Feb 03 2010

About to send our MILLIONTH Alert and perform our BILLIONTH Alert Check

Category: Alerts, Miscellaneousrdonat @ 11:50 pm

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!

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.

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Feb 03 2010

New Map Dashlet size & “Follow Me” capabilities

Category: Mapping, New Features, dashboard dashletsrdonat @ 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

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

GPS Insight Map Dashlet Settings

Make sure to save your dashboard here:

Save your changes to the GPS Insight dashboard!

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.

Rob.

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Dec 19 2009

GPS Insight adds over 1,000 devices in one day

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

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

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

19 minute lunch stop into the 11:00 Hour

In-N-Out stop for Joe Vidmar

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.

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Nov 29 2009

Counting & Reconciling Tolls using GPS Insight fleet tracking

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

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

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

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?

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.

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Nov 09 2009

Jack’s first Camelback climb, GPS Tracking to document it

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

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

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

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

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

With sweaty Dad:

Camelback Hike with a GPS Insight EZ-1000 Tracking device

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

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.

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Oct 31 2009

Heading home from Disneyland, GPS tracking using “Customer Sites”

Category: California, EZ-1000, GPS Insight Employees, GPS Tracking, Mappingrdonat @ 2:26 pm

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

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

Goofy with Ryan at Disneyland

Rob.

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Oct 30 2009

Panic in Disneyland!

Category: Alerts, California, EZ-1000, New Features, Safetyrdonat @ 8:59 am

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

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

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

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

Jack in Tom Sawyer's jail at Disneyland

Rob.

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Oct 05 2009

GPS Insight Hierarchy Capabilities now available in Beta

Category: Ad Hoc Reports, Hierarchy, New Features, Reporting, Reportsrdonat @ 9:46 pm

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

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

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

Drag Hierarchy Members from different Hierarchies

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

Create an "intersection" between hierarchies

Create an "intersection" between hierarchies

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

Restrict by "subtracting" one or more hierarchy members

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

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.

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Feb 28 2009

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

Category: Arizona, Miscellaneous, New Features, Reporting, Reportsrdonat @ 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.

Ben Franklin Daylight Savings Time inventor

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:)

GPS Insight supports multiple time zones

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.

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