact that GPS Insight truly is helping our customers make a big difference both in terms of saving fuel money, and the environment.

Another report shows that they have saved roughly TWO THOUSAND IDLING HOURS across their fleet of 234 vehicles by eliminating that 15% idling (based on 13,000 hours driven in the past month). With fuel costs plus wear & tear easily costing $5 per hour, they’ve seen a $10,000 PER MONTH savings, which is $42 per vehicle. We charge them $32.95.  So they make $9 per month just by reducing idling, and now they have all the other benefits of GPS Insight for free – efficient dispatch, proof of delivery, proof of driver hours worked, reduction in speeding, theft recovery, and so on.

Plus they’re not pi$$ing on the planet anymore…

Click to learn more about our GPS Fleet Tracking System.

Rob.

One of our salespeople, Alissa, just sent me this.  Nice to know we are getting use out of our own product.  She was waiting for her car to be towed & didn’t want it stolen over night (the radiator died).

using an alert to ensure a vehicle isn't stolen

We get hooked on all the various uses of GPS Insight ourselves as well! Learn more about our tracking alerts or the rest of our GPS vehicle tracking solution by visiting our website.

Rob.

We have an SMS query capability which allows you to see the driving distance between a vehicle & an address, a landmark, or another vehicle.

It is documented at http://support.gpsinsight.com/wiki/support/sms_query_documentation under “Driving Distance.”

You just text “gps [vehiclename] distance [address | landmark | vehicle name]

It just came in handy for me while my family & I were driving in California.  I mentioned we were close to our office and my wife asked how close it was [we drove right past...  We're going on vacation this week].

I didn’t know the exact name of the landmark we have for it (GPSI – LA) so I just SMS’d our 477-477 (GPS-GPS) short code with “gps nav2 distance gpsi” — nav2 is the vehicle we were in.  The return SMS told me the list of valid landmarks meeting “GPSI” — GPSI – LA was the one I needed so I sent it again, & it showed that I was 12.1 miles away, a 25 minute drive:

Use GPS Insight SMS Queries to see how far it will take you to drive somewhere

We got close — within 4 miles of the office.  But I’m on vacation, so we just kept on going…

Driving by close to the GPS Insight LA Office in City of Orange, CA

So close:

Driving by the office on the way to vacation

Great way to show how useful SMS Queries are for our customers though — they are an optional, but highly useful capability.  We use them ALL THE TIME ourselves.

Click for more information on our GPS Vehicle Tracking Mobile Access.

Rob.

Keir finished the Atacama Crossing “4 deserts” race — 250 km across the Chilean desert.

We tracked him using a GPS Insight TT-1900, and here is the track of his entire journey:

GPS Track of Keir Oxley finishing a 250 km race in Chile

Here is a picture of him crossing the finish line:

Picture of Keir Oxley finishing a 250 km race in Chile

He finished in 64:13:23

Congratulations Keir!

Rob.

Keir is still hiking across the harsh Chilean desert as we speak, tracked with a 5.9 oz. satellite tracker in his pack.

Keir hiking across the Chilean desert

Not to be outdone, I covered 40 miles today in the harsh wilderness myself, with only the assistance of 20 ski lifts, gravity, 2 skis and a couple of beers:

Ski tracking in Deer Valley at Park City UT

Just kidding, obviously a lot harder to walk 20-some miles across the desert than ski around a bunch.  Maybe I should invite Keir next time…

Rob.

Keir is doing well, in 112th place (out of 127 left in the race), and there are a LOT of people who have dropped out.

112th out of 127 left in the race

The site says he has raced for just shy of 40 hours. We are tracking him every hour with a GPS Insight TT-1900.

I ran a track like this:

GPS Track of Keir across a Chilean desert

And see where he’s gone (roughly — we update once an hour):

GPS Track of Keir across a Chilean desert

This shows 94.2 miles, but it’s been more than that, since he’s not racing in a straight line.

Good luck Keir!  He’s got 1 more 25 mile day, then a 50 some mile day tomorrow to complete this race, his second Racing the Planet race.

Rob.

My Brother-in-law Keir Oxley is at it again, doing another “Racing the Planet” 126 mile extreme race through the desert in Chile (his blog is available here).

Last time we tracked him through the Sahara Desert.

They are raising money for earthquake victims.  Again we are tracking him using a TT-1900, which weighs 5.9 ounces, and reports world-wide, every hour.

So far he has gone 22 miles (we show about 19 since the tracking device only transmits once an hour and he’s not traveling in a straight line):

Keir traveling across the Chilean desert (Atacama crossing)

I’ll try to keep the site updated with tracking screen shots.

Good luck Keir!

Rob.

I’m on a vacation at Park City Utah, and I have a new app for my iPhone called Navionics. It lets you see where all the ski trails are, and search for them, as well as track your own trail.

It’s got great features, but is a shining example of how inaccurate phones are for tracking purposes.  The “pins” are GPS Insight, and the little yellow “O”s are my Garmin Edge 705.  The red line which goes off the mountain then back at the top of the lift is the iPhone based tracking device.  I did not go over the side of the mountain, trust me…

GPS Insight vs. Cell Phone Tracking

It’s a nice app nonetheless – here are a few screen shots:

Ski trails on Navionics

List of trails you can choose to see in NAVIONICS

Highlighting a single trail in NAVIONICS

But when you take the inaccurate iPhone “track” which NAVIONICS provides out of the map, you can see that GPS Insight (light blue) and the Garmin 705 (red) are both very accurate.  The GPS Insight EZ-1000 was set for 1 minute updates, and the Garmin is about 10 seconds between points.  The big difference is the EZ-1000 transmits its location every minute, and with the Garmin (meant for bike riding), you need to upload the data when you get back to a PC.

GPS Insight vs. Garmin to track snowboarding

The speeds even match up pretty closely:

snowboard speed using GPS

Note that this view (from the Garmin website) shows both speed AND elevation (so you can see I went on the long run 4 times, & smaller runs 5 times through the day):

GPS Tracking snowboard activity & speed

That was enough to kill my newbie snowboarder legs, so I’m taking today off & have plenty of time to write about it…

Rob.

We just added a couple nice new capabilities to make it trivial to create a map on the GPS Insight dashboard by dragging and dropping either a single vehicle or the name of the group up at the top of the dashboard.

Just be careful to move dashlets by dragging on the RIGHT side of the title bar now (or you’ll create a map accidentally).

Here’s a quick video which shows how to do it:

Thanks,

Rob

Sometime yesterday GPS Insight checked our ONE BILLIONTH alert for our customers.

Every night I get a small report showing how many checks and how many actual alerts have been processed/sent.

GPS Insight checks our one billionth GPS Tracking alert

Last night it showed that we have passed ONE BILLION alert checks, and just over one MILLION alerts (1,036,790 to be exact).

Again, just about one in one thousand times GPS Insight checks your vehicles’ status, we send you an alert email or Text Message about it.

That’s the beauty of managing the exceptions — GPS Insight does everything for you, and you just find out once every thousand times we check — once a minute per vehicle.

FYI, the popularity of alerts is in this order:

idling alerts, speeding alerts, odd hour alerts, geofence alerts, long stop alerts, panic alerts, and powercycle alerts.

Click for more information on our alerts.

Rob.

I took my  boys (7 & 9) skiing (snowboarding they correct me every time…) up to Flagstaff AZ this weekend.

I brought my Garmin Edge 705 (a Garmin for bikes, basically) & put it in my coat pocket to get a really good feel for where we went during the weekend.  It logs every 10 seconds for eventual upload (vs. once a minute in real time for the EZ-1000 I brought along as well).

Garmin EDGE 705

They are really nice, and we don’t sell them — I bought mine at the bike shop.  [We do sell Garmin's for vehicles and can integrate them with our GPSI-4000 GPS tracking solution though...]

The Garmin is an optimist, and thinks I ran up all those hills & burned 5248 calories in the process (had I brought the wireless heart monitor it would have known better):

Garmin's interpretation of my Skiing with my kids

This is a great image of GPS Insight vs. Garmin (bear in mind we are an “ACTIVE” tracking system whereas the Garmin is “PASSIVE” and needs you to upload the data eventually):

GPS Insight vs. Garmin for ski tracking

The “pins” are EZ-1000 points [every minute while in cell coverage, which is spotty on the mountain].  The yellow circles are Garmin points (a LOT more of them).

Here is the Garmin unit track of where we went (and where I remembered to turn the unit on…):

Skiing at Snowbowl in Flagstaff AZ

It’s nice to have that for sports usage.  But if you want to track your vehicles in real time, that’s not an option — you need an active tracking solution like GPS Insight. Both are great products — just for entirely different needs.

And here are my cold kids.  Lots of snow this weekend, and way colder than they’re used to living in the desert.

Rob's kids in their cold-weather snowboarding attire

Rob.

Recently a prospective customer asked us to add a “half-height” map. We did that within a few days (as well as a 2x, 3x height map).

When using it though, I thought it took too long to use the menus to choose the right vehicle, etc.

I decided it would be really convenient to allow the user to “tear off” a vehicle from a location, alert, etc. dashlet.

Now you can just drag & drop ANY VEHICLE from any dashlet onto the dashboard to create an instant half-height “follow this vehicle” map:

Drag a vehicle to instantly create a half-height "follow this vehicle" map

As soon as you drop the “map” icon which is displayed, that vehicle is now displaying in a map which follows it, and shows all of the vehicles from the group associated with the dashlet you dragged it from (this was a complaint from the prospective customer about their current vendor — this type of map only showed the single vehicle):

Instantly create 5 maps just by dragging 5 vehicles to the dashboard

We let you show up to 8 maps per dashboard window.  This took me 2 seconds per moving vehicle to create these maps using this new capability.  We will start allowing other drag & drop capabilities on the dashboard now that we’ve started to use this type of functionality.

Really convenient!  Remember, if you want to keep this particular layout, you need to save it or save as in the hierarchy save tools:

Save your Hierarchy Changes!

As usual, if you have any tips or requests for new capabilities or ideas, please let us know!

Thanks,

Rob.

We now have support for saving a custom hierarchical view — as well as using that in a scheduled report.

We still have not given access to the hierarchy to all customers, but are happy to allow you access as a beta customer if you just ask.

Here’s how it works:

When running a report, select “Custom Hierarchy Selection”:

Saving a Custom Hierarchy Selection

Then after running the report, an intermediate screen is shown where you can choose/exclude any groups from the hierarchies you have defined:

Drag and Drop hierarchy nodes to include them in the custom group

Choose another hierarchy and drag/drop nodes to “intersect” (restrict to the vehicles in the SouthWest which are Delivery, Parts, or Service), and “exclude” (in this case get rid of all Nevada and “big rig’s.”

Restricting to just the 55 vehicles you need

Then save this highly custom group as “MySavedHierarchy” by typing the group name and pressing “save.”

Saving a custom hierarchy group

Then click on “Run Report” to run the report you started & you’ll see that the Vehicle Group is a Custom Hierarchy with those 55 vehicles:

Report based on a custom hierarchy

(tip: make sure to refresh the main site to pick up the newly created hierarchy group in the main menu) Now you can use it to run any report moving forward:

Recalling a saved hierarchy group for running your GPS Tracking reports

Additionally, they now show up under scheduled report choices:

Use a Custom Hierarchy Group in your scheduled reports

Any time you make a change to your hierarchy structure or members moving forward, they will automatically be reflected in the ad-hoc or scheduled reports you run using that custom group.

This is a big deal for large organizations since they can “intersect” multiple functional/organizational/geographic groups of vehicles very easily without having to manually (tediously) create groups for every combination of interest.

Rob.

GPS Insight sends out our Millionth Alert

GPS Insight sent out our millionth alert on Sunday, February 14.  GPS Insight has checked just shy of one BILLION alerts, so that means that only one out of 1,000 driver events is “exceptional.”  Depending on how the alerts are defined, that could be good or bad…

Either way, we’re glad to be sending these to our customers, and ensuring they know what is happening with their fleets at all times — day or night, 24 hours a day, 60 minutes an hour.

If you’re not using our alerts, you should be — let us do the work.  “Set it and forget it!”

Rob.

I have a daily report which comes to me which tells me how close we are to hitting 2 major Alert milestones:

GPS Insight's Millionth Alert and Billionth Check are coming soon!

We are very close to sending our MILLIONTH alert out.

Shortly thereafter (unless drivers stop causing alerts which, uh, isn’t very likely…), we will process our BILLIONTH alert check.

We process a huge number of alerts checks and send quite a few each day.

In the short time I’ve been typing this blog article, we have processed 15,282 checks, yielding a relatively small number of alerts — 3.

This is because it’s night and most of our customers’ drivers aren’t driving, let alone speeding, idling, or going in or out of landmarks.  Chances are those were odd-hours alerts…

I’ll let everyone know when we hit these marks.

[worth noting, on 8/15/2009, when I last wrote about this, we were only at 350 million checks and 419,000 alerts.  Customers are really starting to utilize our alerts more now than they have in the past]

Rob.

We recently made some new enhancements to our Dashboard Maps.

Now you can size them in any of 4 heights (and the width is determined by the dashboard style you choose).

Additionally, we allow you to display 8 maps per window now, vs. 4. You can still open as many windows as your PC is OK with.

In addition, we now allow you to “follow” a single vehicle, and display ALL the vehicles around it (determined by which vehicle group you choose).

Here is a screen shot of 3 “half-height” maps which are all “following” a different vehicle (noted in the title area of each map):

3 "Follow me" half-height maps in GPS Insight's Dashboard

These are only the right-most column of the full dashboard, which has a “twice-height map in the middle:

New multi-height maps within GPS Insight

You can choose which vehicle or vehicle group to SHOW, which landmark group to DISPLAY, which vehicle or vehicle group to FOLLOW, and which zoom level to use.  Additionally, the same Map Group choices apply so you can “tie” these maps to the other various dashlets (e.g. location, alerts, landmarks, etc.).

As always, click on the “pencil” icon at the top right of the map dashlet to open the edit settings screen which looks like this:

GPS Insight Map Dashlet Settings

Make sure to save your dashboard here:

Save your changes to the GPS Insight dashboard!

An upcoming enhancement will allow you to simply “tear off” a vehicle from a dashlet to automatically show that vehicle in a “follow me” map, which will make it quicker to create these ad-hoc maps for vehicles you may have a short term interest in following closely.

View our GPS Vehicle Tracking Features for more information on what we can do.

Rob.

This new report shows the speeding and “slow-poke” tendencies of your individual drivers.

It can be run for a month at a time, and is available here (we are running the report for just the OKL group for the month of January):

Launching the GPS Insight Speed Summary report

Here is the part which allows you to rank by any of the major columns (click on the column heading) and you can see that OKL-69633-Service-Jasoncb is the top speeder on average. This is relative to the speed limit ONLY when he is exceeding the speed limit.

Ranking your speeders using GPS Insight's new Speed Summary Report

Conversely, you can click on “Laggard Avg” which will give you the top “slow-poke” (tie between the Manager and Chadc). This is ONLY when the driver is going LESS than the posted speed limit.

This is useful because both activities are undesirable. Padding hours by going slow is just as bad as being reckless and wasting fuel by speeding.

Clicking on any of the “at a glance” graphs to the right brings up a graph which compares a single driver’s speeding profile to the the entire group:

Graphically showing differences between a driver and the group average

This is the 4th in a series of enhancements to our speeding reports and graphs.

Since occasional discrepancies between GPS Insight’s data and actual posted speed limits occur, we have found it much more useful to run on a month-by-month “Macro” level to indicate undeniable trends in speeding.

Future enhancements will include posted speed limit alerts, group-by-group comparisons of speeding/lagging trends, and historical comparisons to prove that progress has been made in improving efficiency and curbing speeding using GPS Insight reports and alerts. Additionally, certain fields within these reports will launch supporting reports (e.g. a speeding report for just that single vehicle, to include violations on a map, etc.). Rapid acceleration and deceleration will be detected and reported upon for certain GPS Insight devices (notably the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000).

This report is available for all customers immediately, and currently has data going back to December 2009. We will add support for earlier months as we add functionality.

Click for information on the other reports we offer.

Thanks,
Rob.

We have been busy this month and released several new features to the dashboard (as well as posted speed limit reports/graphs which I will talk about separately).

First, there are new dashboard layouts, and they are more intuitively labeled:

Intuitive dashboard styles

Choosing “2 wide L” will give you a wider column on the left and a thinner column on the right.  Choosing “4 wide” will give you 4 columns.  These various layouts are useful depending on what type of style you like for your dashboard setup.

As always, after making changes, make sure to save your dashboard settings!

Next, we have added the ability to send routes to Garmins from the Route Dashlet.

After optimizing a route with the route dashlet (and optional feature), just choose a Garmin-integrated vehicle and click on send — the optimized route is sent instantly to that Garmin:

Send a full optimized route to a Garmin

Last, we made our “closest to” dashlet more useful by adding both drive distance and drive time, in addition to the “crow flies” distance which is all we previously supported.  You can sort by any of the columns, choose your vehicle, and click on the “dispatch” button if you are using Garmin integration:

Closest To Dashlet includes drive distance/time now

And for users of the dashboard map book tool which turns an address into a map book page/grid coordinate, you can now “sanity check” the location by clicking on “Map Address” — it will pull up a convenient map for you to make sure you typed it correctly & have a reasonable address:

Sanity check your mapbook addresses now in the dashlet

And another recent dashlet worth mentioning again — the legend.  Now you can have a convenient reference to what the various colors and vehicle icon shapes mean:

GPS Insight map legend

Thanks for using these new capabilities and we appreciate your feedback which has led to their creation.

Click for more information on our GPS Vehicle Tracking Functionality.

Rob.

After months of work, we are pleased to announce a brand new www.gpsinsight.com!

The new one will allow us to keep our rapidly enhanced product better documented for our customers and prospective customers.

Brand New GPS Insight website

Additionally, we have begun work on a comprehensive training site at training.gpsinsight.com.  This site will allow us to keep all of the documentation for GPS Insight up to date and available for both customers and prospective customers.

Brand New GPS Insight Training website

Please check them both out and expect many new features and much more content for both coming soon!

Thanks,
Rob.

I pretty much have a never-ending supply of EZ-1000’s so I brought one skiing with my 2 boys on a recent trip.

Jack, my older son, is old enough to go skiing (boarding, he would correct me) without me. Actually, he has officially passed me by — he does black runs I refuse to do (small on a board is way better than big on skis when it comes to moguls).

I wanted to know where he was at one point so I ran a quick mobile map on my iPhone & put it in “compass mode” so I could see what direction he was from me.

Here it is (I’m the blue dot, Jack is the red pin):

GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain

Here he really was (my eyes are better than the 3 megapixel camera on the iPhone…) — note that he’s between the lift & the ski patrol “house” just like the map shows it:

GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain

I ran a 3D history of that device for the 2 days I remembered to bring it and put it in Jack’s pocket & it puts him exactly where my iPhone shows him at 1:44 (note the time in the first screen shot). Waiting 4 minutes at the bottom of the hill for his 2 friends:

Showing skiing activity using an EZ-1000 from GPS Insight

Also interesting is the straight lines which depict the lifts very clearly. The main lifts are in the “clutter” of dots on the left side, but the lifts we went on once each are really easy to spot toward the top right.

It’s easy to see which runs got the most use by turning off the “time slider” and looking at just the blue path:

GPS Tracking my son on the ski (board) slopes

Here are my two boarders:

Jack & Ryan on a snowboarding trip

And by looking at the GPS track as well as how well he was jumping and grinding, I can tell Jack went through the terrain park most of all:

Jack grinding/jumping off a box in the terrain park

I’ll try embedding a Facebook video I have of him going through the terrain park here:

Rob.

Next week we will release this new capability which will be part of the Activity Detail Report. Next month you will be able to run it for all the vehicles in your fleet and sort in a way that you can identify your Lead-Foots, your Slow-Pokes, and your efficient, safe drivers:

Identify which drivers are going too fast or too slow relative to the speed limit

This is a really useful report, and is just the beginning of many new graph-oriented capabilities we plan to release in 2010.

Here is a close-up of just the graph area which shows the driver efficiency — within 10 MPH of the limit 44% of the time:

Efficient Driving Graph in GPS Insight

To see more intuitive reports that we offer, please view our Sample Reports.

Rob.

I lost my keys the other day which is awesome. I think they’re in a toy chest somewhere courtesy of my daughter.

So today after we rolled out a new improved Driver-to-Vehicle mapping product, I grabbed a new DriverID at work and put it on my (new) keychain.

I forgot to “log in” — we do however support mandatory login using a really obnoxious buzzer which goes off after 30 seconds until you press the driver ID button to the reader.

So after dinner, I decided to test everything for myself. Since I’m not the only person who will lose a DriverID or their keys, we made sure to make it easy to give out & assign new driverID’s.

After my drive, I logged in and launched the right administrative screen where we see 3 unassigned driverID buttons — one has been used in my car (Rob 4000) and has today’s date and a recent time.

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So I choose my previously defined Driver record with the drop-down:

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So then we run an activity detail report for my vehicle for today to see the driverID switch. My “wife’s” driverID had been recently assigned to my car, so the change was very apparent. (I quote “wife” not because she’s not real, but she doesn’t really use a driverID — she might be more colorful than some of our customers’ drivers about telling me where to put my driverID if I asked her to use one…)

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

So here’s the switch — exactly when I took the car for a quick spin around the neighborhood:

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

And here is my path with my name now in the Driver field within the information bubble:

New DriverID assigned to my vehicle after losing my keys

After working diligently lately, we’ve streamlined this process as much as possible for as many use case/problem cases (e.g. drivers losing their keys…) as possible, and it’s trivial to reassign a new driverID to a driver now.

I wish we tracked keys though…

[Side note, I found them today, 1/24/10, finally, outside by the hose, rusted after a couple weeks of sitting out in the rain, but the car door openers still work...]

For more GPS Insight features, please see our GPS Vehicle Tracking Features page.

Rob.

We have recently added the ability to view a single group (or all) of your landmarks within GPS Insight’s dashboard maps.

Here is how you do it:

Click on Edit (the pencil icon) then choose your group of landmarks, and click “Apply”:

Including landmarks within GPS Insight Dashboard Maps

They show up in both Map as well as Satellite/Hybrid views:

Including landmarks within GPS Insight Dashboard Maps

Large landmark groups are not allowed due to typical browser limitations. If you need to include more than 500 landmarks, GPS Insight’s GPS Fleet Tracking 3D Mapping is the way to go and can handle thousands, probably even tens of thousands depending on your PC.

All users have access to this convenient capability. Please be sure to use it!

Thanks,
Rob.

This feature really helps to make sure you are saving miles/hours/dollars by streamlining your drivers’ daily route!

Before I talk about this, please realize that the routing dashlet is not a standard feature, and is included with our routing package, which is an enhancement to the base GPS Insight product. You may not have access to it currently. Call your salesperson for information.

Here is a new ability we added to the Route dashlet:

You can enter multiple addresses as always, as well as a start/stop landmark.

GPS Insight routing dashlet

Click on Optimize to get the proper order (which you can cut and paste into an email to the driver, etc.):

Click on GPS Insight's "Map This" button for optimized directions

Here is the result:

Map and directions for optimized set of destinations

You can click on print, send (email), or link (to cut/paste a direct link) at the top right for your convenience.

We will add more functionality to this dashlet over time (e.g. more landmark/landmark group inclusion, optimization options, Garmin integration, etc.).

If you would like to try it out and you are not an existing routing customer, please call us for a 14 day trial.

To learn more visit our Fleet Tracking Routing.

Thanks,

Rob.

Rob.

A big customer of ours wanted their sales vehicles to be able to pull up where they have been for the past 30 days.

This is so they could “eyeball” where they have been within their territory & how recently they’ve been there, where they’ve stopped, etc.

Here is where you can go to get this new functionality now:

30 Day History Map within GPS Insight

This will show my vehicle’s location for the past 30 days, plus today. We color the vehicle’s history from yellow to green, and with thin lines representing older activity, thicker lines representing newer activity.

Then we show the full “today” line in Blue (thin-to-thick indicates the time of travel) and the link updates every minute.

We limit this functionality to a single vehicle since it is pretty computationally intensive, and since the purpose is for the driver to run it for his or her own vehicle on their laptop with an aircard.

The yellow lines are “older” activity, & the thicker green lines are more “recent” activity. The Blue lines are the current day’s activity and the red dot is the current status, along with information which shows up when it is clicked:

GPS Insight 30 day history plus current status map

If desired, the stops themselves can be displayed by “opening” the time slider on the top right:

Viewing stops within GPS Insight's 30 Day History/Current Status GPS Tracking map

This is available for all of our customers with access to 3D Mapping using Google Earth.

It’s mostly useful if you’re driving around, trying to figure out where you HAVEN’T been in the past 15-30 days — perfect for salespeople who need to cover a territory and do a lot of driving around, looking for customers.

I’m sure other uses for this capability will show up — as always, let us know if you need a slightly different version for your exact requirements.

Thanks,

Rob.

Well, the holidays are over, and we’re getting back to business at GPS Insight.

There are 2 MAJOR additions coming in January.

1. We will release our Posted Speed Limit Report late this week or early next week
2. We will release an iPhone App toward the end of January (although Apple may take longer to approve for the App Store than that)

The Posted Speed Limit Report will let you know where your drivers are driving fast relative to the actual speed limit. It will come with other graphing enhancements to our regular speed alerts which will let you graph the 30 minutes before & after the speeding event in order to better understand what your drivers are doing. Additionally, if you use GPS Insight’s 3D Mapping with Google Earth, you will be able to click on the graph for an instant download of that vehicle for those 60 minutes.

Here are some screenshots:

Running a Posted Speed Limits Report on the “Robgroup” (my vehicles, and “Rob” has several devices installed):

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Disclaimer!!!*** — I was not really doing 28 MPH over the speed limit — I’ll explain this after the report:

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Clicking on the “Google Earth” button shows this:

GPS Insight 3D Posted Speed Violations View

That street is actually a 40 MPH zone (although I was definitely speeding — I live in the middle of the desert and it was 50 MPH when I moved there so I’m grandfathered in — is that a good excuse? How about I only needed some sample data for this article? My scofflaw COO borrowed the car? How about I have big brakes? Either way, I was speeding and this report picked it up.)

What is important to know is that the standard speeding report wouldn’t have really called attention to it so much. I was only doing 63 [65 max]. It’s 65 MPH standard on the highways out here. What’s important is the difference between ACTUAL and POSTED speed limits. 28 (really 23) in this case.

So how do you check to see what the real speed limit is? Just quickly go into street view in that area & find a speed limit sign:

Finding Stop Signs in GPS Insight's Google Earth Mode

Soon we will allow our customers to “override” certain street speed limits in order to accurately report on violations. Not every speed limit in our system is 100% up to date. It’s the ease of using it which makes this a quick and powerful tool. We plan to begin a “sanity check” service on our customers’ behalf where the most flagrant speeding will result in our double-checking the actual speed limits in that area.

Even if they are off by 5-15 MPH, this report is REALLY good at finding your opportunistic speeders.

Note the “inline” graph in the 3D “bubble” will also show up in the report for an instant check of recent/subsequent activity. Clicking on it gives a 30 minutes before/after map in Google Earth.

Speed Graphs in GPS Insight

[we're still working on the best way to graph it, so this will change soon]

Here is the 60 minute “quick map” you get when clicking on the graph:

60 minute "quick map" around a speeding violation

This is useful in order to get some context for what the driver was doing.

So this report will be EXTREMELY USEFUL to companies, and comes with a lengthy disclaimer that you need to put some time into investigating the speed limits initially before going off and firing drivers. It will also come with a follow-on report which “ranks” your drivers with graphs which show their typical speeding patterns. Since speed limits differ from our data equally across drivers, you will quickly get a feel for which of your drivers are speeders, which are ideal, and which intentionally go slower than they should in order to pad hours.

Moving on, we have an iPhone app coming in January. It will do a nicer job of mobile fleet management than the current GPS Insight Mobile Mapping option. Here are a few screen shots:

GPS Insight iPhone App coming soon!

You launch it from the iPhone like a normal app.

You are then given a set of options to choose from in terms of moving/stopped vehicles, various vehicle groups, etc.:

List of vehicles within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Choosing one will give you various information, to include a map of just that one vehicle (or choose “Map” to see them all):

Vehicle location within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Quick View lets you choose just a few vehicles at a time

And you will be able to set certain settings (right now they’re pretty limited):

Settings tab in the GPS Insight iPhone App

So that about covers the 2 new exciting features coming soon in January 2010. Based on licensing restrictions, both capabilities MAY have an additional cost, either now or in the future. If they do, it won’t be much, and chances are they’ll both be free to customers or cost the same as the existing mobile mapping capabilities.

Happy New Year everyone!

Rob.

My 4 year old daughter Sarah got a Disney Princess jeep from Santa Claus on Christmas (along with a liberally applied Tinkerbell makeup kit, earrings and much much more…).

GPS Insight tracks Princess Sarah

Never missing a chance to track something important, I covertly put “Rob 1000,” a GPS Insight EZ-1000 in the battery compartment:

GPS Insight tracks Princess Sarah

So off, we go. When we get to the corner, I check the location on my iPhone & it shows we’re there:

(I’ve blurred the street names):

Tracking Princess Sarah

Here’s a picture of her at that intersection:

Tracking Princess Sarah on Christmas

A quick 3D history report:

GPS Insight 3D History GPS Tracking map

… and here’s our 20 minute walk around the neighborhood. Per usual, our 3D mapping starts “light & thin” and gets “darker & thicker” so you can see the direction of travel is clockwise around the neighborhood easily, just by looking at it (or by the times which are at 1 minute intervals): [by the way, blue = idling, e.g. zero MPH, & green = moving]

Princess Procession on Christmas Day

She wants a faster car though already…

Princess Sarah wants a faster ride

If there’s one person I’ll break the “we don’t track kids” rule at GPS Insight for, it’ll be Sarah when she’s ready to drive (especially at the rate she’s applying her Tinkerbell makeup).

Ok, here’s one more bonus picture of my Princess:

Sarah on Christmas

Rob.

Just a couple weeks ago, I wrote about a Detroit city employee’s vehicle which had been used to BUY crack cocaine.

Now in Key West, FL, an employee was just arrested for selling cocaine, near a school or church, even!

We are seeing quite a few municipalities show interest and purchasing GPS tracking systems.

With problems like this, I can see why! We hear a lot of stories, but these two in the last couple weeks are pretty shocking.

Use GPS Insight! Know where your drivers are at all times! And let them know they’re being tracked. Then they won’t do this type of thing most likely…

Rob

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year from GPS Insight

Click here for the animated holiday card!

Thanks for everyone’s support in 2009 & best wishes for the Holidays and a Happy New Year.

Rob.

We will have a formal announcement about this after the holidays.

Just last Tuesday, we lit up exactly 1,000 new units on GPS Insight for a new customer.

They all came online at the exact same time, which is not typical, but this had an interesting and noticeable effect on our daily processing.

Here is a graph we get each day which is typically 100% bell curve shaped. This indicates driving activity, and peaks during the middle of the day when most of the drivers of our tracked delivery vehicles, service vehicles, and government vehicles are out doing their jobs.

GPS Insight turns on 1000 new units

It was very evident when these devices started reporting to GPS Insight, so I thought I would point out the nice “bump” we got to our overall vehicle installed base Tuesday.

It is interesting to note that even though we have vehicles in 4 different timezones (6 if you include Alaska and Hawaii), and in 100 different types of business, they all wind up “smoothing each other out” to a single bell curve.

The street sweepers and a number of over the road/long haul vehicles work at night typically, which keeps our nighttime activity from dipping too low, and the early morning service workers (Construction, typically) get things off in a hurry starting around 4 AM MST (here in AZ this time of year that means 6 AM New York Time). The longer tail at the end of the day is because of overtime — drivers get going according to a schedule, but don’t always finish on time.

Some drivers drive to a workplace once a day, then there is no more movement until they leave to go home, and some drive all day long (e.g. delivery vans). When you you put together tens of thousands of vehicles though, across over 1,000 customers, things balance out and become pretty predictable.

GPS Tracking histogram / Bell Curve

Here’s a daily “by hour” for the whole month. The only anomaly is a slight dip in the 11:00 hour — I’m pretty sure that’s lunch related. I bet if our customers check the street view on their vehicles locations, there would be a lot of this stuff going on:

This is our Scion 4000 on the way to take a couple salespeople to the airport to head home after a week in the office:

19 minute lunch stop into the 11:00 Hour

In-N-Out stop for Joe Vidmar

Our Chicago guys only get into Scottsdale occasionally, and needed their In-N-Out Burger fix before heading back on Friday. Them & several other thousand drivers being tracked by GPS Insight around lunchtime. And now 1,000 more.

Rob.

Watch some of the GPS Insight staff “get down” in a hilarious dancing elves video.

Happy Holidays!

(click below to watch the video)

So I have 2 back to back soccer games today and while the kids are off warming up, I thought I would figure out how to write a blog post from my iPhone using a new app I downloaded.

I have to keep if about GPS so here is a screenshot of my location under the tree and my car’s location in red with the length it’s been stopped.

Jack just stopped 4 shots on goal. I should probably watch the game now…

Afterward, they had the obligatory pizza party:

Soccer Pizza Party

And how much time did we spend there, and at the games prior? Just run a quick (1.8 second) stop report for the day.

GPS Tracking stop report for soccer activity

Easy to see — 3 hours, 9 minutes at the games, 1 hour, 3 minutes at the party, and 17 minutes prior to the games getting snacks for the game at Target

By the way, the iPhone app for the blog is not very good. I had to use a browser to move the pictures around, and the sizes aren’t ideal. Oh well, I should probably be watching the game instead anyway.

Rob

I used to use this as a far-fetched example when talking about the benefits of retroactive landmark reports:

“Let’s say you catch one of your drivers buying crack at a crack house — don’t you want to know which others may have visited there in the past year or more?”

Well, in Detroit, they actually found a city employee’s vehicle at an actual crack house.

It’s detailed in this Automotive Fleet article.

So, now that there is a real life example of this, how would you use GPS Insight to easily determine the other vehicles which have visited that same crack house?

Here’s how:

First, find the exact location by looking at that vehicle/date/time and create a landmark with the convenient link from that point (we’ll pretend my house is a crack house).

First, run a 3D history map for that day (pretend yesterday):

Use GPS Tracking to find out who's buying crack with your vehicles

I’ll pick the “crack stop” at my house (really me coming home from taking the kids to Buffalo Wild Wings, a different kind of crack) and blur the street names in case anyone wants to come see for themselves — then I click on “Landmark: Create from Point”:

Pick a stop & create a landmark around it

Now I choose a Polygon landmark, change the color to green (why not?), and outline the areas a vehicle might PARK IN (not my house, which is a common mistake — you want landmarks to be where people park, not where the actual landmark is!).

I call it “Crack House.”

Now when I refresh my menu to pick up the new landmark under “Reports: Landmarks” I can run a 1 month at a time landmark report (note clicking the month name selects the entire month):

Run a GPS Tracking landmark report on a crack house in GPS Insight

Other than my wife & I, no other vehicles show up in December, so I go to November and see that a few other vehicles have been tracked in that exact area. Note the “Passing through” option which is checked — this means the visit will show up even if the ignition is not turned off while there (e.g. a drive by drug buy — my guess is crackheads like to idle too).

There was too much activity for my vehicle (with 3-4 devices), my wife’s & the company Scion (3 devices), so I created an “all but robs” group and ran the report against that:

Quickly create a vehicle group in GPS Insight

So Elliot and Ryan were in the crack house zone in November:

Elliot & Ryan at the crack house?

You get the idea. Obviously this is just a simulation — Elliot was dropping off a credit card we had forgotten at a restaurant the night before, and Ryan was dropping my wife off after her car needed service.

But what is important here is GPS Insight allows you to go BACK in time to check for landmark activity.

Several competitors do NOT (including two of the largest/oldest ones in our space). They will only allow you to report on landmark activity in landmarks which you created BEFORE the activity took place.

That means you would need to know all the crack house locations in advance! I hope our customers don’t have that information handy.

Although, I’ve often said you would have to be smoking crack to go with another solution…

Rob.

We have a customer in San Francisco who wanted to be able to reconcile the # of trips they make across the Bay Bridge (since they pay a toll when coming into the city).

Here is a picture of the landmark they defined (along with a nice 3D representation in Google Earth):

GPS Insight Landmark of the San Francisco Bay Bridge

We added a “Passing Through” option to our standard landmark report to help with this requirement. Before this, the landmark visit would have required the vehicle to either stop or idle for a minute to register. If you click the “Passing Through” checkbox, it will count any activity through that “zone.”

GPS Insight landmark report adds "passing through" option

Now when running the report (which took less than 3 seconds), you get each time a vehicle went through that area (I’ve blurred out the vehicle names for customer privacy).

GPS Insight vehicle tracking landmark report

This makes it easy to see that 7 vehicles went a total of 23 times across the Bay Bridge.

But how many tolls is that?

You only get charged on the way INTO the city. Exporting that report to Excel gives us some additional information such as heading (what direction the trip took through the landmark). So only Southwest trips should incur a toll. That shows 8 of them according to this Excel Screenshot:

How many tolls should we be charged across the Bay Bridge?

We added Heading as well to the exported version of the report. Since space isn’t at a premium in Excel, we usually put all columns into the exported versions of the reports there.

This helps our customer, & I thought it would be worth detailing here in case other customers can think of a good use for this.

Thanks,
Rob.

Happy Thanksgiving from GPS Insight

On behalf of all of our employees, we wish to express our gratitude to all of our customers and vendors (and even some competitors…). We hope you have a great Thanksgiving holiday. We will have Support available on Thanksgiving, but it will be cell-phone based, and you may get someone in a Turkey Coma.

Rob.

It’s getting ridiculous, lately. I just saw a press release from another company I had never heard of selling a GPS Tracking solution for vehicles. They even misspelled their website in the press release!!! (by the way we have the exact same 30 day money back guarantee and the exact same month-to-month contract type as they mention)

Don't buy from a brand new, start-up GPS tracking company!

They have only had a website since June 2009! We have servers which have been running without being rebooted upwards of 5 times longer than they’ve even been in existence!

Several GPS Insight servers online without reboots for over 2 years!

Here’s how to tell if a company has been around for a while before you go with them:

Look up their web address using “whois” by visiting www.whois.sc/theirdomainname.com such as I did here:

Avoid Startup GPS Tracking companies

You can see they were created just a few months ago on 6/1/2009. Then you can “nslookup theirdomain.com” and get an IP address. Do a “reverse lookup” on that same IP address and see if it’s their domain or a shared computer, which it is in this case:

This company doesn't even own a single dedicated server!

How can someone think of buying such an important product for your company from this type of business?

hmdnsgroup.com doesn’t even have a web page!

blank page at this company's hosting provider

Go one step further:

Looking 1 above & 1 below their IP address (.70 and .72) and you see two utterly unrelated company websites, all sitting there sharing the same computer:

next-door neighbor to a shady GPS tracking player

next-door neighbor to a shady GPS tracking player

Then take a look at the code for their login form & see they don’t even own the service themselves!

Don't buy from a GPS Tracking startup company!

Sure, they may be successful, EVENTUALLY (actually, I’ll bet they’re not here a year from now & will check on it…). But do you want your company to be the guinea pig they learn on? No. Call GPS Insight instead. The Better Business Bureau gives us an A and we are one of their Accredited Businesses. We’ve been around 5 years. And by the way, that’s the right number of years for a company in this high-tech space. It’s long enough, but not too long. Our technology is modern day, not too old like some other players in this space. Give us a call and we’ll help you understand the differences.

Thanks,
Rob.

We were lucky enough to get a couple passes for this weekend’s NASCAR event, to include pit passes to the garage & pits.

We had a couple of EZ-1000’s with us, and I want to show how easy it is to quantify how much time we actually spent in the pits (vs. the stands/box):

I first create a landmark called “PIR Pits” around the pits:

tracking activity in the NASCAR pits

Then cut & paste the PIR Pits landmark into GPS Insight:

Paste a geofence into GPS Insight

Paste here:

Paste geofences into GPS Insight

Confirm here:

Paste geofences into GPS Insight

Run a report here:

GPS Track of Pit activity at NASCAR using GPS Insight EZ-1000's

1.9 hours in the pits

Except that missed the part where we went really close to the “inside the building” chatter from the GPS device, so I had to carefully re-draw the polygon to get a more accurate picture of the true time spent down there.

So even though we may pick up a little bit of false “in the pit” activity since it’s so close to the box/grandstand (with drift due to the device being enclosed), this adjustment to the “pits” will give a better representation of how much time was there:

Extend the boundary of the pits geofence to get all activity

While we get a couple of random “1 minute” visits which are inaccurate due to the EZ-1000’s “inside” drift, the 2.8 hours is much more accurate than the original 1.8 — both Brent and I spent half an hour in that remote area of the pits and it makes a big difference to the total amount of time in the report by accurately creating the polygon:

2.8 hours in the pits

A fun (and loud) time was had by all:

NASCAR in Phoenix

And a favorite of mine, the RedBull 83 car:

RedBull NASCAR

I like this car so much I bought the $60 model for my bookshelf. Brian Vickers may have come in 38th today, but we drink a lot of RedBull and don’t have much use for Lowe’s in our office.

Rob.

I decided to take my 9 year old, Jack, to Camelback mountain yesterday. I was curious how much longer it would take than the last time I went.

I brought an EZ-1000 & here is a picture of our hike, which was 1:30 up, & :56 down:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

Here is a picture of Jack at the bottom:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

Here was our location, courtesy of the iPhone (blue dot) and the EZ-1000 which had reported just a few seconds earlier:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

And 1:20 later, at the top:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

With sweaty Dad:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

And one of Jack’s shady cave — he found a few of them on the way up & down to rest in:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

It took a little longer this time (last time 1 1/2 hours, this time 2 1/2 hours). But my heart didn’t feel like exploding as much as when I was in a hurry. Plus I had some company. Much better this way.

Rob.

My kids went trick-or-treating the second we got back from Disneyland yesterday. Jack is wearing the skull face, and Ryan is the headless horseman. Sarah is the Alice in Wonderland.

Rob's scary and cute kids

(Look at the arrow on Jack’s shirt below) Just like in Halloween 3, the movie, there was something REALLY scary — truly frightening — lurking underneath Jack’s Skull costume. I had no idea until I saw it later.

YIKES! (shudder...!)

Ryan had enough battery left in his EZ-1000 to track him trick-or-treating around the neighborhood so I could stick with Sarah on her first Halloween:

Halloween GPS tracking with an EZ-1000

Rob.

Funny, we saw this truck on its way home from Disneyland. I think I’ll have a salesperson call to see how they keep tabs on unauthorized usage on Monday:

Unauthorized usage of Company Vehicles

GPS Insight prevents this! Not only will you prevent your drivers abusing/using their take home vehicles on weekends and at night, but you won’t have to worry about your drivers causing accidents when couches fall off of YOUR vehicles. Plus you won’t have to pay for the fuel to move their apartment.

Rob.

There is a feature our customers sometimes require, where they can show a subset of their vehicles’ location to THEIR customers.

We call it “Customer Sites” and here is a good example of how it works:

I created a site called www.gpsinsight.com/disney in about 30 seconds just by configuring the “disney” group to show up publicly:

Tracking our drive back from Disneyland using GPS Insight's Customer Sites

This view only tells you current status & speed (or time stopped) but is useful, and worth mentioning here. It shows our vehicle (Navigator) as well as my 2 kids’ EZ-1000’s (Chip and Mickey).

It’s my wife’s turn to drive so I’m just catching up on email & thought I would check to see where we’re at using this site I set up so a few people could see where we were at in Disneyland over the past couple days.

Here’s a picture of Ryan with Goofy for good measure (note the GPS Insight pen for autographs!):

Goofy with Ryan at Disneyland

Rob.

We added 10 second panic capabilities to our EZ-1000 devices yesterday. They have a “panic button” which can be pressed to send a message.

My boys have EZ-1000’s here in Disneyland so I thought I would configure an alert straight to my cell phone if they ever pressed the button (not that they ever were somewhere without us).

Within 20-30 seconds on average, it would “page” me that either “Mickey” or “Chip” (the 2 devices) had pressed the panic button.

This is NOT something we sell to people for their kids — but security firms do use them for their foot and bike/Segway mounted security guards.

Here is the alert:

Panic alert on a GPS Insight EZ-1000 GPS Tracking device

And here was the SMS text message I got when “Chip” pressed the panic button:

Panic alert on a GPS Insight EZ-1000 GPS Tracking device

Then a map shows you their location and using the iPhone, I can walk to them using the “blue” dot which is me (well, if you look at the time, I had actually done this earlier to figure out where they were at beforehand…):

GPS Tracking my kids on Tom Sawyer's Island

This is what might happen to a kid at Disneyland if they get lost on Tom Sawyer’s Island without a Panic Alarm capable EZ-1000:

Jack in Tom Sawyer's jail at Disneyland

Rob.

Apparently the hard 57+ mile “day” (40 hours allowed) of Keir’s Sahara race is over. Here was yesterday’s GPS track. Our device which only reports every 1 hour shows 48 miles, but he really went 57 — this is because of the “as the crow flies” way we’re determining distance. Our vehicle tracking devices (vs. satellite based asset tracking devices) don’t have this issue — they are as accurate as an odometer.

Hard part done with the Sahara Race

Now it’s just 10 more miles to go — apparently they do this so most competitors can cross the finish line roughly at the same time. He’s still in 70th of 95 competitors. (125 started & 30 have had to leave the race)

Here is a total track of how far Keir’s gone, using the lightweight Satellite tracking device in his pack (with yesterday standing out):

GPS Tracking of Sahara Race

Congratulations Keir!

Of course, my wife, kids, & I probably walked close to that long yesterday at Disney:

People Tracking at Disneyland using GPS Insight EZ-1000

Our dogs are barking!…

Rob.

My brother in law Keir has covered over 30 of the total 54 miles for today as of 9:15 PST. This final 5th stage requires him to go 54 miles in 40 hours.

Here’s a picture of what we’ve tracked so far since he left Base Camp 5:

GPS Tracking Keir across the Sahara

Rob.

We headed to Disneyland today with the boys (Sarah got her own “Princess” trip with Mommy to Disney earlier in the year):

Jack & Ryan after riding the "California Screamin'" rollercoaster

I put a couple EZ-1000’s in the boys’ pockets in case they got lost and to document our day.

Originally they were labeled Goofy & Dumbo but my boys took exception to that. I called Tech Support and within 2 minutes Adam had them changed to Chip and Mickey (per my kids’ wishes).

Here’s a picture of our first day at California Adventure, then Disneyland. (There’s a cool time lapse video of this at the end of the blog article):

GPS Tracking at Disneyland

They tracked like a charm for the entire trip from Scottsdale at 1 minute updates. No kids got lost or ran off with Goofy.

I decided it would be a good idea to walk home to the hotel. Apparently I was wrong, and had to carry Ryan on my shoulders most of the way (fun).

I got to measure it afterward — only .57 miles, but it felt like longer after walking all over Disneyland:

Walking home from Disneyland at the end of the day

Here is a video of our walking around for the day:

disneyland

Rob.

My Brother in Law Keir Oxley is half-way through the 162 mile long Sahara Race.

He’s in 70th place (they started with 125 and are down to 96 at this point).

Here is a shot of their route so far & all of the base camps they’ve had:

GPS Tracking in the Sahara Desert

I think our Driver Efficiency Report would have something to say about their route of choice…

Here is a screenshot of Egypt & the tiny area they’re in, which is a 75 mile trek covering 30 actual miles so far:

Tiny area of Egypt the race takes place in

And here are the rankings — Go Keir!

Racing the Planet Sahara Race standings for stage 3

Rob

A customer just sent us a picture of how they show GPS Insight on a big screen in their office & I thought I would share it:

GPS Tracking on the big screen using GPS Insight

Here is an iPhone (e.g. no flash…) picture of the 52″ LCD in the lobby of what we track here at GPS Insight:

GPS Tracking on the big screen using GPS Insight

I’ll put a Facebook group out there for our customers to upload pictures of their dispatch & we’ll see if people are interested in sharing this type of thing. The Grand Prize goes to one of our customers which puts dueling 120″ projection screens out there — one with 2D mapping & one with 3D Mapping. Pretty impressive. I’ll ask if they can send a picture.

Rob.

I guess my assumption that they would have a destination (e.g. the Nile River which was 162 miles away from base camp) was invalid. In the past 2 days, my brother in law Keir has been on a race through the Sahara, but they are just running around a track with no real direction:

Running around the Sahara

They’ve only gone 16.6 miles away from base camp, although they will have finished up with 49 miles of racing by the end of today (probably a couple more hours).

Today is a 28 mile day and a half hour ago Keir had gone 21.1 miles, as the crow flies, with one hour updates, which understates mileage by probably 8%. This means he should be done in the next 2-3 hours hopefully.

Tracking Keir across the desert with GPS Insight GPS Tracking

I’ll keep putting tracks up on the blog for interested people (e.g. Keir’s relatives…).

Interesting to see this type of tracking though — it is not the typical “where’s my driver” stuff.

Rob.

I was curious when Keir, my brother in law racing 162 miles across the desert, would get started today, so I put an alert on his tracking device and built a quick geofence around his “base camp.”

GPS Tracking Geofence around Egypt Base Camp

Then I created an alert to let me (and his wife/parents in law) know when he got moving in the morning (down to the hour — the device only transmits to the satellites every hour since it costs around $.25 per “ping” and it probably doesn’t matter much to us which exact route he takes through the God Forsaken Desert):

Geofence Alert for Keir's Satellite Tracking Device leaving Base Camp

Then I got the email (I didn’t send myself a text message since it would wake me up in the middle of the night):

It went off at 12:14 AM local time, and Egypt is 9 hours ahead of us so they must have started between 8 and 9 AM local time. Here’s the alert I received:

GPS Tracking alert

And a quick image of his trek so far — I think they do 26 miles a day (a marathon a day until they do 162 miles). He had done 19.7 miles so far today so far, and is averaging around 2.6 miles per hour. That means a couple more hours I would imagine.

Hiking across the Sahara Desert with GPS Insight satellite tracking

Makes me tired just thinking about it. Actually, I think I’ll go for a run this morning, but a lot shorter and a lot cooler than this one.

Rob.

My brother in law Keir Oxley starts a 162 mile race across the Sahara tomorrow. (This is the same brother in law who almost got me killed scaling the wrong part of Camelback Mountain 15 years ago…)

Here are 2 pics from the last race:

Egypt Race tracked by GPS Insight

Egypt Race tracked by GPS Insight

He wanted to be able to “show” the family and friends his progress and asked for a tracking device. We have a perfect one for that, the TT-1900 (we don’t really advertise it much — it’s a tiny version of the TT-2000/2100).

He needed it light, battery operated, and satellite capable.

We programmed one up for 1 hour updates, and sent it to him.

I gave them a login & password, but didn’t want everyone in the world using it, so I also created (using “customer sites“) the following link: http://www.gpsinsight.com/egypt — it took 1 minute.

For iPhone & Google Mobile Map users, they can “search” and see Keir’s location by entering/refreshing http://gps-i.com/k/oxley/1778.kml

Anyway, this is a pretty interesting new use for GPS Insight devices. The TT-1900 is intended for container tracking and is waterproof, heat-proof (well, we’ll see how it works in the Sahara Desert…), and works on satellite networks across the world.

It only weighs 5.9 ounces so it won’t be difficult to lug 162 miles across the desert over 7 days. It’s rated to 212 degrees F & Keir said it was 122 today — 90 F to spare.

GPS Insight Satellite Tracking unit TT-1900

I’m guessing they’re hiking to the Nile river — it’s exactly 162 miles from where they are right now, & they start soon.

Hiking across half of Egypt being GPS tracked by GPS Insight

Keir is doing this A) to prove he can do it and B) to raise money for poor African schools — if you are interested in saving schools from being destroyed by elephants by helping to purchase a fence for them, feel free do so in Keir’s name here: http://www.asanteafrica.org/donate.html#online

If you feel compelled to buy GPS Tracking devices for your company based on your love for Keir & his cause, we’ll donate 10% to Asante Africa.

Have fun & be safe Keir!

Here is a link to Keir’s online blog from the race — they have an opportunity to use satellite internet to update this once a day.

Rob.

We recently introduced driver-to-vehicle mapping. Now we support driverID buttons and readers to quickly allow drivers to identify the fact they are driving a vehicle. A really obnoxious alarm goes off in 30 seconds after ignition on if they forget this (optional — I left it off my vehicle…)

Here’s how it works:

You touch your driver ID button to the reader before or after turning the vehicle on. In dispatch, a list of all the “unassigned” driver IDs is shown (on the bottom). Note that my driver ID (Robert Donat) is assigned only to “Rob” at this time. The Driver ID reader is on “Rob 4000″ and I used that button earlier today:

GPS Insight shows "unknown" driver ID buttons

After clicking “Assign Driver Button” you can now choose from a list of drivers — I choose myself:

Assign a driver to our gps tracking and driver tracking system

Notice I am now listed on BOTH vehicles (really 2 different devices in the same vehicle, which is not typical, but there for our testing purposes):

Then that “unknown” button is no longer in the list of buttons to assign:

No longer unassigned in the driver button box

Now whenever I use a different vehicle, I can use my button on that vehicle and I will automatically be “assigned” to it for reporting/mapping/alert purposes.

We recently completed an API to achieve this as well.

This makes things much easier and more automated when assigning drivers to vehicles. That allows you to tell which PEOPLE are speeding, idling, using the vehicles off hours, getting parking tickets, etc. — not which VEHICLES.

Rob.

We just finished up at the TruckIT conference in Dallas yesterday. I had a high value package to send and wanted to know when it had been picked up by UPS.

So I put an EZ-1000 in the box (it was a nice new LED TV).

Here is how I quickly was able to create an alert to page me the minute that box left the hotel:

First I pull up 2D Mapping which has a convenient link to create a landmark from a vehicle (TV’s) current location:

Alerting me when UPS picks up a package using GPS tracking

Here I click the “Landmark: Create from point” link:

Click a link to create a landmark

Here I expand the radius to 1500 feet and save the landmark as Renaissance Richardson (the hotel we were at):

Create a landmark in GPS Insight

Now I can open up the Alert Manager and create a geofence alert for when that box leaves the area:

Create a GPS Tracking alert in GPS Insight

Choose the “New Landmark Alert” link:

Create a Landmark Alert in GPS Insight

Choose the EZ-1000 (named Demo), then name the alert “UPS Picked up TV” and enter my cell phone, and last choose the new “Renaissance Richardson” Landmark and change the “trigger” to “Outside”:

Vehicle Tracking alert (Geofence/Landmark)

I waited a couple minutes then hovered over the alert information icon to see that it had been checked 4 times (once per minute is standard):

GPS Tracking Alert

At 12:36 I received a text message on my iPhone telling me the package left that landmark:

Receiving a landmark alert in GPS Insight

Reading the alert, we see that the Demo device (in the LED TV box) left Renaissance Richardson at 12:35. The alert name is “Ups Picked Up Tv”

GPS Insight Landmark Alert

It’s been a couple hours since I got that alert, so now I can look to see where that UPS driver has gone since he picked up the TV (or if it was stolen, where they took it…):

GPS Insight history using GPS tracking device in a TV box

GPS Insight history using GPS tracking device in a TV box

I should put an alert out there now to let me know when it gets to our office in Scottsdale so someone doesn’t take it home before I lock it away for the next trade show…

Rob.

We have done a few conferences lately and will be at TruckIT next week in Dallas as well.

Here are a couple pictures of our team at these conferences:

RMFMA (Rocky Mountain Fleet Manager’s Association) in Salt Lake City last month:

Alex, Ryan, Alissa, Rob, and Elliot

Here is a picture of Joe and Elliot at NCSFA (National Conference of State Fleet Administrators) last month in Chicago:

Joe and Elliot at NCSFA

We will be in Dallas for TruckIT Tuesday and Wednesday 10/20 & 10/21 — please stop by and see us if you are in the area.

Rob.

If you would like to use the Hierarchy capabilities while they are in Beta, please contact support@gpsinsight.com or your salesperson.

The Hierarchy Editor is available now (upon request), as well as reporting using individual Hierarchy nodes or multiple ones in combination (”Custom”)

Here are the basic steps — create your hierarchies, and drag/drop members (vehicles, drivers, landmarks & users) into the various levels of the hierarchy using both groups and “wildcards” to make it fast and easy:

Drag and Drop into the GPS Insight Hierarchy\

Then create a custom report (any report can use a single hierarchy node or a “Custom Hierarchy Selection”):

Create a Report using a Custom Hierarchy Selection

When using a custom hierarchy selection, you can drag and drop hierarchy levels from different hierarchies into the editor. This allows you to “add” hierarchy members together, “intersect” them (e.g. all SouthWest vehicles which are parts vehicles), and “subtract” or restrict them (e.g. but exclude all managers and foreign vehicles, etc.).

Here we are adding Canada to East vehicles:

Drag Hierarchy Members from different Hierarchies

Here we are choosing all Management vehicles in Canada and the East

Create an "intersection" between hierarchies

And last, subtract or exclude/restrict all Foreign vehicles:

Restrict by "subtracting" one or more hierarchy members

Then click on “Run Report” and the Report is run for just that group of vehicles. Only those 9 vehicles are included.

Create a Custom GPS Tracking Report using GPS Insight Hierarchies

Soon you will be able to save your custom hierarchy selections and use them in both alerts and scheduled reoprts.

The Hierarchy Capabilities are still in Beta, and we are constantly adding capabilities.

They are immediately useful and powerful, so please start getting familiar with them by asking support to give you beta access as well as a demo.

Thanks,

Rob.

We don’t sell to individuals for a reason, but this isn’t exactly the reason…

Jealous GPS

The good old Onion is a favorite source of news for me…

Rob.

This is weird. I got an automated alert that a “Demo (EZ1000)” unit entered my house.

Weird alert that "Demo" entered my house

I didn’t think too hard about it, but it was exactly when I got home in my wife’s car. I figured a developer was testing something new.

Then I got a couple other alerts telling me the unit left, then re-entered my house. That’s just strange.

So I finally realized, we’re going to a trade show Sunday (Rocky Mountain Fleet Manager’s Association) in Salt Lake City. Ryan Driscoll, our Marketing Manager, put a suitcase full of GPS Insight devices in my car when I was at the office so I could take them to the airport.

I realized he probably left the sample EZ-1000 turned on, inside the box, inside the suitcase, inside my truck, inside my garage.

It still tracked me within 15 feet of its actual location (just as good as the other devices inside of the garage):

EZ-1000 tracks me within 15 feet while inside a suitcase in my hatch

Here is a picture of the suitcase full of devices, & the box containing the EZ-1000 labeled “Demo” — I opened it & turned it off:

EZ-1000 location in the suitcase full of GPS Insight devices

It was a little weird being tracked without knowing it…

This is EXACTLY why we don’t sell GPS Tracking devices unless we ensure they are for corporate or municipal/state use. EZ-1000’s in particular can be easily abused & used to track people without their knowledge. We only sell them to companies using them for legitimate reasons — typically for security guards or occasional use tracking of their vehicles or high value shipments.

The EZ-1000 is a very easy device to give out for demo purposes though, so we do that occasionally as well, as long as we know the company is legitimately interested in tracking THEIR OWN ASSETS.

They work well, even in a suitcase in your car. Just know that we screen customers to ensure they won’t be used for anything which violates someone’s privacy.

For comparison purposes, here is a track of the EZ-1000 hidden in a suitcase in my vehicle (blue line with dots, at 5 minute updates) vs. the “official” GPSI-4000 for that vehicle (red line without dots at 30 second updates). It doesn’t give as much information (1/10th as much) but it is spot on when it does report — note the “pins” are all on top of the red “actual path taken.”

5 minute updates with an EZ-1000 vs. 30 second updates with a GPSI-4000

Rob.

GPS Insight has made it easier to get your Dashlet maps exactly how you need them by introducing “Map Groups” to the map-aware dashlets.

You can assign each map and each dashlet a letter A, B, C, or D.

Then whenever you click on a vehicle name, the appropriate map will display that vehicle’s location.

When you set it up, it looks like this:

GPS Insight Dashboard Maps

The way to “assign” a map to a dashlet is to choose the Map Group Letter for both the map and the dashlet, like shown below:

GPS Insight Map Groups

Now you can “tie” your dashlets to certain maps, and choose your groups accordingly.

In the graphic above, we have 4 different groups chosen, and they are each tied to a map nearby, so you are able to view your various vehicle groups separately but at the same time.

Every map-enabled dashlet has this capability now — here is a screenshot of the “Closest To” dashlet & where to make that configuration change.

REMEMBER TO SAVE YOUR DASHBOARD AFTER MAKING THESE CHANGES OR YOU WILL LOSE THEM!!! (I just did that — oops)

Save your GPS Insight Dashboard changes

Rob.

We have had a few customers require alert for both panic buttons which they wire to our GO-3000 and GPSI-4000 devices, as well as “power cycle” alerts (due to tampering, battery changes, etc.).

They are now there, and here is how to use them:

First, open the Alerts Manager:

GPS Insight Switch Alerts

Then choose the “Switch-Based Alert” option:

GPS Insight Switch Alerts

Here is where you can then choose either a panic switch based alert, or a power-cycle-based alert:

Panic vs. Power Cycle Alert

The next time a Panic Switch is detected (or a Power Cycle of the GPS Insight device), you will receive an email and/or an SMS text message letting you know.

This capability will be very helpful for customers with high-risk environments (cab drivers, etc.), as well as to help detect if/when drivers are intentionally disconnecting the GPS Insight device in order to escape being tracked.

As always, call for details at 866-GPS-4321, #2,1 for Tech Support.

Thanks,
Rob.

I finally created a Facebook page for GPS Insight. With as many people on Facebook as there are, we hope this helps our customers & prospective customers keep track of the many new developments and capabilities we add to GPS Insight weekly.

GPS Insight launches its Facebook page

Here is a link for you to get there directly, and to become a “Fan” of GPS Insight.

Thanks,

Rob.

Most of our competitors give you 3 months of history availability, maybe 6.

Starting in June of 2007, GPS Insight has kept every bit of our customers’ data indefinitely (unless they specifically ask otherwise).

Here is an illustration of going back 2 years for a customer of ours and comparing their 1/2008 mileage vs. their 8/2009 mileage (they have added trucks since then):

Here is January of 2008’s summary:

Compared to last month (where they did over twice as many miles in spite of the economy I’m glad to see!):

Note their max speed is 89 again, almost 2 years later. Their vehicles are probably throttled and it will be trivial to find those speeding events for both months:

Here is the full report, if you want to see what the 1/2008 report looks like:

Both reports took less than a second to run, even though we’re talking about almost a million miles worth of data to crunch through.

If you need more than 3 years worth, just ask — we’ll be able to accommodate that, and if you need access to something over 3 years ago, we can always get it for you from an archive — for free (vs. the thousands of dollars we’ve heard it may cost you to get from other GPS tracking companies)…

Also, we have several “big picture” reports & graphs coming to allow you to see large scale trends across months or years within your fleet. We wouldn’t be able to provide these to customers without at least a couple years’ worth of data, which is why we keep it for your benefit.

Rob.

We added a new dashlet to our list of those available on the GPS Insight dashboard yesterday.

Just “drag” it off the list of available dashlets onto your dashboard in the column you want it:

It is a list of landmarks, and you can choose from any available landmark and vehicle groups, and the dashlet will tell you how many vehicles are present in a particular landmark.

Additionally, it will allow you to click on any listed landmark, and will instantly zoom you to that location on the map.

This is useful if you want a feel for how many of your vehicles are at particular landmarks. You can use particular groups & have several copies on your dashboard (e.g. work locations on the left & home locations on the right, showing how many are at each throughout the day).

You can change certain properties of what it displays & how it is shown here by clicking the “edit” button (pencil):

We also added an option to our location dashlet to ONLY show vehicle stopped at landmarks:

This is subtly different, and shows each vehicle, not just a count of how many vehicles are at each landmark.

We hope these new capabilities help you and your organization. Please let us know if there are changes which would help your utilization of GPS Insight and we are happy to work toward making those changes.

Rob.

I just realized GPS Insight turned 5 years old 2 days ago (8/24/09).

In the past 4 years (2005-2008), GPS Insight’s revenue grew 7800%!

We don’t officially qualify for the Inc. 500/5000 until next year, and we are shooting for the top 100 (this is very realistic — our 2006-2009 growth in on track for 1800% growth, and that was #83 this year).

I appreciate our customers’, employees’, and partners’ help getting to this point, especially given the way the economy has been for the past several years.

It’s a wonderful job I’ve got — working with fantastic customers, developers, salespeople, tech support, and support staff, all of whom have helped us to develop the most technically advanced and most adaptable GPS tracking product on the market.

I really appreciate everyone’s help and support in the past 5 years, and we look forward to many more years of high growth and delivery of an outstanding product and exceptional ROI to our customers.

Thanks again!

Rob.

This is a quick camera video I took to show just how fast messages make it to the GPS Insight Navigation solution using Garmin.

I simulate a dispatch event using an SMS text message from my iPhone, which sends both a “dispatched stop” (to GPS Insight Headquarters) in the form “gps rob dis headq” (which is short for “dispatch GPS Insight Headquarters”). Then I send a text message using “gps rob gm hi there”and “gm” is short for “Garmin Message.” You can see it takes literally less than a second to receive the message, and about 2-3 seconds to receive the dispatch (the “lag” is due to the text messaging infrastructure but 2-3 seconds is pretty good regardless).

Here is the video, and below it, I will show how a customer would “typically” send a message or next stop to a driver.

Here is the message I sent back using the Garmin in the demo (visible here in the Garmin message history):

There is another Garmin demonstration here for a more thorough look at how the Garmin Integration with GPS Insight works. This video is to really show the solution “in action” to illustrate how quick and powerful it is for dispatch oriented organizations.

Thanks,

Rob.

Alerts are probably the best way to proactively gain ROI (Return on Investment) with GPS Insight. I am glad to see our customers using them as much as they are.

We passed the 350 MILLION alert checks mark recently, and have sent out over 419,000 alerts since making alerts available to all our customers.

Note that our system takes less than 1/100th of a second to make those calculations. The reason we are able to process alerts in this volume is our overall system speed and scalability. We do this at only 20% peak utilization, and add hardware constantly to provide the fastest, most powerful GPS tracking system available today. Really — test us out vs. any other system on the market and you will see the difference.

Less than 5 months ago, we only had checked 100 MILLION checks.

This is a huge increase in alerts usage, and is probably due to our next generation alerts which were introduced in April.

Keep on using our alerts, and if you’re not already a GPS Insight customer, please call us at 866-GPS-4321 and find out how to get a trial device or a pilot going (or just outfit your fleet now & start getting instant ROI).

Rob.

We have been doing a lot of work with switches and sensors lately on our GO-3000 and GPSI-4000 line.

In addition to inputs (panic button, when a garbage truck empties a can, when emergency lights are on in an ambulance, etc.), we have been doing work on outputs lately as well.

While we are fairly reluctant to support “remote vehicle shutoff” due to liability reasons, we will work with certain customers on supporting outputs to do any range of things:

• Disable the vehicle’s starter (unless an authorized driver swipes in)
• Disable the vehicle’s fuel pump (if a vehicle is stolen or idling too long)
• power a buzzer or light for the following:
  • Speeding
  • Idling
  • Forgot to sign in using a Driver ID card/keyfob
  • On demand from dispatch

Basically, using outputs allows us to turn something on or off remotely, using relays. Since we don’t want customers accidentally wiring them wrong and stranding their drivers, we will be supporting this closely and only occasionally.

Anyway, here is a quick video of this in action, showing a couple of lights which depict the remote switches being turned on or off. Click on the photo to download a .mov (Quicktime from my iPhone) to view. If you don’t have Quicktime, sorry –just trust that we remotely change one light to turn off, and the other to turn on. The iPhone .mov is sideways if I try to create a blog-compatible .flv, so hopefully you can view this ok.

This is in our development lab where we are constantly pushing the envelope on how to make our products work for customer requirements.

This generally requires some sort of custom work for the customer, and a familiarity with the customer’s requirements, so we will limit this type of work where appropriate. But we have this capability now and can use it for custom requirements where security or other custom requirements are necessary and a big concern.

Rob.

I took my 2 boys to Navy Pier while traveling to Chicago last week.

We went on the Seadog “Extreme” which is a fast powerboat ride on Lake Michigan. I had an EZ-1000 on me so I was able to see how fast we were going from my cell phone on the boat. Here is a Google Earth 3D Map of that activity

40 MPH is about as fast as it got according to the EZ-1000.

Here is a pic of the Seadog Extreme from my iPhone:

And my boys enjoying the fast ride:

This was Friday, so one of our developers noticed I was out on the lake & texted to see what I was doing. Then he saw I was waiting in line for the ferris wheel & he bumped my refresh rate to 15 seconds so he could see the altitude rise and fall while we were on the ride. We don’t show that data (too much information…) so I had to trust him when he said it worked. Then I asked him to drop the refresh rate to 2 seconds for the swing chairs. It got a good set of points & they all agree the speed for that ride was between 14-19 MPH:

The swings at Navy Pier:

And each of my boys again:

This is Ryan:

This is Jack:

Fun time for the kids (and Rob).

Incidentally, I was curious how long of a trip they take you on with the Seadog, and using Google Earth & the Measurement Tool, it’s simple to see that it’s about 10.5 miles after they get past the breakwater:

Thanks,

Rob.

This is hardly the most exciting part of GPS Insight, but most customers need to know how to add users, restrict them to only certain vehicles/permissions/landmarks, etc.

Here is a 15 minute demo I placed out there today on  how to add a user (in this case a real world new user for our account).

The demos are very useful, and we try to keep them up to date. They take a while to watch, but they walk through most capabilities of GPS Insight and the longer ones have a table of contents to skip around.

Enjoy!

Rob.

(Click here for a video demo of Driver-to-Vehicle mapping)

Since many customers have drivers which use different vehicles, we have added DRIVERS to GPS Insight in addition to VEHICLES. This has the following benefits:

• Driver-centric reports (e.g. idling/speeding/odd-hours by driver, not by vehicle)

• Administrative control of which drivers are assigned to which vehicles

• Historical accountability for which vehicle was driven by which driver (e.g. for parking tickets, toll violations)

Vehicles may be assigned to drivers, and drivers may be assigned to vehicles. A driver may be assigned to multiple vehicles at one time, but a vehicle can only be assigned to one driver at a time.

In other words, if John drives car1 and truck2, and no one else ever does, he can be assigned to both. However, if Sally moves from car2 to car1, John must be unassigned from car1 before Sally can be assigned. This way, if someone drives a couple vehicles exclusively, they don’t need to be re-mapped every time they start driving a different vehicle.

Any activity performed by that vehicle during the time that driver was assigned will be associated with that driver for reporting purposes. Maps will have driver information available, and alerts/messages will have the appropriate driver’s contact information as an override to the default vehicle information (e.g. email address & cell phone number for SMS).
A driver may be assigned to a vehicle in 5 different ways:

• Manual assignment via the web interface

• Touching a driver keyfob to a reader in the vehicle (if installed)

• Sending the driver id via Garmin

• SMS text message gps 1234 assign david.smith assigns david smith to truck 1234 at that time)

• API (Application Programming Interface)

Here is the workflow for assigning a new driver to a vehicle. Bear in mind that the times you can choose to assign a vehicle include now or the beginning of any vehicle trip (e.g. when that driver first started driving the vehicle). The times you can choose to unassign a driver from a vehicle include now or any begin or end of trip. These options are conveniently shown in a pick list for you to choose from, as shown in the screen shots below:

First, open the Driver Administration tool:

Click on Create New: Driver:

Then complete the form for a new driver:

Note that you can then select a vehicle to assign the driver to here, as well as create/modify a driver group (e.g. parts drivers, supervisors, etc.):

Adding a Supervisors group with 3 members:

Alternatively, you can create a driver association when looking at all vehicles under the Vehicles tab (at top):

Choose an existing driver or create a new one on the fly:

Then choose a start time for the driver-to-vehicle association (always, current date, or from a particular date/trip):

And either allow them to stay assigned or end their assignment at a particular vehicle stop time in the past:

Now that the driver is assigned (shown below), this association will be evident in relevant maps, reports, and alerts:

Driver-centric reports, mapping, and alert functionality will be added continually to the GPS Insight product to make use of this driver-to-vehicle mapping capability.
Here is an example for a day where 4 different drivers used our company car (Scion):

• Trent drives to work

• Elliot drives to a customer site with a salesperson (Jason)

• Elliot drives to his house to pick up his vehicle

• Jason drives back to work

• Trent takes the Scion home

We have entered the appropriate mappings and here are some screens/reports which show these mappings:

Here is an idle report (which conveniently breaks out idling/stops/mileage/etc. by driver, by day:


The driver activity is shown (in order) on the Activity Detail report:

Historical mapping has the driver information as well:

More driver-specific functionality and capabilities will be added to GPS Insight within the next few weeks and months, and we welcome customer input and requests.

For more information on this new feature please feel free to call us at 866-477-4321, option 2 (for support).

Rob

(Click here for a video demo of Driver-to-Vehicle mapping) 

I took my kids and wife to see Wicked (the musical) last weekend at Arizona State.

It was hot. 118 degrees hot.

The play was good, but my kids wanted to walk over this bridge to leave afterward, which left me confused on where I had parked my car. The heat was melting my brain.

So I pulled up the vehicle location on my iPhone using our Mobile Map application:

The blue dot is my iPhone & it told me that my car was East of me. That’s all I needed to know, but didn’t necessarily know what direction was East (Gammage is a big round spaceship looking building so direction is not immediately apparent).

The new iPhone has a compass built in — perfect. I wish I had this when I was in the Army:

So I head East & see my car and note that it’s in the 6th space:

Looking at the iPhone in satellite view & zooming in, we show I’m in the 5th space, as well as where I am when I pull this up out of curiosity:

So then we get going & even after 10 minutes of driving, it still shows as 118 degrees. Note that the AC & the seat coolers are cranked as high as they can go…

We were in a hurry since the play was really long and our babysitter needed to leave at 5. Unfortunately at one point I saw we were in Mesa and I realized I missed my turn, costing me 7.42 miles while I drove the wrong direction.

I was a little preoccupied trying not to burn myself on the steering wheel, etc. to notice I had passed up the 101.

Apart from it being insanely hot, and my missing my turn to get home to the babysitter on time, it was a great day — This is my second time seeing Wicked & it’s a fantastic play (The Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch’s perspective).

My 7 year old son Ryan had this to say: Wizard of Oz – 1 star. Wicked – 4 stars. He’s hard to please but Wicked worked better than a 70 year old movie apparently.

Rob.

I saw this graph today in an Automotive Fleet email newsletter:

When fuel spiked last year, GPS Insight helped our customers save fuel by curbing idling, reducing speeding, ensuring the most appropriate vehicle was sent to a job, and that the efficient routes were taken.

Here is an article about how we saved a customer $100,000 EACH MONTH in fuel during the Summer when fuel prices were at $5 per gallon of diesel. Then the snowball effect saved them literally millions throughout the year.

Here is another article about how we send alerts to your drivers themselves telling them to stop wasteful behaviors.

Get GPS Insight in your vehicles and get control of your fleet. There are so many benefits, you will not regret the decision. Start with a unit or two to and see what kind of insight you will gain into your fleet. Call one of our reps at 866-477-4321 (1 for sales) and find out how we can help.

You can be up and running within 1-3 days with GPS Insight. Really!

[or you can buy a 1/2 gallon of gas with the money you don't spend on the product, per day -- that will go down to 1/3 gallon shortly]

Thanks,

Rob.

I decided to hike Camelback Mountain today — I’ll try to make this short (shorter than the 1 1/2 hour hike up & down the toughest mountain I’ve done in the Valley).

I couldn’t remember where to go so I looked it up on the internet & then dispatched myself via my Garmin from my PC:

Then I created a landmark as well, while I was at it (note I put the “route me here” address where it should go, but then I outlined the whole mountain) :

Then I routed myself there with my Garmin by wirelessly dispatching my vehicle’s Garmin to that location:

Turns out it was the wrong entrance — I go to the other one typically, so I drove around aimlessly finding that, plus the REI sports place where I bought a new water backpack (called a Camelbak, coincidentally…) .

Running an efficiency report, I ran 58% more time and 20% more miles (since the miles I went extra were on surface streets, not highways, this makes sense):

Here is my driving around aimlessly, wasting time & fuel (green dots, vs. blue “optimal path”):

Then I get to Camelback, and send a couple SMS notes when I start, get to the top, then get back to the bottom:

Here is my track of the 1 1/2 hour climb to the top and back (using an EZ-1000 at 10 second updates):

Here is an iPhone picture of me at the top, mapping both my iPhone GPS location (blue) and the EZ-1000 location (red pin):

But here is the good part:

Toward the bottom:

And at the top:

I’m a little sore after the 1 1/2 hour long trek up & back down, but the view is worth it.

And I even wore a GPS Insight hat…

Rob.

We just exhibited at GFX (Government Fleet Expo), organized by Eric Bearly at Bobit, which was a great show with 500 attendees.

Whenever we go to a show, we have a big 52″ LCD at our booth. To rent a cheap 50″ which has poor resolution typically would cost us $950, which is nuts. So I usually buy a new one at Best Buy for less than double that instead and store it in the closest office/friendly person’s home for use in the next local conference where we exhibit.

Well, my TV just went out at home, so guess what? I get this one.

But shipping them is a nightmare, since they sit on a dock & stand a pretty good chance of getting stolen.

So I stuck a GPS tracking device, an EZ-1000 in it (someone called the device Telemundo, Spanish for TV, I guess…)

When I was at the Airport, I was able to confirm that they picked it up using my iPhone like this:

(Here is how to take a screen shot with an Iphone — hold down the round application button & press the top power button.)

So I knew it made it off the dock and to a transfer dock to be shipped to my office (and then my living room…).

I was surprised to see they flew it, and our 900 lb trade show booth from Denver to Salt Lake City, then to LA. Hopefully we’ll see the TV on Monday, and then I can watch TV again.

Here are a few more screen shots of how I was able to track the TV on the way from the trade-show:

I clicked on Get Directions to see how far it was, thinking they were driving it (but it’s being flown apparently):

Note that it’s at LAX Airport right now.

While it’s in the air, we don’t receive GPS or transmit location, since the plane blocks the GPS signal, but this is pretty good for determining roughly where a TV is. We are working on a different product which is better for determining an asset’s location, even if it’s well inside a truck/structure. But for now, we stick to vehicle, and the occasional TV headed for Rob’s living room, and this does the trick. If it had wound up in a dockworker’s home, we would have been able to send police pretty easily.

We only sell EZ-1000’s for business use, such as for security patrols/bike police, etc., but those security-oriented customers occasionally use them to track things like this, & I’m glad we have this capability ourselves. We also use them as easy demo units, so if you want a very quick proof of concept, charge one up, stick it in a vehicle or two’s drink-holder, & you’ve got a tracking proof of concept without having to do an install (which still is only typically 15 minutes or so).

Rob.

So yesterday I took my 9 year old son, a friend and his son to the Diamondbacks game (they lost…). Thanks to Mike Greco at bluemedia for the tickets…

On the way home, after dealing with the 101 being closed (Arizona doesn’t know how to work on roads without closing them entirely), yours truly got pulled over 2 miles from home after punching it to make a stale yellow light. In my defense, there was no one around (except the police officer apparently, who I never saw).

Anyway, I got pulled over shortly thereafter and was informed I did 67 through the light in a 50. Oops.

I haven’t had a ticket for 15 years, so there goes that streak.

I got home shortly thereafter & guess what, he was right.

My GPSI-4000, which takes speed samples once a second, got me doing 68.

Here’s a picture which pretty much tells it all:

Here is my idle stop while receiving the ticket:

I pulled over near a community’s entrance to get over from traffic:

I brought an EZ-1000 with me for my son to hold on to at the game in case I lost him, & it was set for 10 second updates.

It got me at 67 MPH going through the light too (and shows I immediately slowed down):

So, the moral of the story is: I was speeding. It was literally for just a few seconds to catch a yellow light rather than slam on the brakes and wake the kids up (that’s my story), but both the police AND my GPSI-4000/EZ-1000 caught me. FYI, the GO-3000 is equally accurate, and our 3500 lineup checks speed every 20 seconds, so it catches speeding, just not the rapid up & down speeding like I exhibited yesterday — it got me at 62 MPH. To put it in perspective, many of our competeitors check speed once every 5 minutes and don’t report max speed — just instantaneous. We report max, instantaneous, and average, and this is detailed in several “speeding” related blog articles.

On a less depressing note, we had a nice time at the ballgame, and stopped at Alice Cooper’s Cooperstown before which we tracked on the EZ-1000. I landmarked it while I was there by sending a text message of: ‘gps rob 1000k landmark cooperstown’ so now it shows up here like this:

A quick landmark report shows we were there for 41 minutes:

41 much more worthwhile minutes than sitting on the side of the road waiting for a ticket 2 miles away from home.

I’ll let you know how traffic school works out.

Now that I think about it, had I been using my new Garmin routing capability I would have been directed to take the shorter path home after getting detoured, and would have avoided this ticket altogether… Grr…

Never mind all those other light green speeding dots where thankfully there weren’t any police or speed cameras.

Rob.

I didn’t really forget it there (yet).  But since a few months ago I put an alert out there when I leave my car at the car wash for 4 hours or more, I just got this email alert along with a cell phone SMS text message alert:

I don’t want to forget, then have to find the manager at the gas station to get my keys from wherever they lock them up at night.

So I’m heading there now, thanks to my alert.  Here is the article where I set this alert up last time.

Rob.

I live in a beautiful area with mountains EVERYWHERE.

Before I moved here, I would climb them every trip.

Now that I’ve lived here, I never do.

Today I took my 9 year old son and his friend to climb (hike) Pinnacle Peak, an easy one nearby my house.

Just checking the map of my trip for the day, and it’s 7.8 miles there — we stayed for 1 hour 23 minutes.

You can see that the parking lot was full so I parked outside on the street, and I got there at 8:40, then left at 10:04:

Here’s a picture from near the top:

If I want to know how recently I was there last, I can quickly create a landmark from a stop report by clicking here:

Then create it, assigning to the Arizona landmark group while I’m at it:

Going all the way back to February, running a landmark report, I find my last time going there:

Note that you can go back >>> 3 YEARS <<< with GPS Insight (or more if you ask nicely) to get information like this.

Most competitors only let you go back 90 days & charge a huge amount if you ever need the data beyond that from them.

The last time I was at Pinnacle Peak was back in February, on 2/2/09, for 1.4 hours.

I need to get there more often. Now that it’s hot again, I think I may need to wait again until Winter.

Rob.

We stopped sending Email Alert maps a little while ago in order to revamp them [we wanted to send one map with all that alert's activity, not multiple maps with each email].

Now whenever you receive an email alert for speeding, idling, or odd-hours activity, it comes with a map to show you where that activity is occurring.

Here is an email I just received about Tony speeding through the desert on his way home from the Memorial Day Weekend:

Note the attached .png map:

Sorry to pick on you Tony. I’m sure it’s 75 MPH there & you’re only 9 over so hopefully they don’t go after you for this…

Here, I’ll pick on myself driving home from the previous article’s trip [does the 5th amendment protect me against a ticket if DPS reads this article? At least I only averaged 58 the whole time.]:

Notice how the alerts are 20 minutes apart? That’s because I don’t want to be alerted continually, just occasionally.

I open up the alerts page, then look at the alert by hovering over the “i” for information:

It’s been checked 370,151 times, and I’ve been alerted 600 since I created that alert.

Opening the properties, we see where it’s set to only send every 20 minutes if the alert condition continues:

Before these changes, there would be one .png attachment for every red dot in the map. With more customers choosing to use 1 minute updates and 20+ minute alert frequencies, you can see why we changed this…

Since many customers have blackberry’s and/or iPhones, smartphones, etc., now if you get the alert email to your phone, you can see the inline image to get a feel for where the alert is occurring as well.

Maybe you can go meet the driver yourself to discuss it…

Come to our main website at www.gpsinsight.com for more information about our alerts and maps.

Rob.

GPS is very accurate, but still not 100%, especially for civilian/commercial purposes.

Typically, when a vehicle is moving, we get it within 5 feet of accuracy.

When a vehicle sits still for some time, tracking devices (all of them) typically experience “GPS Drift” of up to 25 feet or so.

However, GPS Insight fixes and insulates our customers from this inaccuracy and I will show you how in this article:

This is what GPS Drift it looks like using a version of our mapping which only our support staff has access to — this particular map shows how long each individual point takes to make it into our database, and also shows every single reported point, and I use it make this “GPS drift” evident:

These are roughly 24 points which bounce around up to 25 feet from the center (they are 30 second updates for 12 minutes while my wife & family waited for me to get a few things from the office on our way home tonight):

All of these points were in our database within 4 seconds of them being registered by the GPS device (in this case, a GPSI-4000 at 30 second updates).

However, we “consolidate” them into a single, highly accurate 12 minute idle stop, which shows precisely where we parked the vehicle and let it run for 12 minutes — the parking lot is practically empty and we parked in the 2nd space:

To show what our customers see, I run a typical 3D history map to compare:

And we only see one “pin” where my vehicle truly parked for 12 minutes:

Note the “lighter/thinner” red line from earlier in the day (where I drove through the ATM at the bank to our North earlier). We show activity in this way to help easily determine direction and time of travel with the “path” which exists below the individual location “pins” which we show.

Here I have zoomed out a bit, and we see this 2 minute idle stop (at the ATM drive through), 5 1/2 hours prior to coming back to that area (it’s a long drive to Tortilla Flat):

The light/thin to dark/thick lines are another way we help customers gain easy insight into their fleet activity.

Here is my vehicle (Rob 4000) and Brent’s — it is immediately apparent by looking at the line thickness/color what direction of travel I took to the office, then back home (by way of the post office) today. It is trivial to see that Brent drove in the direction of travel from light/thin to darker/thicker.

These are the types of things which you might not immediately notice with GPS Insight. Things just “work” the way they should. But behind the scenes, we are processing and filtering and consolidating and sanity checking millions of points per day for our customers to make sure they see sensible data and can use that to bring efficiency and insight to their businesses. We take advice on usability from customers all the time, and encourage them to provide feedback to help better the product.

I just happened to run a map tonight for a different reason (we were testing a different unit) and I noticed this idling activity. I thought it would be a good time to detail how we do these two (of many) convenient map enhancements for our customers.

By the way, here is an iPhone pic of where we were at with the kids (’Tortilla Flat’ — an old mining town/tourist trap in Apache Junction):

It is a beautiful area near the Superstition Mountains — we thought the drive would be nice on this Memorial Day weekend. I’ve had better food before though…

Note the hitching post where people tie their horses up when they can eat at the Saloon.

We don’t have GPS or diagnostics for horses, and note they left different types of “emissions.”

Rob.

GPS Insight now offer switches to its customers using the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000 models of tracking device.

These are useful if you want to count and quantity where certain activity takes place, such as:

• solid waste collection (tipping a can into the garbage truck)
• pump activity (pumping a well, concrete, etc.)
• street sweeper on vs. off activity

There are countless uses for switches, and we will go through them in future articles.

Here are some pictures of the new capability within GPS Insight for a residential solid waste operation which recently put GPS Insight on its vehicles. These are the “sideloaders” for the day (which pick up curbside cans):

We have a new “All Inputs” option for what to show in 3D Mapping — the path of each vehicle is shown in a different color, but the actual pickups are shown as green or blue dots with stars (depending on speed):

To isolate JUST the pickup activity or JUST the driving activity, put a polygon in place to show the dots like a cornrow, or turn off the time slider to show just the path:

But if all you want to do is count “tips” just run a summary report — here is the how:

Zooming in:

All in .28 seconds. Lots of information, and quick, easy, and relatively inexpensive to obtain. We have other reports available which we will go into with future articles (e.g. idling when PTO is NOT engaged, etc.).

Now when Mrs. Smith at 123 N. Main Street says you didn’t pick up her garbage on time, you’ll know what happened.

Rob.

When we subcontract out installations, we want to make sure they were done right electrically. 6 of our devices are either “Plug and Play” or “Lick and Stick” (they just glue to the top of the trailer) but some require actual installation into the vehicle’s electrical system. We can help with easy “wire taps” so you don’t need to do much work, but often times the customer will ask us to do the install or we subcontract it out.

So, after a joint installation of 65 or so devices recently, we ran a quick report to make sure every unit was reporting properly.

A minute to run the report & we could see 2 things immediately:

One unit did not have its “switched power” lead properly wired in the vehicle, since it shows as idling (blue) throughout the night vs. red or white (which indicate stops between 1-8 hours and 8+ hours):

The top circled item shows this mis-wired vehicle. We will just need to have our installer make a quick adjustment & we will be 100% on these 65 units.

Toward the bottom, we see an actual overnight idle stop — amazingly, some times, drivers leave the vehicle running, then go home for the night, and the next morning find the truck has wasted 15 gallons of fuel, caused 15 hours of pollution, etc.

A GPS Insight Idle Alert to both the supervisor and the driver will stop that, as well as this report or one of our other idle-detecting/quantifying alerts.

Rob.

At NAFA 2009 (National Association of Fleet Administrators), we unveiled several new hardware and software offerings. Notably:

• Garmin Integration
• Driver Log/DOT Hours of Service application coming in 2009
• EZ-1000 & PNP-1500 hardware
• Switches & Sensors capabilities

This year’s conference was in New Orleans. Here are some pics of our booth and

The 5 of us who attended (Ryan, Jolene, Rob, Alissa, & Elliot) (wearing our Bourbon Street beads…)

:

Then Elliot donned a Mardi Gras outfit & joined in the parade…

We had a good time & the show went well.

Here is a video interview of me which Automotive Digest published after the show.

Rob.

We just exhibited NAFA in New Orleans in April.

During our downtime on Bourbon St., I wandered into Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo.

I found an alternative for customers unwilling to pay for a good GPS Tracking product:

Only $8.95! Seriously, we rarely try to sell our product strictly on the asset recovery aspects, since there are many more significant drivers of ROI (idling, speeding, efficient dispatch, off-hours usage, maintenance, etc.). But we generally hear about a vehicle or two each month which was recovered because they used GPS Insight. That probably means there are several we don’t hear about either each month.

Using the odd-hours alert, and cc’ing the driver of the vehicle, you can alert drivers to the fact that their truck is being moved (stolen) in the middle of the night as well, which is a very proactive way of avoiding theft. Additionally you can tell the alert to exclude homes so that driving it from the street into the driveway won’t trip a false alert.

Or you can use the Saint Anne figurine…

Rob.

I was reading Wired Magazine on the plane the other day and came across this puzzle:

It’s all of the “early” computers, in chronological order, where you need to determine and find the names based on year, how much memory they came with, and number of letters in their name.

I found my first computer pretty quickly — in 1981 I bought it by cashing in all $400 I had in savings bonds from birthday’s past. I was 11 years old & had taken my first couple computer classes at the local high school when I was in 6th grade in 1980. Technically we wrote programs on the Apple II and some HP card-reading beast back then so those were really my first computers.

The classes and TI-99/4A were a good investment. Almost 30 years of programming later (and I’m not even 40 yet), it’s hard to believe how long it’s been. Just a little walk down geek memory lane.

Enjoy the puzzle if you are also a closet geek. Here are the answers.

Rob.

So we sent a team to coordinate some installs in Santa Monica last week. Since Google Earth makes city boundaries available, it’s not hard to quantify when we were there, and how much time was spent in Santa Monica and what stops were made in neighboring cities. This takes no time at all in GPS Insight. Here’s how:

First, turn on City Boundaries, turn off roads (to make it easier to see the city boundary) and then “fly to” Santa Monica:

Then trace the outline using a Google Earth Polygon and name it “Santa Monica” and color it however you may like:

To be precise while tracing the city boundary, you can Zoom Down/Up, and pan around using the Pg Up/Pg Down and Arrow Keys ( Help -> Keyboard Shortcuts gives you this information) – just click all the defining points until you complete the polygon:

It’s up to you how accurate you want to be — 1 minute and you should be 99.9% accurate:

After clicking on “OK” you can then right-click/cut [or copy to be safer -- either is fine] the definition from Google Earth and paste it into “Quick Import” under Mapping -> Landmarks on the GPS Insight top navigation bar:

T

Then click on “Import Now” and repeat for any bordering cities in question.

To find out which ones we need, grab the history for roughly the time that vehicle (Scion 4000) was out in California.

I forget when they were there so I’ll just grab 9 days or so toward the end of April:

It looks like they spent some time driving through Venice, having breakfast in Playa Del Ray, and in WestWood, Sawtelle, Culver City, etc.

I’ll just add a couple other cities for the sake of this article, but if these were important county or city boundaries, you would only need to add them once, and if it was a LOT of data, we have ways of automating this for our customers — just ask! [sometimes that means we do it for you...]

Here are 3 I quickly traced (they’re not 100% — there are crazy in & out borders which are irrelevant for our purposes here):

Now we can group them as “CA Coastal Cities” under GPS Insight -> Mapping -> Landmark -> Groups:

Click on “Create New Landmark Group”:

Then name it and save it:

Now here’s the timesaver:

Draw a quick “throw-away” polygon around all three in Google Earth and cut/paste it into “Filter by Polygon”:

We quickly see only our 3 Coastal Cities — this is down from 966 landmarks we would otherwise need to look through to find all three and drag them into the new group we’ve created:

Now shift-click between the top & bottom to select all 3, then drag onto our new “CA Coastal Cities” group:

Now click on the “edit landmarks” icon to change if necessary or just verify the group is correct:

OK, enough about grouping landmarks, but that’s necessary for the final report:

Make sure to refresh or hit F5 on your browser to pick up the new landmark group, and run a landmark report for Scion 4000 for ONLY the landmark group called “CA Coastal Cities” — make sure to click on the “Passing Through” checkbox to ensure you get driving activity which does not begin/end a stop as well.

And .6 seconds later, here is the answer:

103.8 hours in Santa Monica, 9 minutes passing through Venice, and 25 minutes in Playa Del Ray with 9 minutes stopped there for something (Breakfast? — too quick):

Turning on the “Places of Interest” layer we see it’s a McDonald’s (which explains why it’s only 9 minutes):

You get the idea — this article has gotten long…

Hopefully it gives you a good example of how to use Google Earth, along with GPS Insight landmarks/landmark groups, and our landmark report.

One nice feature I’ll mention though is this — if you want to remove a particular landmark from a group because it doesn’t belong there, just click on the “minus” sign near the landmark name in the report:

You are given a chance to “OK” or cancel the deletion:

This is a great example of how our reports allow you to interact to create/delete/remove landmarks, pull up maps, etc. We are always trying to make the product more able to answer questions about your fleet, and the interface easier for you to do so efficiently.

It truly took me 3 minutes to get the answer to my initial question — but about an hour & 15 minutes to document it in this article. It’s a long one, thanks for reading it.

Thanks,
Rob.

I saw a competitor’s [I would never name names -- just that they start with an F and end with a s and they're an Irish company...] blog the other day which stated they recently added support for Google Earth, and that they were “the first telematics solution to use Google Earth mapping.”

We have supported Google Earth since 6/29/2005, nearly FOUR YEARS AGO, and I’m going to point that out.

Additionally, our Google Earth, nearly 4 years old, is LIGHT YEARS beyond any I’ve seen in a competitor’s GPS Tracking product.

The day Google Earth launched, I saw it on the Bloomberg Terminal I was using, downloaded it, saw it could be used to enhance GPS Insight, and immediately wrote some (very primitive) support into our product. This was back in the day when I was still able to code things myself… Now we have some of the best developers I’ve worked with, and they do all the heavy code lifting.

Anyway, I want to point out that this blog has 23 articles (including this one) about Google Earth usage within GPS Insight, dating back to October of 2007, right after I started writing these articles.

Here they are — use the categories on the left to see only articles on the topics which interest you: http://blog.gpsinsight.com/?cat=14

I will spend a little more time detailing the usage of Google Earth within GPS Insight, as it is the cornerstone for “power usage” of the product, and yields tremendous advantages over other mapping.

Here are a few things we do which are beyond the “typical” support of Google Earth:

• Polygon Landmark compatibility
• Time Lapse Movie view of history
• One Click, Secure .kmz links of your fleet and landmarks
• Drag and drop creation of landmarks from Google Earth search results
• Tens of Thousands of objects supported at once

I won’t give away our roadmap — for that, the competition needs to view our freely available demos (they do, I get a report…).

By the way, here’s a quick screenshot of Santa Monica, CA — we just returned from there and I was curious how big they are and how many miles/hours we spent there doing installs last week. I’ll detail how we determined that in the next blog article available here.

Google Earth is a great tool – just don’t trust companies saying they are “the only” provider out there supporting it.

I will say truthfully that GPS Insight was the FIRST to support it (someone try to beat 6/30/05), and has more functionality built around Google Earth than any other competitor, including F|$$!&@!|(s, regardless of what their blog states.

I’ll be celebrating their 4th birthday on 6/29/09 by gladly renewing all our Google Earth Pro licenses, which allow you to do a few extra things like compute area, as shown above.

Rob.

I got an odd-hours alert for our GPS Insight Scion (the wrapped vehicle we use to do advertising, occasional installs, etc.).

One of our employees took it home tonight, which is fine — miles & miles of cheap advertising since he lives far away from the office.

Except they’re speeding so I looked online to see what’s going on. (I also got a speeding alert…)

The Scion has 3 units installed — a 3500, a 4000, and a 3000. The “Scion” vehicle is the 3500, at 2 minute updates, and the others are at 1 minute updates.

This was a pretty interesting distribution of whereabouts on the 60 heading West, all speeding, but nicely spaced out between location reports:

I just thought I would share, it looked interesting.

FYI, the “out of range” “Pedestrian” units are our EZ-1000’s — when you turn them off, to save on battery, they rightfully go “out of range” – since we only have a few for testing on our account, they are all turned off at night, since we’re not out patrolling the mall, etc…

A few minutes later, the 3 units in the Scion are still equally spread out — this time Alena is in chase. I’m guessing she’s trying to catch up to her husband, who is driving home from wherever they met for dinner together…

And here we go, the culprit is…. Grant, stopped finally at Grant House.

[The night after I wrote this article, 3 of our installers are driving the Scion to coordinate a large install in California together, and one has an EZ-1000 with him (don’t ask me why he named it ‘Ghost Rider’ — I have no idea). Now there are 4 different types of tracking device in the Scion, all together, again all speeding… That’s California though, they’re probably getting passed left & right.

Here’s a picture of the 4 units, off by just a bit time/reporting-wise, all in an alert mode. Bear in mind the speeds are slightly different due to them having different 1-2 minute sample timeframes:

Rob.

We got this request in Spanish the other day:

No one here speaks Spanish — we need to work on that as our product now works in Mexico and other Latin American countries.

So we used the internet to translate it “automagically.”

It returned this:

We had a friend translate it and apparently “pie” should really be “country…”

Glad we caught that before developing a product for that emerging daily pie theft market near the Equator (should be Ecuador).

If you have something other than pies you would like to track (preferably with wheels) please give us a call & we will help you out.

Thanks,

Rob

I forgot to turn off an EZ-1000 I had brought on a trip. It was in my overhead luggage (oops).

It still tracked me on the runway (a max speed of 214 until it lost signal), then all the way home while in my trunk.

Run a quick 3D map for Friday:

We took off on time (3:35 flight pushed back at exactly 3:35 & left the runway at 3:40):

Then the unit last reported before losing cell coverage at 214 MPH after turning over the ocean:

I was out of cell range for roughly an hour, and covered 330 miles between Orange County, CA and Phoenix, AZ which means we averaged about 330 MPH:

All of our units except for this one (the EZ-1000) would store that history, but the EZ-1000 is more about where a person is right now (e.g. security guards, police officers) so it does not store data if it loses cell coverage — since we rarely lose cell coverage (except in planes at 33,000 feet…) it’s a non-issue, as you’ll see next.

After landing, it picks right up again, then tracks my vehicle all the way home, even though I had the unit in my suitcase, in my closed metal trunk:

And on the freeway, it is exactly accurate (but at 2 minute updates) relative to my GPSI-4000 at 10 second updates in the same vehicle (red line=10 second with the GPSI-4000, blue line = 2 minutes with the EZ-1000):

Here on the highway there are 2 points 4 seconds apart, with the same exact speed (67 MPH):

The points are 56 feet apart, which seems reasonable for 4 seconds at 67 MPH (technically it should be 393′ but the 1000 takes a couple seconds to transmit vs. the 4000 which is pretty much instant — but close enough– we’re not launching missiles here):

The moral of the story here is that this unit can be used to economically supplement your tracking of freight, high value packages, etc. Just Thursday a customer I visited in El Monte asked if he could use them to track shipments — Given the fact that my trunk is probably thicker metal than the typical trailer, I can say that it should work reasonably well.

Remember these units work for up to 10-15 days in “ping only” mode, and 3 1/2 days at 2 minute updates. Inexpensive external USB-connected batteries work well to extend the life up to a month or two.

This device is very reliable, and easy to use for many security, freight tracking, and occasional tracking needs. Just don’t ask us to sell it to you to track your spouse or kids — we strictly sell for B2B (Business to Business).

Here’s one more picture of the 2 minute EZ-1000 tracking (blue with green movement/speeding dots) vs. “reality” at 10 second updates (red) — it caught me speeding… I wanted to get home in a hurry obviously:

Thanks,

Rob.

We have launched a new version of our Alerts. Alerts are one of the easiest ways to simply let GPS Insight help notify you (and your drivers) on an exception basis.

This is from our support article about Alerts:

The alerts system has been updated to incorporate odd-hours and a landmark filter into each of the alert types.
In addition, ALERTS now have the ability to send a copy of the alert to the driver of the vehicle which generated the alert.
Alert Types:
* Landmark — will send an alert whenever a vehicle (or vehicle group) enters or exits (or both) a landmark (or landmark group).
* Long Stop — will send an alert when the vehicle is stopped for a specified amount of time. This stop can be an ignition-off stop or an idle stop.
* Idle Time — will send an alert when a vehicle has been idling for a specified amount of time.
* Odd-Hours — will send an alert when the vehicle is on and moving during specified odd hours.
* Speeding — will send an alert when the vehicle is moving above a specified speed limit.

Filter Types:

* Odd Hours Filter: If an odd-hours filter is applied, the alert conditions will only be checked during the specified hours.
* Landmarks: If a landmark filter is applied to an alert, the alert conditions will only be checked when the vehicle is inside (or outside) the specified landmark or group of landmarks. This is not the same behavior as the Landmark Alert, which will alert every time the vehicle enters or exits a specified landmark.
* Landmark Groups: Previously, alerts using landmarks used a simple pick-list of all the landmarks available to that user. This has been changed so that our standard landmark groups are used instead of an ad-hoc group of landmarks. This interface change enables future enhancements when we GPS Insight will allow users to specify alerts on landmark categories and attributes.

Driver Alerts: If the alert is set to alert the driver, the drivers alert preferences must be set up. For each driver, you may specify an email address and a phone number for text messages. Each driver also has an alert preference telling which of these addresses should receive the messages. If the driver is not set up to receive messages they will not receive a copy of the alert. Garmin enabled drivers will have alerts sent to their in-cab Garmin as well once this is released in May 2009.

In order to create an alert, open the Alerts Manager from the GPS Insight navigation bar under Account: Scheduled: Alerts

Then choose the alert you wish to create:

A Dialog box with appropriate options opens up:

If you wish the driver to receive an alert as well, check the Driver box.
If your drivers cell phone/email address are not currently set up within GPS Insight, click on Driver: Contact info for the following screen:

Simply click on any empty email or phone number field to instantly edit that field:

Note that many options are available regarding whether or not to alert a particular driver (if they are ccd in the alert) as well as how they prefer to be alerted (SMS or by email):

The Odd-Hours options for all alert types allow a different schedule to be kept for the week vs. during the weekend:
Note this alert sends me, as well as the driver of the vehicle speeding, an alert if they go over 55 MPH only in a landmark (or landmark group) named Construction on the weekend, between 5 PM and 4 AM:

For more information on GPS Insight alerts, please feel free to view the demonstration video available at http://demos.gpsinsight.com/demo/19 or call us at 866-477-4321, option 2 (for support).

Rob.

This has nothing to do with GPS, (but it is an M2M/Telematics device, I suppose).

Amazon has released the Kindle 2 — an AMAZING product.

It’s an electronic book where you can browse Amazon’s website (as well as Wikipedia & the Oxford Dictionary, & some limited web browsing).

You can buy books at a discount and electronically download them in seconds from anywhere (car, beach, wherever) — no computer required.

It stores 1,200 books, and you can read it for 2 WEEKS on a single charge (less if you use the wireless functionality).

So I was reading Christopher Moore’s “Fool” which is a comedic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” from the Jester’s perspective. $9.99 on Kindle from Amazon vs. the $17.81 hardcover (plus shipping/handling).

Then I decided to download all of Shakespeare’s works — $4.79 and less than a minute later and they were loaded on the Kindle.

All of Edgar Allan Poe’s works? Same $4.79. Some books are free (most religious texts, lists of “must read books”, etc.).

It uses “electronic ink” rather than a computer screen, and is just as easy to read in bright sunlight as a book. You can use a book light (it’s not backlit) if it’s dark.

Anyway, the Kindle is the best thing I have seen come around in a long time & I just want to put that on the record — they cost $359, but if you are (or used to be and want to again be) a big reader, it’s a MUST HAVE. Plus, I had it in the Sauna for 30 minutes at 180 degrees, and it didn’t die (I was a little worried about that…).

So as amazing as this Amazon product is, they aren’t so smart in other ways.

I got a “recommended” email from them today.

Because I bought Elmo’s Wild Wild West on DVD for my kids some time ago, they think I should buy Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis– an existential story about a guy who turns into a bug. And they didn’t even spell Metamorphosis right on the ad!

Stick to their Kindle, not their Recommendations…

Rob.

So I talked about the “inaugural run” with the EZ-1000 here.

I mentioned that we can sacrifice battery life for accuracy/frequency, and vice versa.

So on the way home from Mexico, I put an EZ-1000 in 8 second update mode and it ran for 16 hours before the battery ran out.

Once I came home (via the same route I run typically), I went for a run, & took the unit with me.

I want to show the accuracy of this unit in “high accuracy mode” — it’s amazingly accurate.

Here is the route of me driving home with the unit in my cup-holder:

You can see that I ran to the edge of the road, and purposely waited 10 seconds to begin running back to ensure an “idle” (blue) dot showed up where I stopped running:

Note that there is no sidewalk at that area of the road so I am on the Eastbound side, opposite where I drove earlier (the line without any “pins”).

Zooming down, the accuracy is ridiculous — you can see where I cross the street because the sidewalk ends and there is more room to run on the other side (both heading out and coming back) — you can even tell that I stay to the right of the sidewalk each direction!:

So it was ridiculously windy (really, it wasn’t that I just got back from 4 days of eating & drinking in Mexico and am out of shape), and I had to walk for a block twice during my Westbound (into the wind) return to home. It’s trivial to pick that out based on the map points:

And I wanted to “simulate” a patrolman taking a shortcut because they were too tired to go the full route to the entry gate & simply cut through the drainage culvert (we don’t have sewers here in the desert…):

While I was “simulating” a lazy patrolman & taking the shortcut, for the blog’s sake, I had to walk through some shrubs where I thought “I should probably not do this since it’s beginning to be rattlesnake season” (Spring & Autumn are when the snakes are warm but not too hot to head to the mountains in AZ).

As I was heading back to my house, sure enough, I saw a rattlesnake in the road (warming up in the late afternoon) but didn’t have my phone to take a picture for the blog’s sake, and to convince my kids to stay out of the desert. I ran home, grabbed my camera, ran back, but by then it was gone.

Here’s that activity:

Sorry, no fun rattlesnake picture for the blog except how long it took me to get home (.10 miles), grab my camera (and my kid who I figured I would have come with to see it), run back (.10 miles), and find the snake gone (I saw its skin it left in the dirt nearby the next day, for what it’s worth).

5 minutes, from 3:45 to 3:50 PM, according to GPS, is too long to expect a rattlesnake to sit around and wait for a neighbor to come back and take its picture (or club it depending on the neighbor…) :

Anyway, this should give you an idea for how accurate the EZ-1000 is for piecing together a security person’s day, a police-officer’s beat and/or pursuit/apprehension (pardon the pun), etc.

We look forward to helping you with your exact requirements using the EZ-1000 (or any GPS Insight offering), and hope you avoid the rattlesnakes.

Rob.

So we went on a short vacation to Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point) Mexico for our kids’ Spring Break last week.

I took an EZ-1000 with a Mexico-compatible SIM in it, and tested out the coverage AND the water-proof-ness (if that’s a word).

Here are my 2 boys on the banana boat (a towed inflatable boat which we bought rides on for $5 each).

Note the boat states “not to be towed at more than 15 MPH” — we can show where the ride took us and that they exceeded that speed, not that there are any Federales out there enforcing the banana boat speed limits.

So the first “lap” I was holding on to Sarah (my 3 1/2 year old) and so I couldn’t get a picture of us all at once.

I pull up the 3D history of our banana boat trip, referencing the picture’s date & time, like so (choosing “Beach Patrol” — what I named the unit, and 3/20):

Then I click on each point and see the speed at that particular 15 second update — they’re all between 8 and 11 MPH since I had my young daughter & I asked them the boat “Captain” to drive slow for one lap until I dropped her off with my wife Kristi on the shore:

Once we got back to shore after lap 1, a wave knocked both Sarah and me off into the Ocean. She & I got soaking wet but made it into shore. The EZ-1000 is fairly water resistant so it kept on reporting and didn’t get damaged even though it was completely underwater for some time in the waves (It won’t make it on a dive trip though…) I also looked at the time stamp on the picture & noticed that Kristi took the picture after the first lap (14:49:52).

So we go on laps 2 & 3, which are about 2/3 of a mile from one end to another based on the “ruler” I use in Google Earth (note the white line I drew between the farthest points — I could also trace a “path” and see how many miles it was in total).

By checking some of the points, I see the speeds go from a peak of 11 MPH up to 25 MPH — definitely more than the 15 MPH safety limit on the side of the boat, not that anyone minded:

Here is a picture taken by Kristi as the boys & I were getting off the boat after the last 2 “laps”:

Note the time is 2:59:00 (not sure it’s 100% accurate on my camera, but it’s close).

Look at the “picture” from GPS Insight with Google Earth:

I was able to “dial in” exact time the picture was taken with the new Google Earth 5 “time Slider” by entering the exact time into the control (press the “wrench” to bring up this dialog box):

A couple days later we took another longer banana boat ride with just the boys from town. I had used the GPS Insight interface to put the EZ-1000 in 8 second update mode vs. the 15 second mode for the first trip. You can see how much more accurate the path is with that refresh interval here (in red, vs. pink):

Incidentally, we get 16 hours on a battery charge at 8 second updates (I tested on the way back from Mexico, that’s another story for another blog article).

And that’s about all I have to say about Banana Boat Racing with the kids — here’s a good picture to leave off with:

Now we’re home — back to school and back to work.

Rob.

We have been processing user defined alerts for over a year, and prior to that would set them up as custom alerts for customers.

I was curious how many have been processed so far, and we are less than 2 days or so from processing our 100 millionth alert:

Yet they are still relatively un-used by our customers.

Here is how you access your alerts, which are an integral part of managing by proactive exception using GPS Insight:

This opens up our account’s alerts (we have a HUGE number of them since we test using our own vehicles all the time — I get 100 emails/SMS text messages a day about our employees speeding, getting to the office, leaving the office, idling (rare, we’re office workers, not service technicians…), etc.

Even if I leave my car at the car wash & forget about it… (documented here).

Here are the alerts, and if you “hover over” the “info” (i) you can see information about how many times it’s been checked (generally once per minute) and how many times you’ve been alerted (in this case 538 times when one of our employees went > 90 MPH — we do a lot of driving back & forth through the desert to/from Southern California — hopefully the 5th amendment prevents us from getting in trouble over this…). Also, bear in mind that we sometimes test this alert by artificially dropping it down to 55 MPH, plus many of our vehicles report at 10 second updates — this over-inflates that number of alerts (but that many emails/SMS text messages were sent on this alert being “tripped.”).

You can see that we have 7 types of alerts currently. Bear in mind that a Geofence is the same thing as a “Landmark” or “Site” in GPS Insight.

Geofence Alert: Any time a vehicle enters/exits a defined Geofence (or group of Geofences)

Geofence Stop Alert: A stop for longer than a defined period of time inside or outside a given Geofence (or group of Geofences)

Idle Time Alert: Alerts whenever a vehicle’s engine is left running for greater than a configurable number of minutes without moving

Odd-Hours Alert: Alerts whenever a vehicle is driven during a specified period of time

Odd-Hours in Landmark: Alerts when a vehicle is driven but only inside or outside of a Landmark (or group of Landmarks/Geofences)

Speeding Alert: Alerts whenever a vehicle’s max or average speed (you choose) exceeds a specific threshold (you choose)

Speeding Alert in Landmark: Same as a Speeding Alert but within a specific landmark — this is good for construction zones or “trouble areas” you define

We have several new alerts coming online soon, and will be able to allow you schedule what time/days you want alerts to come within the week.

These do not include Maintenance Alerts which are separate and maintained under “Scheduled Maintenance” within GPS Insight.

As always, if there is an alert you would like to see, please let us know — there’s a good chance we’re already working on it or will add it to our list of alerts to add, and usually they come within a week or two, not “sure, we’ll get that for you…”

Rob.

I don’t come across much GPS humor, but this was in The Onion today (The Onion is a great satirical newspaper originally from University of Wisconsin – Madison). In case you don’t remember, Kenny Loggins sang “The Danger Zone” as the theme song to Top Gun back in the ’80s sometime:

http://www.theonion.com/conttent/radio_news/50596

In late April, 2009, we introduced support for Garmin integration with GPS Insight, which allows dispatch to now send drivers’ Garmins their next stop(s) as well as send and receive messages to and from a Garmin connected to a GPS Insight GPSI-4000 tracking device.

Here is a demo of that. It is a huge advancement for the GPS Insight product and is invaluable to companies who need to send orders/pickups to their drivers throughout the day. We also support sending and receiving text messages and driver/job statuses using a Garmin as well.
Rob.

So I’m not the only one who has this dream once a year even though college is a LONG time ago?

What about the part where I forget which building the class is in and the final just started and I just remembered I took this class?

And then I realize all that info is in my locker and I forgot the combination to my lock?

[and which one is my locker, now that I think about it...]

Again, courtesy of the fine people at xkcd.com.

Rob.

Los Angeles Police Department puts on a yearly race from LA area to Las Vegas. It’s 120 MILES long, through the desert, at night. 242 teams of 20 runners each participate. That’s 4,840 runners! (running 6 miles each).

It’s called the Baker to Vegas Relay.

A customer of ours, Crown Disposal sponsored one of the teams this year — the San Fernando/South Pasadena/Compton team.

Their head of IT, Jerry Prieto, asked us to loan them a GPS device and an account where they could view the progress of the race, to supplement their elaborate communications already in place to track the race.

We are happy to do so — Crown Disposal has been a GPS Insight customer for years and has given us ideas for many improvements to our product (the Speed Bands report, imported rolloff locations color-coded by age, etc).

Using an infrequently used aspect of our product “Customer Sites,” I was able to put a publicly available website out there for anyone to watch the race progress. It took about 1 minute to do this, and is seen here:

And in Satellite View we see where they ended (at the Las Vegas Hilton):

Anyway, the race commenced Saturday night, and the vehicle should have taken 120 miles to get there.

Here is a track of that vehicle, and since I really don’t know where the race physically began, I traced back from Vegas roughly 120 miles to start my “search.”

This screen shot shows I’m not too far off — the light green dots are speeding events (76 MPH max, in this case then slowing down to 6 MPH) prior to stopping at the beginning of the race:

The vehicle had driven 113.5 miles that day — we’ll subtract that from the ending mileage for the day to arrive at 120 miles in just a minute.

They leave out at 10:40:57:

From the time they got to the starting point (on Death Valley Rd., by the way, in the middle of NOWHERE…), it was just about an hour before they started their team race.

Nice terrain to have to run up! — We’re tracking the vehicle which is the lead for the team — they had several vehicles to carry all the 20 runners.

At least whoever was running at 3:21 AM got to go downhill:

They arrive at the Hilton (the finish line) at 7:55 AM — 123.4 miles and 21 hours, 15 minutes later. That’s an average of 5.65 Miles Per Hour.

The car drove a few extra miles doubling back, etc., relative to the racers’ 120 mile trek (although it might be a few more miles, I didn’t measure it myself…).

Anyway, we’re happy to help with this fantastic 25 year old event, and appreciate Crown Disposal’s invitation to help them help LAPD and the world’s “biggest police chase” as they call it.

Rob.

I haven’t been out golfing for a LONG time — it’s busy here at GPS Insight.

But the head of marketing for a great local company we work with (bluemedia — www.bluemedia.com) invited a couple of us out to golf the other day.

So I got to enjoy the day on Wednesday & we played 27 holes.

But I needed to test accuracy and battery life on our new EZ-1000 so I put two of them in my pocket during the day. Here’s what they look like:

One was set for 15 second updates, sent every minute (blue), and one was simply set for every minute (orange).

You can see slightly more information on the blue track, and they are slightly more accurate since they are keeping constant GPS, but again, as I’ve mentioned, that drops the battery life down. We get about 20 hours at 15 second updates once a minute. We get around 40 hours by transmitting every 1 minute. The customer will have the ability to modify the settings “on the fly” so that the battery vs. information/accuracy tradeoff is in their hands.

This will be useful for foot patrols, dismounted police and security officers, and similar applications.

You can get a lot more information from this, such as we got off on time for our 7:36 tee time, and that I went to the water to try to get the ball I rolled into the pond on the 13th hole:

This shows my vehicle parked at the golf course for 9:45 (I didn’t get a lot of work done that day…):

But this is more telling of what activity occurred there:

We are going to start encouraging our customers to consider this product in addition to vehicle tracking, particularly if their drivers need to spend extended periods of time outside of the vehicle. They will double as a panic alarm, since they have a button for this on the side.

For more information on the EZ-1000 give us a call, or look on the website and in the blog under articles in the category “hardware EZ-1000″ — for a picture check out this article here.

Cast:

Lost Driver: Rob’s beautiful wife Kristi

Dispatch: Rob at his desk on a beautiful Saturday afternoon

Important Delivery: birthday present

Happy Customer: Birthday boy

Pretend this is a business scenario — this happens hundreds of times a day with our product for our customers.

My 6 year old is heading to a birthday party with my wife driving. The address is new and doesn’t show up on her navigation built into the car.

I’m at work & she called and asked me for directions.

Since I’m sitting at my desk, and we usually have our account pulled up, it took me about 15 seconds to tell her how to get there.

Just type in the address in Google Earth (this works on our browser map as well, I just happen to like Google Earth more).

Right click it and choose “Get Directions To.” Then either click or right click her car and choose “Get Directions From.”:

So then the directions come up:

And I explain to her how to wind over to the new street address (clearly a new subdivision since the aerial photo shows it as dirt)

Then I watch as she takes a wrong turn anyway… (It’s not like I follow directions well either). I’m able to call her & explain she needed to take a left, not a right.

Then she’s back on track, and gets to the address.

But then she stops there for 4 minutes, & moves somewhere else?

Why? I’m guessing the party is at the subdivision clubhouse. Turn on Street Maps, & confirm that’s the case:

Or maybe they’re having it in the park, who knows? I’ll find out later. Meanwhile I am getting caught up at work on a Saturday. It only took 30 seconds to find and get directions to my wife, & another 30 to call her back & help in the maze of this new area. Unfortunately it takes me longer than that to document this good example for the blog, but it’s done now, & I’m only 40 minutes farther away from getting out of the office on this beautiful day in Scottsdale. I wish I had taken Ryan to the party instead!

This should illustrate the real time dispatch assistance you can give using GPS Insight though — call our sales or support for more info at 866-GPS-4321.

Rob.

A key concept in effectively executing a corporate plan is MEASURING the LEADING indicators (vs. the LAGGING indicator).

For instance, considering sales, revenue is the LAGGING indicator, and customer visits may be the LEADING indicator.

The problem is, once you measure revenue, it’s too late! There is nothing you can influence or manage it at that point, once you’ve measured it.

HOWEVER, on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, the LEADING indicators can be measured and adjusted. This is like measuring RPM to predict change in Speed. Or taking the derivative, in Calculus terms.

GPS Insight can help tremendously to gain perspective on where your company is trending.

In this economy, that’s HUGE. For $1-2 a day, we can automate reports which help you to drive your goals to completion, rather than “hope” your company (and your employees…) are headed in the right direction.

So, what is it that we can help drive, depending on your company’s goals? This table summarizes some typical ways customers can use GPS Insight to reach their goals:

Please give us a call at 877-GPS-4321 and ask how we can help you to manage these indicators using GPS tracking technology. You will have meaningful measurements with which to manage your fleet and ensure you meet your goals.

Rob.

We are testing out this new tracking device which I mentioned in the past couple articles.

I am trying to lose a few pounds gained from the past 2 trade shows in Dallas (mmm, barbeque…).

So I went on a run today and put the tiny device in my right shorts pocket and headed on my usual route.

Here is the 2 minute-by-2 minute track:

As always with GPS Insight, green means moving, blue means idling (e.g. 0 mph as I start/end the run), and the color and thickness of the line goes from “light and thin” to “dark and thick” to help indicate direction of travel which helps visually determine the vehicle’s (or runner’s) activity more easily.

Here is a different perspective which shows me leaving my subdivision and heading EAST 2 miles then turning around at the main road. Note that the light blue line is much closer to the sidewalk than the line coming back (about 100 feet off). I took the same sidewalk the whole way — what happened? This is where battery life vs. 100% accuracy comes in. 100% accuracy, we are good for 10-12 hours on a charge. But we can go well over 3 days on a charge at 2 minute updates if the GPS unit is allowed to sleep between those two minutes — this generally adds some error to the location, in this case up to 100 feet when I’m not faced toward the satellites.

Well, as I mentioned, I put this tiny tracker in my right pocket and headed East. When I headed back, my body was “in the way” of the GPS signal from the predominant GPS satellites in this area at this time, in the Southern sky. This means they caught a bit of a bounced signal from the houses, trees, etc. to my right. This subtle difference shows up on the map. The accuracy of these units is very good (best case, 5 feet, worst case, 100 feet), considering the GPS satellites are 22,370 miles in space, and the tiny device is in my running shorts pocket (don’t worry, we won’t sell this one, and they are VERY waterproof, fyi…). The moral of the story is they’re highly accurate if you only need them for 10-12 hours on a charge, and pretty accurate if you want 3 days (at two minute updates). If you want less frequent updates, they’ll run up to 10-15 days on a single charge.

Our more powerful vehicle-mounted GPS tracking devices are always within 5-15 feet while driving, and typically within 10-30 feet of accuracy when parked. Either way, that is VERY good considering the standard accuracy of a single GPS fix is 9 meters in any direction. This is because only the US Military gets the “100% accurate” signals — for the rest of us it’s only guaranteed within 27′. However, the more samples you take in a given period of time, the more accurate you can become by eliminating the really far off samples. This is a topic for another day. Thankfully, our customers aren’t harvesting grain or painting road lines based on our “civilian” GPS. We don’t cost nearly as much either (trust me).

So to use Google Earth to its fullest, I outlined the path I ran and measured it to be 4.59 miles (I’m getting tired as we speak…):

[Nice mini-racecar track my neighbor has, huh? Unfortunately I don't know him...]

I can run a quick activity detail report for my rough speed while running (along with a “12 MPH” which is bad — it’s due to my going into the house & losing GPS signal which can cause a transient issue with this unit (currently, we are programming it to be less likely once we sell them).

Anyway, that’s some of what you can do with our new small, rechargable EZ-1000. (shown below):

By the way, did I mention it was 85 degrees today here in Scottsdale…? A little hot for a run already (sorry everyone back in the Northeast & Chicago)

Thanks,
Rob.

My last article detailed how I took a very small tracking device to the zoo to track my day there. Incidentally, that tracking device has been reporting every 2 minutes for the past 36 hours (I’ll let you know when its rechargeable battery finally needs recharging later).

I want to quickly illustrate how fast it is to overlay a map of the zoo (my son brought one home & I scanned it) in order to determine how much time I spent at a particular area (my daughter loves the Giraffes so we went there first).

After importing the overlay in Google Earth, we stretch it to fit the roads, lakes, boundaries, etc. This is covered in other “Overlay” subject blog articles.

We can measure (using the Pro version of Google Earth) that the zoo is roughly 90 acres:

Dialing down the “Opacity slider” we can see through the overlay to the “real map” to determine the distance between the real Carousel and the map carousel — only 139 feet off. This map is not military grade but it works for our purposes. We can also see the Giraffe just above the carousel. They are my daughter’s 2 favorite things at the zoo, we start our trip with the Giraffes then end with the Carousel before we leave (and a toy from the gift shop to avoid a scene…).

Here we can zoom down and bring in the tracking history of our zoo visit:

It is easy to see we were walking through the zoo at 13:31, then got to the giraffes at 13:33, left at 13:41, took a wrong turn finding the entrance to the Amphibian exhibit, then got inside the Amphibian exhibit at 13:45. Well, if you use our product regularly, trust me, it’s easy to see.

You can create geofences around key areas, set up automated alarms to notify someone via email/cell SMS message whenever someone goes inside those zones, and can set up automated reports showing how much time is spent over a week at the various areas of the zoo (or your business, or the companies/subdivisions which pay you for servicing them, securing them, visiting them, etc.).

Obviously I like to use “personal” non-business related examples to illustrate what can EASILY be done using GPS Insight. I hope you can draw some analogies to how to use our product in your business in order to save money/time, reduce risk, increase efficiency, and understand and investigate/defend employee activity.

Here is a “zoomed out” version of the Zoo map overlay — you can use subdivision maps, Army Maps, Farm maps, or really any overlay useful to your business as a guide to interpreting data, quantifying activity, and identifying points of interest relative to your vehicles’ or employees’ activity.

Thanks,
Rob.

We haven’t started officially selling the GPSI-1000 yet, but I decided to test it today on a trip to the Phoenix Zoo with my family.

The GPSI-1000 is a tiny GPS tracking device which is battery operated and can be worn on a belt by security personnel, and other generally “outdoors” workers whose safety or productivity needs to be tracked by management.

It is TINY — only 1.4 inches wide by 2.5 inches long:

I wore it on my belt under my shirt all day & tracked my whereabouts every 2 minutes.

It isn’t something we recommend for tracking vehicles — our GO-3000, GPSI-4000, and LD/HD-3500 are the best for that.

But if you want to track your employees when they are OUTSIDE of the vehicle, it’s a great way to go. It will be available later in March.

At 2 minute update rates, it’s enough to know where a person has gone, and it has enough battery to last at least a day between charges.

Additionally, there is a single button which will allow us to implement either a panic alarm or a “mark my location” capability.

Here is a map of both my tracked vehicle (Navigator, the red lines) as well as the GPSI-1000 (worn while I drove, in blue):

The GPSI-4000 in my Navigator is fantastic at tracking the vehicle with fantastic accuracy. The GPSI-1000 (person tracker, really) does a good job but is only 2 minute updates, and occasionally loses track since its internal antenna is inside of the vehicle where it doesn’t get sufficient GPS signal. That’s not its job though.

When I get out of the vehicle, then it shows where we went, every 2 minutes. I won’t bore you with details of how much time we spent looking at giraffes, zebras, amphibians, etc. But I could — all we would need to do is overlay a map of the zoo, put up some geofences to match, and run a landmark report.

Instead, I can illustrate a little of that. Bear in mind that our typical GPSI-1000 “tracked individual” might be a security guard, a dock worker, a temporary worker who doesn’t need a wired GPS device in his or her car, etc.

But I can show you how accurate and useful this hardware can be, especially when combined with a vehicle tracking device:

Basically, once the driver “dismounts” the vehicle and does a patrol, some mowing of yards, movement of equipment, etc., you can still track that individual.

And if you want to know when and for how long they rode the Merry Go Round, you can use our typical GPS Insight capabilities:

Create a polygon around the satellite image of the Carousel (giving it a few more feet to make sure we catch the activity around it):

Then cut/paste into GPS Insight:

Then Paste into “Quick Import” under the Mapping: Landmarks menu:

After quickly refreshing the menu so that the new landmark shows up, run a landmark report:

.07 seconds later:

And here is the accuracy of the units while I was on the Carousel with my 3 kids and wife:

And here were the kids on the Carousel, oldest to youngest:

And on the way there with my family, I kept it under 68 (in a 65 MPH) on the trip there & back — the accuracy between both units is very good in terms of location, speed, and time — here are 2 points right next to each other & only 1 mph off [I called this unit the "Pants Patrol" since I was going to wear it on my belt, in case you were wondering...]:

These units should be available late March for $350 (with applicable $25 quantity discounts at 10, 25, 50, 100, 250 levels). Monthlies will range from $15-40 depending on update frequency (on 1 per hour/on demand to 1 minute). We should have a heavy equipment version of this unit available in April as well.

Thanks,

Rob.

GPS Insight recently added functionality ensuring that reports are 100% accurate when running them across daylight savings time (DST) boundaries. We are headquartered in Scottsdale, and Arizona doesn’t “celebrate” daylight savings time which is actually really convenient from a computer standpoint (in other parts of the country, when DST hits, scheduled computer jobs either fail to run or run twice when scheduled between 2 & 3 AM). But since Ben Franklin invented it, & the rest of the world (and most of our customers) need reports accurately after they change DST settings twice a year, we needed make them happy.

This is something surprisingly difficult to make work for all our customers, but we finally spent a few weeks working on this to avoid customer questions (and complaints) which tend to happen twice a year during time changes.

We have always supported different time ZONES so that the same vehicles can be viewed from the perspective of user-based time zones (see a national customer’s various users with different time zones, below:)

However, when running historical reports such as stop reports for a time of year DIFFERENT than the current time zone setting, everything was off by an hour.

No longer! Thankfully, we usually only had two or three complaints about this each time it changed, but this is the right thing to do, & now everything works properly.

Bear in mind that customers running scheduled reports would always see the correct report time, providing they ran it before the 2 AM “switch” time. Unfortunately, for multi-day reports spanning that time zone, things will look weird. But that’s due to an unnatural shift from 2 AM to 3 AM and back from 3 AM to 2 AM once a year.

Nothing I can do about that, sorry — that’s where our support can help you properly interpret your reports, and we encourage everyone to call if/when you have questions, problems, or suggestions.

If you don’t like DST (like me — it puts us 3 hours earlier than NY half the year, which means I have to wake up earlier…), take it up with Ben Franklin.

Rob.

We have begun work on some new graph-based reports to help our customers quantify their return on investment. Since April of last year, we have been crunching and saving every customer’s data to help provide long term trend reports such as this.

This is a large, almost 1000 truck customer, and this graph completes in 1/4 second:

This particular customer doesn’t have much of an idling problem. They started around 13%, dropped to 4% average, and have risen back up slightly most likely due to both weather & the fact that management may have stopped looking so much at their numbers.

However, this customer has been rolling out vehicles for 3 or 4 months now, and we realized that certain divisions might see a decrease in idling due to usage, but brand new vehicles with poor idling habits would offset that.

So the next iteration of this graph will be to show the data based on how many weeks/months each unit has had GPS installed.

e.g. this will answer the question “How much were we able to decrease idling from week 1 to week 12?” — this is a big savings and helps our customers to justify moving forward after a small trial. Additionally, we will have similar reports for fuel consumption, speeding, off-hours/weekend usage, and total miles driven, moving forward.

Better yet, since we have customer data from over a thousand customers and over 12,000 vehicles, we can establish industry-specific averages and help our customers compare themselves to that average to see how they perform. We can do the same by state or region.

In a nutshell, we can help companies to determne not only how well they have been able to curb wasteful behavior in the first several months using GPS Insight, but also how they compare to the averages in various industries, regions, or overall.

Here is a nice success story:

In a previous blog article, we showed a large customer’s cost savings after emailing their drivers any time they idled longer than 7 minutes.

Here is that data, and in the first 2 months, with diesel at $5 per gallon, they saved 18,000 & 22,000 gallons, for a $200,000 2 month savings by properly utilizing GPS Insight.

Conservatively, their organization has achieved a 500% return on their GPS tracking investment with GPS Insight when considering fuel savings, wear and tear, improved dispatch and delivery efficiency, identification of unauthorized usage and theft, and recovery of stolen vehicles (and some arrests too). Now we have the graphs to help prove some of that.

Rob.

PLEASE CHECK YOUR Better Business Bureau before purchasing a GPS tracking product. For info on how, read my original article on this subject.

A competitor of ours called “Millennium Plus” (really “Horizon Technologies”) just went bankrupt, shutting off access for all of their subscribers.

We have been getting requests to help their customers (we can only sell them a new system at our current $50 off special through 2/15/09, unfortunately).

The one consistent thing I’ve heard from these customers has been “We should have checked the BBB first.”

They have >> NINETY SIX << complaints registered against them in the past 36 months! Why in the world would anyone buy from them?

GPS Insight has >> ZERO << complaints. Check your vendor out before buying!

Look at what pops up when you Google them!

We usually avoid badmouthing our competitors, and are friendly with many. But I’ve always heard shady things from ex-customers/dealers of this company, and I’m glad to see they finally went away for good.

A friend also in the GPS industry just sent me this link, as well:

http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/422/RipOff0422033.htm

Shocker…

Rob.

Since we moved offices, I get my car washed more often.  It’s just a block North of our office, and I’ll drop it off in the AM before work, then pick it up later.

I’ll forget though, and scramble to get there before they close up at 6 occasionally (doh!).

So the other day I left my car, got busy at work, & realized when I left to head home that I left it at the car wash.

Enough! I have 3 tracking devices in my vehicle, time to actually put them to good use (Physician, heal thyself, right?).

So, this blog article shows how to set up an alert to let me know whenever my car is parked over there for more than 4 hours.

I’ll even video it and show you how quick it is to set up this landmark and this alert within GPS Insight.

So I just created that landmark and alert, and commented about it within a video which is created below.  it’s 4:36, so in less than 5 minutes I created a landmark, then a long stop inside of a landmark alert.  I’ll be alerted every 20 minutes whenever I leave my car parked there for more than 4 hours.

Here is  how I can create a history of my vehicle for yesterday to see that long visit to the car wash:

Here is the image in Google Earth, also showing the landmark I created (note the time spent there is 8 hours 15 minutes):

Running a landmark report shows the exact entrance and exit times (within 8 seconds of each other between all 3 devices I have installed in this vehicle):

And the report takes .07 seconds to run:

If I want to run a report for my time “at the office” that week, it will not show much time at our office itself.  Then I can create a custom group called “Scottsdale Office and Car Wash Also” and run the report for that landmark group instead, assuming the time my car spent at the car wash, I spent that time at the office.  This is covered in other landmark demos/walk-through’s so I will end it here.

The moral of the story is, if you have GPS Insight on your fleet of vehicles, using landmarks and alerts, you can pretty much automate anything.  This will keep me from getting there late one night only to discover all the car wash people have headed home, my keys are locked inside & I’ll need to find the keys to the GPS Insightmobile and take that home instead.

Rob.

We started working with a well respected expert in the golf industry, Bill Yates — founder of Grey Town Golf, LLC. They are a golf management company in Pebble Beach, CA. Bill’s expertise is consulting to courses about how to improve the pace of play.

Based on his interest in a prior blog article we have begun work on a system for using GPS technology to improve the pace of play as well as maintenance and service at golf courses by tracking the various types of golf carts.

Starfire in Scottsdale was nice enough to work with us on this project, and here are 5 of their carts for yesterday:

Here is that activity as a movie:

GPS Insight movie of golf carts throughout the day

I need to remember how to embed that video into the blog, but for now it will open up in a new window.

This sample data allows us to now write alerts, reports, and maps which will allow Bill and Grey Town Golf to improve their pace of play system significantly.

Here is a “current status” dashboard view of the course and the 5 carts we’re tracking currently:

We look forward to bringing this system to market in early 2009 (and maybe I’ll get some time to test it out on the course myself…).

Rob.

This is the 3rd (and last) in a series on GPS tracking of skiers, and more to the point, the overlaying of ski maps into Google Earth in order to put that data into reference. So after asking someone way better at Photoshop than me to “stretch” that ski trail map of Heavenly Lake Tahoe and make it fit Google Earth, it has become VERY clear that those maps aren’t even close to accurate.

Photoshopping the map & stretching/skewing it to fit, then overlaying the sides to be accurate, it’s still obvious that there is no real scale built into these maps. The Gondola is nowhere near reality:

So we aborted the mission of overlaying this map in favor of simply recreating the runs as Google Earth “paths.”

Here is what it looks like once you add a number of “paths” and “placemarks” in Google Earth, using the map as a reference, and the satellite photo with the missing trees as evidence of where the ski runs actually are:

The paths are color-coded based on type (typical green/blue/black difficulty based on the map) and the Gondola is in red.

If you were using GPS Insight to say, track your Snowcats (which are used to groom the runs regularly), you would be able to run reports on which runs were groomed on which days, for how many hours, etc. This is actually something we’re starting to see some interest in from some ski resorts which is part of the motivation for this exercise (if I had thought about it in advance I could have written off the trip!).

You can see how accurate this is if you take a little time to properly map the trails — We show activity skiing right along Orion, Skyline Trail, and Ridge Run (as well as us taking the lift up ABOVE Ellies — I didn’t take my 8 year old snowboarder on this black (he probably would have done better than me, actually).

Using a combination of a ski trail map and Google Earth with recent imagery, it is easy to see which runs particular GPS data recorded activtity on.

We’re going skiing tomorrow in Pinetop AZ at “Sunrise” park (www.sunriseskipark.com) — here’s their much more straightforward trail map.

I’m done overlaying them, I think everyone gets the point now (on to more vehicle based GPS tracking topics next!)

Thanks,

Rob.

I guess I forgot to mention an extremely obvious reason why we completely re-architected our landmarks over the past 3 months — SPEED!

GPS Insight allows you to run a “all landmarks, all vehicles” report. I am unaware of any other GPS company which does this (let alone in 2.8 seconds for 50 vehicles and hundreds of landmarks).

With just a couple clicks, I can see EVERY landmark one of our 50 GPS tracking devices for GPS Insight’s “house account” (e.g. our own salespeople, developers, etc.) visited yesterday.

This is the (shortened) report, showing every vehicle’s (50) every stop in every landmark (604):

I just ran the same report for a much larger customer with 750 trucks and 91 landmarks. It took 80 short seconds to run, and quantified almost 150 THOUSAND miles worth of activity, and 6,236 HOURS of activity.

That may be longer than you want to sit and wait for a report — so then you can schedule it to be run automatically and sent to your email daily. In reality, no one looks at a report that big — individual branch or regional managers look at their smaller reports daily, and those still just take a few seconds to run typically.

Please give us a call if you want to set up training on these new capabilities, or advice on how you can use this to achieve better return on your GPS tracking investment.

Rob.

There is now a 20 minute walk-through demonstration of our new landmark capabilities here.

Thanks to 2-3 months of hard work by our developers, GPS Insight has released the next version of our landmark capabilities (not that they weren’t already better than most).

This is a REALLY big deal [kind of like Ron Burgundy, Anchorman]:

Why? We have consolidated all 6 types of landmarks into a single, all-purpose landmark — previously we had:

• Circular “typical” landmarks
• Polygon shaped landmarks
• Circular Geofences [big]
• Polygon Geofences
• Routing Landmarks
• Imported Landmarks

Now there is just one, with a much nicer 2D interface for creation:

Just enter an address (or choose the “create landmark” button from any stop on a report or detail point on a map):

Then enter an address, put it in satellite/hybrid mode, and then move the “pin” or check “Polygon” and draw an EXACT polygon geofence, then change the color, etc. You can even “lock” the landmark so other users may view, but not change it.

We even allow you to place the “pin” where you will want us to route your vehicles — e.g. the address/driveway, etc., even if you geofence the entire parking lot and/or building which you want to depict. This helps when we give you directions, etc Note the “circle” around the polygon — this helps us to speed up your reports/queries, and certain reports use the circle, and some are more accurate and use the exact polygon.

Next, you can make and assign landmarks to LANDMARK GROUPS, and assign users to them as well.

Select the users, then choose the permission options, then drag them to the new group:

Then assign landmarks to the group by individually shift or ctrl-clicking them, then drag and drop onto the appropriate landmark group:

You can choose an existing landmark group to help filter, or if you use Google Earth, you can automatically select/restrict from the list by pasting an “impromptu” polygon into the “Filter by Polygon” box:

Then only the landmarks in that list show up:

Choosing both the “Arizona” group and the “Chicago” polygon yields zero landmarks, as it should [as much as I wish my native Chicago were here in my new home Arizona's climate]:

If permissions need to be changed or removed, it can be done by clicking the “pencil” (edit) icon for that group and making the necessary changes, then saving:

So, this is a basic walk-through of the new GPS Insight landmark creation/grouping/permissioning. Since GPS Insight is very heavy in the usage of landmarks with alerts, reports, and mapping, this is a big step for us and has been a very long project to complete.

It opens up tremendous possibilities for the future of GPS Insight, and the next “step” will be to allow our customers to create and populate their own custom categories and attributes, then assign them to landmarks as well as vehicles, stops, trips, and schedules.

This will allow HIGHLY custom capabilities either on your own or with our help, to provide the following type of functionality:

• Alerts letting Supervisors know when non-parts trucks stop at vendors for more than 30 minutes, unless they are in an exception group [e.g. keeps drivers from spending too much time eating doughnuts at the vendor who brings in Krispy Kreme every day]
• Alerts letting the Manager know when drivers take their vehicles to their own home during the day, during the work schedule, vs. at night, when it is necessary
• Automated route creation based on landmarks when the branch, day, route, and priority (or AM/PM) are columns in the imported spreadsheet

Our customers may import spreadsheets of landmarks, and these custom attributes and categories will soon be supported, simply by classifying each column of your customer list (e.g. yearly revenue, type of customer, gate codes, etc.).

All these custom attributes and categories will also show up shortly on the map for dispatchers’ easy reference (e.g. is the nearest truck certified to work on a particular type of condenser, truck, etc.?).

This is a long blog article — thanks for making it this far. It’s hard to wrap up 3 months of intense work in just one article. Documentation and training will be available, as well as an online Flash video demonstration soon.

As always, thanks for your interest and ideas — most of these requirements came from customers who we listened to in 2008. Please email us or call us with questions or comments.

Thanks,

Rob.

I realized I didn’t have much data from the prior 2 days’ skiing so I put the tracking device in 20 minute mode and you can see we have more to go on now.

Here you can start to see the (thawed versions of) trails and where the points themselves lie:

Next I will begin to merge the Google Earth version of the mountain with the Heavenly Ski map:

Since the map itself is drawn on a vertical angle, I will need to reshape it, something I need to do anyway as we’ve started working on a project of this sort for a customer. This is a relatively simple thing to do, provided you know how to do it. I don’t, so I’ve got some Photoshop reading to do…

When I figure it out, I’ll finish this overlay & make it plus the data available for you to look at in Google Earth.

Rob.

GPS Insight is working on a new line of package tracking devices. They’re geared toward placement in valuable shipments – plasma TV’s, cigarettes, bank bags, etc. The beauty of these units is that they don’t use only GPS signals to determine their location — they can use the E-911 cell phone system to VERY ACCURATELY determine their location.

For instance, I put one in the trunk of my car, drove into our covered concrete parking structure at the office, and this device knew where I was within 10 feet.

I put one in my oldest son’s (8) pocket (they’re very small, only a 1″ x 1″ x 2″) yesterday when we went skiing in Lake Tahoe on our yearly vacation. These units are typically used on a “every 4 hours or whenever I ask for a location” basis. Jack is a good snowboarder, but why not stick a device on him in case I lose him somewhere, right…?

[BY THE WAY, we do >> NOT << sell GPS tracking devices to people for tracking their kids, spouses, lovers, whatever -- we are strictly B2B (Business to Business)]

So Jack didn’t fall down the side of some slope and get stuck where I coudn’t find him, so the only “locate” we got on him were the “scheduled” 4:30 (MST), 3:30 PM local time ones, which were both close to the top of the Gondola (which you need to be on by 4 PM to get back down). Here are the two, and you can see they’re within .35 miles of each other (yesterday we were heading back a little earlier than the previous day since he was tired out from some longer runs):

Here’s a picture of the mountain & where the Gondola goes from the base to the mountain:

So how can I really tell where those points are (or worse case scenario, where my lost kid is if necessary)?

Here is a map of Lake Tahoe’s “Heavenly” resort:

I will put this map into a digital overlay in Google Earth so that we can see more easily where EXACTLY these GPS device locates were. This allows us to put “reality” on a map relative to “usefulness” — e.g. a ski trail map is much easier to use to locate someone than a map or satellite photo of a mountain.

I’ve never created a “vertical” overlay like this, so I think I’ll need to Photoshop this graphic a bit in order to stretch it to match the mountain.

This is a big enough exercise that it will be another blog article. I’ll post the link here when it’s done. I’m on vacation and the Gondola is closed due to wind, so I wrote this one article, but the next one will have to wait until I’m back to work most likely. I’ve got 3 more days in Tahoe, so I’m going to enjoy it and stop typing now.

Happy New Year !

Rob.

GPS tracking devices have traditionally only given reasonably accurate mileage data — they typically don’t tell you what your odometer readings is. That is something we have recently improved across our line of GPS tracking devices in order to ensure that GPS data can be used for maintenance, state mileage and DOT reporting, and just overall usefulness.

Here is my odometer reading as of 12/26/2008 at 11:30:

It reads 22859:

I have 3 different GPS devices in my vehicle — a 3000 (Rob 3000), a 3500 (Rob), and a 4000 (Rob Q4C). They all have reported my odometer slighly differently since I “sync’d” them up 22 days ago using our new odometer adjustment tool.

The 3000 and 4000 use GPS only in order to calculate odometer, which tends to understate mileage (since straight line distance between points seconds apart can be less than the actual route travelled). The 3500 uses information from the engine to calculate odometer, and is generally slightly over actual miles travelled. Our only “perfect” unit in terms of odometer is the 3500 HD (for heavy duty trucks) which gets exact odometer readings from the engine — this is useful since the biggest requirement for 100% accurate odometer readings is for fuel tax and DOT compliance, and this is the unit they typically use.

They are all within around 7-10 miles of reality, but for some customers, this isn’t good enough, so I’ll show you how we can adjust these now using our new odometer adjustment tool.

First, this shows the odometer readings as a graph, with adjustments as vertical green lines (these can be edited as well):

My 3000 unit:

Here is the 3500:

Then the GPS Insight GO-4000:

Now to adjust these:

An adjustment is created automatically:

Choosing “Vehicles” on the administration tab brings up all of our GPS Insight vehicles/tracking devices:

Zooming down, we see all the odometer readings are now 100% accurate again:

Note that 1 unit (the 3500 which talks to the engine’s computer for RPM when determining ignition status) shows I last reported 2 hours ago, and the other 2 show 35 minutes ago.

That’s because in order to take a picture of my odometer reading 35 minutes ago, I turned my key to “On” but didn’t actually turn on the engine. The 2 “3 wire” units installed in my vehicle thought (incorrectly) that my engine was running (idling). However, the 3500 checks RPM, which were zero, to determine engine ignition status.

Since these units correctly detect ignition/idling status when the key is in “accessory” mode, which is more common than “on” mode, this really isn’t a problem for our units or our customers, but is worth mentioning here.

Bear in mind that all GPS tracking devices aren’t the same, and we sell several variety — ones with engine diagnostics, inexpensive “bare bones” ones, ones to track trailers, ones to track freight, ones to track heavy equipment, ones with switches/sensors, ones with the capability to use a mobile data terminal, etc.

What’s important is that we know EXACTLY which ones fit our customers’ needs, and they ALL WORK TOGETHER within GPS Insight’s GPS tracking suite, and we will help to make sure you get the most suitable device for your needs. We will also make sure that your reports and maintenance alerts are highly accurate and consistent, regardless of which units you choose. This is all now possible using the GPS Insight historical odometer offset tool.

By the way, this is in contrast to most GPS tracking companies which either A) don’t actually track odometer readings (only mileages), or B) give at most 1 odometer offset, which means your current odometer may be accurate, but when reporting historically, it’s nowhere near reality. This is absolutely necessary if you ever need to replace a GPS tracking device down the road, or upgrade. Without the ability to adjust these odometer readings, you lose a valuable capability of GPS tracking in general.

Give us a call if you want to get clarification on this useful feature or our overall product.

Thanks,
Rob.

I decided to test a unit in my car today at 3 second updates (vs. the typical 2 minute, sometimes 1 minute/30 second updates).

It is WAY too much information, but interesting to see.

I was able to look at the map and literally remember what was going on at that second. I can see excruciating detail about:

• Lane changes to get through traffic
• Right turn/U-turn to avoid a long line turning left
• Searching for a space at my son’s over-crowded track meet
• Slow service at the Dairy Queen drive through afterward

First, here are a couple pictures of my vehicle’s activity (and 2 others in “Rob Group”) for reference. My vehicle has 3 different units at 3 different reporting intervals — 2 minute, 1 minute, and 3 second.

I quickly run a “2 click” history map:

I took my 2 boys to a track meet after work and didn’t bother to check directions to the field first. Here is a zoomed in view of a winding road where I realized I didn’t know where I was going, then pulled into a corporate driveway to enter the address into my car’s GPS navigation (which didn’t know the address since I haven’t bought the newest disc from Chrysler…):

The amount of granularity is unbelievable at 3 second updates (if you’re paying attention, I missed a turn here by the way…):

• Lane changes to get through traffic

• Right turn/U-turn to avoid a long line turning left

Interestingly, Jolene our office manager cell phone text messaged me at 5:52 telling me to turn left since she could see where I had gone the wrong way (I had to call the office and ask her for directions since my car didn’t have the latest maps (not GPS Insight’s fault, just mine for not bothering to buy the new maps every year…)).

At 5:51, when she saw I had taken a “wrong turn,” I was exactly where the green pin above shows me moving (courtesy of the “time slider”):

• Searching for a space at my son’s over-crowded track meet

Incidentally, it was pretty close to .75 miles as far as I can measure based on where they ran (thanks to the path measurement tool in Google Earth which our customers use for our 3D mapping):

And it was definitely illegal parking, per Street View (a trick to make sure you are looking the right direction is to”get behind” the right bubble from the correct angle when you turn on Street View as shown below):

[note it even shows that I backed up a bit to get as far out of the street as I could]

Double-clicking on that “photo bubble” shows this exact sign which I parked right in front of:

• Slow service at the Dairy Queen drive through afterward

It should not take 10 minutes to get 3 ice cream cones from the DQ in the middle of our frigid 48 degree winter here in Scottsdale:

And you can tell that:

1. I had to do 2 U-turns to get into DQ and turned back in the right direction home when leaving
2. the building had an overhang since it interfered very slightly with the GPS signal, causing what we call “GPS drift or bounce” — this was only 15 feet of “drift” but I want to explain the spaghetti which occurs with 3 second updates — typically vehicles move a lot more than 15 feet between 2 location updates (1 or 2 minutes apart) — with 3 second updates, there is more drift visible, but it’s a trivial 15 feet — we’re not planting crops here so it’s not the end of the world.

OK, I think you get the idea here — 3 second updates makes for a lot of data, and a long blog article. But a lot of our customers are asking for this type of thing:

• 10 second updates for garbage trucks during operating hours (they take 12 seconds to empty a can, so this ensures we see every pickup event without needing to wire the arms for a switch input)
• 30 second updates when an ambulance’s lights are on vs. 2 minutes when they’re off (triggered using a switch)
• 5 second updates when a truck is inside a port vs. 5 minute updates when it’s outside the port boundary
• 10 second updates when an airport vehicle is on the runway vs. 60 second when it’s not
• 10 second updates when a vehicle is speeding vs. 2 minutes when it is not

This article should hold some good information about many different applications of “high frequency” updates. Unfortunately they cost significantly more, which is why we do what we can to get as much good data out of as infrequent of updates as is reasonable. I’ll be changing my car’s refresh rate back to 1 minute tomorrow… It’s overkill for me:

Rob.

We have quite a few daily reports we see on overall usage patterns, and one shows an interesting fact, over our 12,000 units and 2300 users:

Drivers start their day 2 1/2 hours earlier than office workers (and way earlier than me…). The yellow/blue line depicts driver activity (e.g. they’re driving), and the pink line is user activity (e.g. people are viewing them on maps, running reports, etc.):

This is in Arizona time, and we’re 2 hours off of New York this time of year, but you get the overall idea. In AZ time, the typical driver starts his or her day around 2:30 AM, and the typical USER of our system (e.g. dispatch) starts around 5:00 AM — 2 1/2 hours later.

That’s way too early for me (either way), but shows how hard both our customers’ drivers, and their office staff work, and how the service industry performs their jobs overall.

I’m a late night worker (after the family goes to sleep), so this is a little more when you’ll see me using the system on the tails of this bell curve, when, to be fair, the drivers tend to be done for the day, and the office staff is still working with the system:

Also interesting is the fact that even though we have well over 10,000 vehicles tracking, the TOP number of vehicles MOVING at any given point during the day (yesterday, and this is a holiday week so it’s somewhat lighter than usual) is 1590 * 2 (2 minute updates) = 3180, or roughly 25%, at 12:17 PM MST:

With so many different vertical markets, time zones, and types of company which are our customer, it’s interesting to see them all take on a very consistent bell-curve like daily activity graph, so I thought I would share this with you.

Thanks,

Rob.

Update: 11/28/08 — maybe Thanksgiving is the exception to this early morning rule (which is probably just because dispatchers leave their computers running all week, tracking when they’re not viewing it):

It looks like the most driving of tracked vehicles is done around dinner time. Authorized or unauthorized usage..?

One other interesting thing — note that the peak is around 650 (1300 vehicles moving) for Friday following Thanksgiving, vs. 1400 (2800 vehicles moving) — less than half the number of people worked the day after Thanksgiving as the day prior. Shopping or working? Based on the similar pattern to the prior workday, I think it was working, but only about half as much — I’m glad at least half of our customers give their employees the day off after Thanksgiving.

Rob.

A customer asked us today if we could add greenhouse gas emissions to our idle time report. It is a simple thing for us to add this type of useful information to our reports. We investigated the generally accepted algorithm for computing this, and added it to our idle report.

Within a few hours, we had made this change to our idle time report for this customer:

Here is how you run our idle time report (for a month, which takes less than a second to run for this ~50 truck customer):

And that yields this new report column and an explanation of how it is computed:

The full report:

We listen to customer requests continuously — if you ever have a need or a requirement, please let us know — most of the time we are able to make that enhancement right away, or put it on a list of features to be added in future releases of GPS Insight.

Thanks for your ideas and help in shaping the GPS Insight offering — we have gotten countless good ideas from customers and prospective customers, and really do listen. It’s good, free advice, and we take it as often as we can get it.

Rob.

It’s been a month since GPS Insight moved our corporate headquarters, and we’re pretty well settled now.

Here are some pictures of the new area and some of our employees:

Here is Ray in our tech support bullpen:

Here is Alissa in one of the primo salesperson offices:

Here is our main conference room with a projected image of all 11,000 vehicles currently tracking under GPS Insight:

And here’s Elliot trying to decide between all the high tech coffee choices in our break room:

And no one has knocked me out of my office just yet per my earlier offer:

Evelyn standing in my office (I still haven’t quite unpacked…):

And from my office, I see this coyote pretty frequently:

And since it’s getting dark earlier this time of year, this is a familiar site as well:

Any time you are in Scottsdale, please let us know and we are happy to meet with you in person at our office and introduce you to the gang.

Here are a couple other pictures from last week (Rob just got a new camera…):

Elliot at his desk:

Trent, who runs technical support:

And last but not least, (and not all, but this blog article is getting long…) here are David and Alan:

Rob.

We got a call today from a golf club that wants to track their carts in order to make sure the pace of play isn’t getting too slow.

Since we have several options available from a hardware standpoint, we can help with this requirement, and will probably put together (I unconsciously typed that as “putt ogether”) a golf-centric offering.

They want to be alerted when more than 2 carts are “bunched up” on a tee box, which indicates a ranger needs to go out to speed one foursome up.

Using GPS Insight, we can easily define the tee boxes, and alert/report on too many carts within a single boundary, and are happy to develop reports to help the golf industry to speed up the pace of play.

GPS Insight has a pretty golf-centric staff, so this is an interesting project we will get involved with. For a typical golf course, it will cost $350 per cart, and $32.95 per month — roughly $1.50 a day on a lease. Since the golf industry works about every day, they’ll get their money’s worth. Also, since this line of “non-diagnostic” hardware can be turned off seasonally, there will be no activation/deactivation fees for them. If this helps squeeze one more foursome in per day, that’s instant ROI, plus greater customer satisfaction from a day at the course which actually moves along at a 4 hour pace.

More on the ROI — out on Scottsdale, $175 a round isn’t uncommon. Let’s assume it’s only $50. Times 4 players, that’s $200. for 75 carts (typical), the cost is $112.50. That’s a 77.5% return on investment, PLUS they know where the carts are at all times, can analyze usage patterns, compare cart usage to actual rounds paid for (sorry all you friends of the cashier who don’t pay for your carts or rounds)… Also, we can put an alert/report in there to identify how long a cart’s run since being recharged or refueled in order to keep customers happy (no more getting stranded on the 15th with a dead cart). You can also find out who is not following the “cart path only” rules when they apply.

There are plenty of courses here in Scottsdale for us to test this new capability:

Plus, our favorite, you can use text messaging to find out how far away the beverage cart is…

Just don’t ask us to track your golf ball.

Rob.

We have 3 separate GPS tracking devices installed on our GPS Insight Scion. I just happened to look at the GPS Insight office on the map and thought I would share the screenshot:

It shows all 3 stopped for 7 hours, 22 (23) minutes at “GPSI- New” (our new office), and the dashboard shows them all parked within a few feet of each other (one’s actually installed in the back of the car & the other are in the front).

Each unit has its own strengths — one does diagnostics which lets us know engine issues (there better not be any, it’s only got 2,600 miles on it…) and MPG, like in this 30 day MPG report I just ran (which took .16 seconds to run):

One is less expensive and capable of 30 second updates and one switch (panic alarm, door contact, concrete pump, etc.).

The other product allows for bluetooth internet, up to 20 switches and sensors, and 5 second updates (but it gets expensive at that rate).

Anyway, they all live together in harmony in our Scion, suited to their own particular requirements.

And they all alert the same whenever someone takes the Scion out of the office, speeds in it, or drives it at night or on weekends:

Yields:

Since we only installed the SCION Q4 today, it didn’t alert other than “appearing” in the GPSI – New landmark at 15:46:57 today.

These alerts let me know whenever someone is taking the Scion to head to a customer, an install, lunch, etc. They are the same alerts our customers use for any number of business reasons, and are extremely useful.

Let us know your business requirements, and we’ll be happy to help you meet them using the most suitable version of our product.

Thanks,

Rob.

While testing some new units today (mentioned in the previous article), we saw a couple of 1-2 minute “lags” from the time a GPS location/speed/direction measurement was taken and what time it made it to our servers over the AT&T network.

We are able to pull in exact coverage maps and “overlay” them on top of the troublesome points (1-2 minutes is still VERY GOOD, but typically points take only 2-5 seconds from the time they’re reported to the time we have them in our database for our customers’ real-time-mapping and alerts):

You can see the highlighted times from report to receipt on the left, and the one 2 minute “lagged” point takes place right where AT&T claims only “Good” coverage — not “Best” coverage. You can tell by the lighter shade of orange.

Here is another Salesperson — David, and he had mostly 2-6 second updates, but had a couple of 1-2 minute reports. Again, the 2 minute report is right where AT&T drops from “Best” to “Good” coverage:

You can see that the vast majority of the 1-minute-by-1-minute reports take just a few seconds to become available — the only exceptions are typically 1-2 minutes where we need to retry because the AT&T signal isn’t strong enough or we temporarily lose a connection.

This happens without our customers even noticing typically. No data is ever lost — we “Store and Forward” so that could drive to a foreign county where we don’t have coverage (Mexico for us Scottsdale-dwellers), and all that data will be forwarded up once you hit the border again.

Since we are constantly testing and building tools like this to help us test our GPS Insight tracking devices and software, I thought I would share a glimpse of how we visualize the quality of our service.

Here are a couple coverage/Store-and-Forward related articles which talk about this as well:

Finding lost vehicles using GPS Insight

GPS Insight and the US Border

So we’ve been a little busy lately & I haven’t had much time to write for the blog.

We’ve been in our new office for a month now, and new or not, GPS antennas generally need to see the sky to work well.

However, this picture shows that they are still reasonably accurate, even inside a building, as this unit spent the night last night after we programmed it for one of our salespeople to put into her vehicle for testing purposes: (the arrow points to where the unit physically was inside our office):

It reported every minute with quite a few “bouncy” points which are due to inaccuracies from receiving bounced signals from the satellite through the halls of our office (this unit spent the night in an interior, no-windows office). Here is a picture of all the various reports (green indicating slight movement, blue indicating no movement):

Once it was installed in Alissa’s car (in the parking garage) and drove away at the end of her day, however, it tracked perfectly, once per minute, within about 5 feet of accuracy or so:

We have been testing our newest hardware offering, and are happy to see it track perfectly.

We put GPS tracking devices of various types on all of our employees’ vehicles for testing and training purposes. Thankfully, we do what our customers do, so our employees don’t mind: We use vehicle groups and permissions to only let a couple employees (the ones doing the development and testing) see all the vehicles. Everyone can see their own vehicle, which is useful when we go to customers and show our car parked in its exact parking space on a web browser or even a Blackberry, using satellite imagery.

Plus we get a discount.

Rob.

GPS Insight partnered with design powerhouse bluemedia to create our new company vehicle, shown below:

They were great to work with, and did a phenomenal job of designing, producing, and installing this wrap for us in virtually no time.

Here was our final design (took about 3 changes to get right, only 30 minutes of my time):

From their website: “bluemedia is a leading provider of design and printing for use in vehicle, large format and environmental graphic applications for B-to-B and B-to-C organizations. Through its combination of cutting edge technology, nontraditional approach to ideas and design expertise, bluemedia helps companies get noticed and gain market share through highly relevant communications.” They are offering a 15% discount to any of our customers on their first wrap — Call Mike Greco, his phone number is 480-317-1333 and his email is mike.greco@bluemedia.com.

They sent me the top picture, which helped answer a question I had — why did they drive it 6 miles after they wrapped it? They obviously have a nice deserted desert parking lot (pardon the pun) where they take their vehicles to add pictures to their substantial portfolio.

We track this vehicle with 2 different tracking devices (one gives diagnostics data and 2 minute updates, and one is less expensive, and gives 30 second updates), and I noticed they had driven the vehicle after wrapping it. I saw this while I was doing a demonstration of our product that day to a customer. It just seemed odd — they weren’t speeding or anything, and didn’t take it anywhere like a restaurant, etc.

I ran a history for the day they wrapped it like this:

And started to zoom down on the activity in question:

They took a very quick photo at this spot, not even stopping long enough to register a stop (2 minues):

This is the Phoenix Zoo, (which we already had landmarked for some reason), and I wondered why the Scion had gone there earlier today when I looked through our weekly Scion landmark report which I have delivered to my email weekly.

Here’s the landmark report (both by landmark as well as by vehicle (technically 1 vehicle but it counts as 2 since we have 2 different devices in it):

Note it only takes .26 seconds to run that report for a week’s activity. Anyway, it wouldn’t be a blog article unless I threw in some ways you can use GPS Insight to help you gain understanding and accountability of your fleet.

But it’s more fun to drive this car than read the reports on it. Here are a couple more pictures of the car — it’s coming to a trade show near you!…

Thanks again to bluemedia! — Give Mike Greco a call at 480-317-1333/480-452-4114 or email him at mike.greco@bluemedia.com and he’ll be happy to help you with your vehicle’s wrap (and make sure you have us track it while you’re at it…)!

By the way, they also have a great blog at www.bluemedia.com/blueline.

Thanks,

Rob.

I’m watching the news as Hurricane Gustav has begun to hit the coast, and I wondered how much damage there has already been.

Using Google Earth, I was able to pull up a picture of it by turning on “Weather” under “Layers.”

Since I can pull up all of our customers’ vehicles within Google Earth, I can see where they are relative to the storm:

It’s obscuring my view of which vehicles are underneath it, so I can remove the clouds by unchecking them under Weather, and change the transparency of the radar image with the transparency slider:

Now I can better see which vehicles are in the storm right now:

Thankfully all of them except 2 or 3 have been stopped for more than an hour (we know this since they are red).

One on the outskirts is moving, and when I look at the time it reported vs. the time my map refreshed, it is within 2 minutes (typically, it takes 2-3 seconds to make it into our database, and our vehicles reoprt every 2 minutes):

This tells me that AT&T is still doing ok in terms of cell coverage. Once it’s over and hopefully there isn’t too much damage, we can run a quick analysis to determine if/when any of our vehicles were unable to communicate due to failures in the cell network. So far so good.

By zooming WAY down, we can actually look UP at the radar image of Hurricane Gustav — a pretty interesting view. Unfortunately, whoever is driving this vehicle has to see the real thing — I hope they are heading out of there.

I looked earlier today and an ambulance customer of our sent some ambulances to the area — hopefully everyone does ok.

Rob.

[ Update -- Gustav has dissipated to a tropical storm as of 9 PM PST.]

I ran a check against all customers’ vehicles which were driving in that area, and only one vehicle had any evidence of cell trouble with AT&T due to the Hurricane.

This screenshot shows a few things:

• the Hurricane above the area in question
• AT&T GPRS (Cell) coverage in orange on the ground (darker orange=better coverage)
• Many vehicles’ paths, with dots close to the ground indicating 2 minute reports, mostly received by GPS Insight within seconds
• The area in the red box shows pins “higher up” in the air, which indicates a delay from the time the measurement was taken and when it was received by us. This “lag” was up to 44 minutes, but all that data was eventually transmitted.

Most likely this “lag” was due to a single damaged cell tower in that area.

Earlier in the day at 8:32 AM, it only took 6 seconds for data to get to GPS Insight from that area. But during the hurricane, at 10:33 PM, there was apparently no cell signal available in that area, so the vehicle needed to drive roughly 34 minutes until it hit a working cell tower.

However, this is the ONLY instance of apparent damage in the cell infrastructure which affected any of our customers in that region, which is great to see. And it only lasted for 30-40 minutes.

This “lag” view is something we use internally to help customers troubleshoot their vehicles (by determining if problems coincide with known AT&T coverage limits) — today it helped to show that Gustav didn’t do much damage to the cell towers in that region, thankfully.

This Labor day weekend, we’re still taking calls from new customers who are installing their first units, forgot how to run a particular report, etc. We get our support calls 24×7, no matter what day it is.

I thought I would write a blog article and quantify just how available our service and support is to our customers.

First, I’ll run a Tech Support phone Queue report for all of 2008:

We see our average hold time at 14 seconds (up from 12 seconds last year, but we just hired 2 more tech support representatives to help that!):

We answer 96.8 % of all tech support calls, and of those which we don’t get to in time, the customer’s average hold time is only 31 seconds, a max of 2.1 minutes. When’s the last time you sat on hold for ONLY 31 seconds and thought that was too long?…

But what about our servers and systems availability?

It’s not quite 100%, but pretty close. Here is a report I ran for all of 2008. I have to blur the names of the servers, due to security, but it should help give you an idea for just how much time our systems are available to you. An average of 99.594% availability, but really, the few servers which “bring us down” from 99.97-100.00% for most of our important servers are “expendible” such as the one called “olap-02″ (shown in the picture below with a 96.021% availability rate). These servers are “extras” which we use to speed your experience during peak traffic, for large report requests like state mileage for a full quarter Sometimes we take them offline to make changes, but ensure that your reports are always available to you, or better yet, delivered to your email every day automatically.

The other server you see is “web-01″ which had an availability of 99.989% for the year so far.

That is only 58 minutes of “unavailability” in the entire year (and generally due to unavoidable “other carrier” network problems between our office and the secure facility where we run GPS Insight).

Here you can see that it hasn’t been rebooted for over a year — 343 days, and it’s barely breaking a sweat (it’s Labor Day Sunday, no one is really using the product):

We go to GREAT LENGTHS to make sure our product and our support staff are available to our valued customers 100% of the time. There is tremendous redundancy built in, so we can make sure that no matter what happens to a hard drive or network card, our customers will never see an interruption of service.

Plus, we have the tools and processes in place to help quantify it for our customers. If you’re not a customer, but considering GPS Insight vs. another vendor — ask them for this information and see if they can provide it. Call THEIR tech support to see how long you’re on hold & if they drop you to a voice mail box or offshore? Then call ours & see how quickly we answer — 866-477-4321, press 2 for tech support, & 1 to bypass the recording detailing our online http://support.gpsinsight.com tools.

Thanks,

Rob.

Many customers or prospective customers don’t know the background of GPS Insight (why would they unless I talked their ear off about it?). Much of the reason for our success is that we AREN’T the oldest company out there tracking trucks. We took a fresh approach, using readily available NEW technology, starting 4 years ago.

Many other companies in this space (and others, e.g. IBM PC’s, Sony Betamax, etc…) painted themselves into technological and architectural corners years ago, and are unable to adapt to the new technologies which abound.

Plus, because GPS Insight’s technology background comes from the high tech hedge-fund trading and (successful) dot com space, we have a few technology tricks up our sleeve. This is in pretty stark contrast to the Automotive and Trucking technology backgrounds which most of the other GPS tracking companies have.

GPS Insight started as a consulting project which I began on 8/24/2004, over 4 years ago. This was under Sedonatech, which owns GPS Insight, my 8 1/2 years old Illinois S Corporation. I had spent the prior 10 years doing high tech consulting for the finance and dot com worlds, but had moved to Scottsdale AZ with my family in 2003. There weren’t many hedge funds or dot coms in Scottsdale (a lot of golf courses, overrated restaurants, and pools, though). I had gotten tired of flying back & forth to Chicago or New York to do work.

At that time, the owner of a local trucking company which I knew through a mutual friend asked me to help determine the best product to suit their demanding needs. I starting paying attention to just how many trucks there were on the road, and just how little they were doing to improve efficiency with the few GPS tracking systems I could find. So I started work for them on 8/24/04, looking into the market to make their implementation a smooth one (it wasn’t, to be honest — I learned a lot of very practical lessons on that project, and they all helped me avoid “unrealistic” goals for GPS tracking. Namely getting drivers to use a terminal, automating billing strictly on GPS input, and the notion that “one product fits all requirements” — it doesn’t, but you can build one and make it easy to customize to those requirements if you spend 4 years doing it…).

Here was the first official record of GPS Insight’s creation (it was incorporated 7 months later, as it became clear there was a big future in GPS vehicle tracking for fleets).

Unfortunately, I didn’t really find anything available which did what they required, and no tracking companies were willing to customize their product for this “small” 300+ truck fleet.

I realized that GPS tracking hardware had already become somewhat of a commodity, and so I went with a reputable, but slow-moving vendor (now competitor, who shall remain nameless, I don’t need a lawsuit…). I used their hardware and data, but threw their interface in the trash. We replaced it with GPS Insight (now on its SIXTH major release, in 4 years). The customization was always something we tried to ensure would be available to ANY customers, knowing that it would help with large implementations, but that for smaller customers, the benefits of our continued development would continue to keep them happy with new features every month.

Our newsletters are a great way to see how quickly our product has progressed over the years.

4 years later, with the new dashboard interface in production, and reports and flexibility that are unlike anything that existed when we started, I’m glad to see the progress. Most importantly, we look forward to the future. The growth and technology has been accelerating rapidly over the past 8 months, and we are looking forward to providing our service to as many customers as we can get (of course…). All it takes is getting them on a trial, or to read our implementation document, watch a few demos, and they usually see the light pretty quickly.

Everyone at GPS Insight and I (now 32 employees strong, not to mention the hundreds of employees at all of the contract manufacturers from whom we purchase our hardware) thank you for your support and business over the years.

Thanks again,
Rob Donat [and all the other GPS Insight employees]

GPS Insight is a Better Business Bureau accredited business. We applied and were granted this designation in May of 2007, 2 years after we were formally incorporated, on 4/14/2005. GPS Insight technically began as a consulting project, and my first billable work on it was 8/24/2004, over 4 years ago. This was work done by GPS Insight’s holding company, Sedonatech, Inc., an Illinois S Corporation in business since 4/1/2000.

Here is our information from the BBB: [you can check these yourself at bbb.org, under "USA Site/Check out a business"]

Today, I got my BBB newsletter in the mail, and was curious which of the other GPS vendors we come across were also accredited by the BBB.

I started searching, and thought I would share and maintain this list, periodically checking for changes, so our customers and employees can also know what the Better Business Bureau thinks of them.

These are the BBB rating links to some are the companies we typically hear our customers are (or were) looking at, in no particular order:

@Road:B, but not BBB Accredited

Fleetmatics: Unsatisfactory and not BBB Accredited

Teletrac: Unsatisfactory and A-, East and West offices

Sage Quest: A & BBB Accredited

Discrete Wireless: A-, but not BBB Accredited
Networkcar: No listing

Navtrak: A, but not BBB Accredited

Rocky Mountain Tracking: A- and Accredited

Fleetilla: No listing

Why do I list our competitors here? I feel that prospective customers should know about the market, and know who’s who, and does what. There are some other good GPS vendors out there, and this may help you to determine that as well. But we are happy to help you with a risk free trial against any of them, to prove that we not only have the best GPS Fleet Tracking product on the market, but that we’re also the best value, and have the best support available. Plus we can get you up and running same day in any of our 4 local markets, or next-day/second-day depending on how quickly you want to start tracking your vehicles.

One thing you’ll notice about our competitors’ websites (you’ll have to look them up yourself, I’m not that charitable to them…):

None of them will let you see a live action demo of their maps, their reports, or their overall product.

We have live demos, video demos, and tons of screenshots of our reports, etc. online at www.gpsinsight.com — please take a look. Our product is something that we are proud to show on the website, without forcing you to enter your information, email address, etc. first. An educated customer is the best type — please educate yourself on our website, check out our competitors, have us do a same-day WebEx demo for you, then do a side-by-side, risk free, 30 day money back guarantee trial. You’ll see the difference, or we wouldn’t put our product out there for everyone to see, including our competition!

I usually sign about 1 refund check a quarter and none yet in Q3 of 2008… [or Q4 of 2008 or Q1 of 2009 either]

Thanks,

Rob.

After 3 years in our existing space, it’s time to expand (again) and this time move to some newer space. It’s just 2 1/2 miles away from our existing space, and although we’re moving to 6500 square feet from 5000 feet, we’re probably going to have to give up the golf simulator and the foosball table, although my kids (and maybe a couple employees) will never set foot in the office if we don’t bring the Wii with the 100″ projected screen. I’m not sure where it will go but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.

Here are a few pictures:

Reception:

Outside view:

Conference Room (the big reason we needed to move — ours was half as big and staff meetings were getting a little too close for comfort):

Rob’s new view (I took the worst one of course):

Where all the important meetings take place:

Where your inbound tech support calls will go — 25×18′ of (eventually) our GPS Insight tech support gurus. We have a lot of desks to move…

And the salesperson of the month gets this office:

And if they sell 2,000 devices that month, they can have my office that month… (I’ll probably be traveling anyway):

The building we’re moving into has lots of room for expansion, and so do we — we look forward to servicing our customers from this new space, and hope to see you visit us in it soon (sorry, no ‘General Store/Antiques hanging from the rafters’ restaurant to take you to lunch at in this complex unfortunately — just a coffee shop next door & we’ll need to get in our car and actually drive somewhere now).

And we can always track it — here’s the old office (me getting caught up this weekend):

And the new office (me trying to figure out where everyone will go just before I head home after driving the weekend home-office-office-home circuit):

Rob.

Here is a link to the original cartoon (from my favorite, http://xkcd.com)

http://xkcd.com/461

From our 2D (or 3D) mapping, all you need to do is click “Directions: From Here” and “Directions: To Here” in the vehicle, landmark, or address “bubble” and you are given high quality directions you can email, print, or send to a phone:

Here I clicked on Brent, then on Cardinals Stadium, choosing From/To for each:

You can turn on Traffic and “Drag” the route around bad areas (red):

Then finally, if you want to see what the area looks like with a “street map” you can click on the camera icon (this image shows Cardinal’s Stadium):

Or maybe it will show a spectral wolf.

We just added this support to Firefox and Internet Explorer versions 6 & 7, please try it out.

Thanks,

Rob.

A large customer recently shared some statistics with me the other day. They estimate that in July, they consumed roughly 20,000 fewer gallons of fuel than they did 2 months prior.

What changed? In mid-June, they asked us to start notifying them (programmatically) whenever a vehicle idled for longer than 7 minutes.

Once they got that notice, they would turn it into an email to the driver and the driver’s supervisor, and have it sent to them via blackberry.

INSTANTLY, the unnecessary idling stopped.

Here is a graph of the dramatic reduction. Bear in mind that in this industry and market, 25% idling is considered normal (stop lights, traffic, powering the lift gate, etc.) — that equates to roughly a 90% decrease in UNNECESSARY idling:

In June, this translated to roughly 10,000 fewer gallons of fuel (mostly diesel). In July, the first “full month” it was more like 20,000 when the final fuel bills were in. We helped this customer ensure their numbers were correct this using our fuel consumption report as well. Believe it or not, this is less than a gallon of fuel savings per day on average, per vehicle, but it has a massive effect on bottom line.

The rough cost savings for this fleet is over 3 times the cost of GPS Insight’s monthly service fee.

Bear in mind that this is still unfortunately a small decrease relative to the total fuel bill, but an interesting thing became clear after the drivers started shutting their vehicle down rather than leave them run, especially in the hotter markets:

The drivers got faster doing their deliveries, which meant the company got more efficient.

Without a nice cool cab to get back into, they took less time doing deliveries, since every minute they took to get the truck back up and rolling, the cab got hotter in the sun, especially on hot days. Our customer’s management commented to GPS Insight that they got more deliveries done on account of this change, as well as saving a considerable amount of money on fuel.We will introduce this capability for all of our customers in August, since the improvement was so significant, and we want everyone to be able to send both their driver and their supervisors proactive alerts/messages when excessive idling, speeding, off-hours usage, and out-of-geofence activity is detected.

Look for news about this new feature in our upcoming newsletter.

Thanks,
Rob.

The drivers got faster doing their deliveries, which meant the company got more efficient.