Planet GeoSpatial

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.