GPS Insight Blog » GPS Insight

Apr 15 2010

Happy 5th Birthday GPS Insight

Category: Fleet Tracking, GPS Insight Employees, Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 11:42 am

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

Tags: gps fleet tracking, GPS Insight, GPS Tracking, gps vehicle tracking

Comments (1)

Feb 03 2010

New Map Dashlet size & “Follow Me” capabilities

Category: Mapping, New Features, dashboard dashlets — rdonat @ 11:28 pm

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 graphs in GPS Insight's Dashboard

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.

Tags: dashboard interface, dashlets, Fleet Tracking, GPS Insight, GPS Tracking, Vehicle Tracking

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Jan 08 2010

Very cool new feature — 30 Day History in 3D Current Mapping

Category: GPS Tracking, Google Earth, New Features — rdonat @ 3:21 pm

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.

Tags: 30 day history map, 3D Mapping, custom request, GPS Insight, salespeople

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Dec 19 2009

GPS Insight adds over 1,000 devices in one day

Category: Arizona, California, GPS INSIGHT COMPANY SPECIFIC, GPS Insight Employees, Google Earth, Miscellaneous — rdonat @ 11:20 am

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.

Tags: 1000 new vehicles, GPS Insight, GPS Tracking, in-n-out burger, Vehicle Tracking

Comments (2)

Sep 06 2009

GPS Insight hits Facebook

Category: Miscellaneous, New Features, UNRELATED TO GPS — rdonat @ 2:35 pm

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.

Tags: Facebook GPS Insight, GPS Insight

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Sep 05 2009

GPS Insight keeps 3 years of your GPS Tracking data

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, GPS INSIGHT ADVANTAGES, New Features, Reporting, competition — rdonat @ 1:03 pm

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.

Tags: GPS Insight, GPS tracking data

Comments (1)

Feb 28 2009

We’re ready for Daylight Savings Time this year (finally)…

Category: Arizona, Miscellaneous, New Features, Reporting, Reports — rdonat @ 8:05 pm

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.

Tags: GPS Insight, GPS Tracking, nationwide tracking, Vehicle Tracking

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