Free Commercial usage of Google Earth now allowed with GPS Insight

This is a really big deal for some of our customers. One of the five mapping types you can choose from with GPS Insight is Google Earth. Until recently, in order to use Google Earth properly under their licensing agreement, our customers were obligated to purchase the $400 version (Earth Pro). However, in September, Google changed their licensing to allow commercial usage with the free version.

Here is the release from Google.

For most GPS Insight customers who use the Google Earth interface (the best we've got in my opinion), the cost of licensing Google Earth is still trivial vs. the amount of money saved yearly through their return on the GPS tracking investment.

For instance, even at a VERY conservative 200% ROI on the $1.50-$2 per day which GPS tracking may cost (many customers estimate between 400 and 1000 % ROI), a 100 vehicle customer will save $125,000 per year on the following:

• Fuel costs
  
  
  
  • We give you MPG & fuel consumption data to identify wasteful vehicles and drivers
  
  
  • We identify excessive idle time
  
  
  • GPS Insight helps you get the closest driver to the next order/job without calling/guessing
  
  
  
  


• Payroll
  
  
  
  • Drivers will no longer be able to pad hours
  
  
  • Time spent on timecards can be spent working on other things
  
  
  
  


• Unauthorized usage
  
  
  
  • Side trips & side jobs are easy to identify
  
  
  • Weekend usage and off-hours usage are easy reports to run
  
  
  • Knowing your vehicle are tracked means your employees won't "walk off" with your materials
  
  
  
  


• Accurate and defensible billing
  
  
  
  • GPS Insight helps you to bill more accurately and easily, without relying on notes from drivers
  
  
  • Service questions are trivial to investigate, defend, and prove
  
  
  
  


• Maintenence
  
  
  
  • GPS Insight provides instant alerts whenever your engine light comes on
  
  
  • Scheduled maintenance reminders are sent
  
  
  • Maintenance logs can be kept in GPS Insight
  
  
  • Recall data is available for your vehicles
  
  
  • GPS Insight comes with GE Roadside Assistance (4 incidents per year per vehicle)
  
  
  
  

However, for 100 vehicle, there might be (typically) 5 actual dispatch/admin/management personnel who USE GPS Insight to manage those vehicles, so only 5 copies of Google Earth were required, at $400 per copy ($300 if you buy during one of their 2 Earth sales each year). That means $1500 in software for $125,000 in savings. Now it's $0 in software, since Google allows "consumers" of Earth data to do so commercially, for free.

Some of our customers still prefer the Earth Pro commercial version. Here are the differences between the "free," the "plus," and the "Pro" versions ($0, $20, & $400/year per user).

In a nutshell, now our customers ONLY have to upgrade to Pro if they choose to measure areas (job costing), generate movies or high quality images, or import GIS data.

Google makes their money selling ads. If your vehicle has a flat, and you search for "tires" within Google Earth, they get paid on the ads you click on (below), so this makes sense -- they may make far more than $300 per user on ads throughout the year, and want commercial users using Earth from home, work, and in some of our customers' cases, the laptop in their car. More users equals more ad revenue!



On behalf of our customers, and GPS Insight, THANKS GOOGLE!

-Rob

Map books meet GPS Insight

I see many of our customers at their locations and they have map books out frequently. A map book is a book with all of the various low-level maps for a city on single pages, and often times, when dispatching a driver somewhere, they will tell them they need to go to "Map book Las Vegas, Page 25, 5D (let's say "Heather St.").

I bought a couple major metro map books today (Phoenix and Las Vegas) thinking we could help our customers in these markets by integrating the map boundary definitions into GPS Insight (but not the images/content - that would be copyright infringement). We want to help the map company sell MORE books because it will be much easier for our customers to use them if we can integrate.

Scanning a couple of pages for MY use, I'm able to pull them into GPS Insight as an overlay (I also talk about overlays and similar concepts for the US Army here):



Then by scanning and overlaying an actual "map page" we can get precise boundaries for each page:



We can then create a "placemark" and put the "pin" precisely at the bottom left corner of the box:



Then we are able to quickly determine the latitude/longitude of each of the 4 box corners. A shortcut for doing so is to right-click the placemark and choose "directions from" which populates the latitude/longitude into the "directions" box:



Because the boxes above/below/next to each share the same points, these latitudes/longitudes don't need to be computed for every single corner.

Now that we have that information, I will have the ability to put a new capability into GPS Insight which does the following:

• Takes a street address and quickly determines the Map Page/Quadrant


• Allows the user to enter the map page & alpha-numeric "box" and takes them there


• Allow the user to report on activity within a certain map page or even alpha-numeric box

We can do the first one simply right now by typing in the address and simply viewing which map page/alphanumeric box the address is in.



It will take a little bit of development time to allow us to choose a map page and "A-6" style box in order to take us there, but this is something which we will easily complete within a few hours of work given GPS Insight's quick turnaround on custom requirements such as this.

Then running a report for a particular area can be done automatically as well, but I will do so manually here using our existing polygon geofence capabilities:

Create a polygon geofence around the square (whether the map page or just a alphanumeric box in question):

We can be EXTREMELY precise when defining the geofence:



Here is the full polygon:



Then we can run a quick report on "Page24" within GPS Insight to see which vehicles were there, when, and for how long:



7 vehicles went to this location, based on our extremely accurate report -- this report completes within 10 seconds and runs through tens of thousands of pieces of information to give you exactly the information you require:





Once we get the map page enhancements into the GPS Insight product, we'll probably make them freely available, and I'll update this blog entry. We will document this where we document all of our product enhancements at http://support.gpsinsight.com.

Thanks,

Rob.

View weather data with your GPS Insight vehcle locations

You can now enable near-real time radar and cloud images, as well as forecasts from within the 3D mapping component of GPS Insight. Here is a screenshot:



One of the nicest things about the way Google has implemented this within Google Earth is they've put the images 19 miles up in the sky, as opposed to on the ground like some other 3rd party weather providers have don in the past. When you're zoomed down, you can see your vehicles and your landmarks, the roads, etc, as opposed to a big white cloud parked on the ground.

I'm no meteorologist, but I believe 19 miles is artificially high -- I travel a lot and it seems to me we don't go that high before hitting cloudsq. In fact, I've fallen through some pretty painful clouds (rain at 2 miles high is frequently big chunks of ice and terminal velocity of a skydiver is 110 mph -- ouch) in my 6 year long skydiving career and the highest we typically got out of the plane was 3 miles above earth (15,000 feet or so). [I don't skydive any longer -- kids make you rethink the risk/benefits of that activity...]

That small inaccuracy aside, I'm glad Google put them so high. Here's why:



This is the United States and a large number of vehicles we track, under cloud cover. We can't see much below the cloud-covered areas.

Zooming down, we head toward Phoenix, where we are headquartered (Scottsdale) and we still can't see under the clouds/radar:



Since Scottsdale is typically pretty rain-free, I head toward the closest area under cloud/radar cover, near the border in Yuma, where we have customer who tracks their produce trucks:



Once I break through 25 and 19 miles (radar and clouds respectively) I can see clearly again, and I measure the width and it's 21.32 miles wide -- enough for most typical customers to see their trucks without clouds getting in the way. I've put a red box around where you turn weather on & off:



Zooming down again to a similar 19 mile high view of Phoenix we see that there are a LOT of trucks we can see within GPS Insight at that level.



This is obviously a bigger concern for people in Seattle than people in Phoenix, given the frequency of cloud cover. In any case, it's nice to have weather data available, and also be able to turn it on/off with a single click in case it gets in the way. It's also nice to live in Scottsdale this time of year. 64 degrees here at 11:30 at night, & 79 tomorrow. Too bad I'm flying through some clouds tomorrow afternoon to a place much colder.



Rob.

Route Reporting in GPS Insight

In an earlier article I mentioned I would do a blog article about the GPS Insight route report. Here I will create a simple route (from my house to work) and run the report to see which of our vehicles ran that route. It should only be (and is) both my vehicle as well as my wife's, since she sometimes comes by the office, or I sometimes take her car to work (I did the other day).

We construct the route by creating, then selecting a begin & end landmark, in this case "Rob House" and "GPS2" :



Then we run a report for a range of dates, a group of vehicles, and a particular route:



Which yields this report, which shows that the only two vehicles making this trip between Rob House and GPS2 (our office) are mine (Rob) and my wife's (Navigator). I have put red boxes around strange entries, where I either leave my car at the office for days (e.g. someone drops me off at the airport), or it takes me a long time to drive the 6.6 miles I live from work (e.g. I go to a customer meeting before heading to work), or it takes me a while to get home from work (e.g. I go out to dinner with a customer or my family).



At the very bottom I put a red box around the only time I've used the Navigator to go to work, this being because my wife took my car to the airport for a trip and left hers so I can take the kids to school/soccer/etc.

Perhaps I want a "median" time it takes me to get to work, and how long I usually stay at work. In this case, I would pull the data easily into Excel like this and run whichever custom calculations I need to:



Now I know it takes me 19 minutes median for me to get to work (the middle of all the samples, sometimes better than an average), and 10 minutes median to get home.

This is because I typically drop my sons off at school on my way to work, which takes around 10 minutes, but I come straight home.

This is a simple example of how you can use GPS Insight to calculate route statistics and use them to gain valuable insight into your fleet and your drivers.

Thanks for your interest, & call us at 866-GPS-4321 to talk about how we can help your company to do similar analysis with its GPS tracking project.

Rob.

Proving a vehicle was towed using GPS Insight

Occasionally for large customers, I will print out a large overview of a day's data, since we have a large format plotter which can print enormous (3 1/2 by 6 foot) images.

I had a few minutes the other day & decided to do this for a large Las Vegas based customer when I noticed what looked like an anomaly in their data. There was a long line connecting two position "pins" which was not "OK." Since we report location every 2 minutes, it looked like the vehicle magically transported itself 8 miles away.

I hoped this wasn't a problem with their vehicle's GPS Tracking device so I looked at it, & realized it may have been towed to that facility. This customer has lots of large delivery vehicles and there's no reason they couldn't have used one to "deliver" another without the vehicle being turned on (maybe to save gas, or they didn't have a driver to take it over there).

Here is the image with the anomaly:



Zooming down, it is simple to identify which vehicle this was -- LVD-15405-18, with a 59 minute 'stop' (tow) beginning at 4:12 PM.



Now here is the hard part -- there are tens of thousands of points -- we need to filter out ONLY the vehicle which may have been towed, and the vehicles which could have potentially towed it, as well as just the data points from the time it was towed. Otherwise there is simply too much data to be able to see what happened here and get to the bottom of things. Thankfully that's what GPS Insight allows our customers to do very easily, using something called the "time slider" and by using the inherent strengths of Google Earth.

We go to the opposite side of the long by clicking the next point in that vehicle's history, an idle stop (blue) at 5:11 PM, where the vehicle "appeared" spontaneously, and see there was only one other truck there that day -- that makes it easy to view ONLY those two trucks at once. One (our towed one with the long line) has a orangish-red line, and the other vehicle ahs a green line and is truck LVD-40209-RIG:



Because we know the 2 trucks, we can easily look at ONLY their history and because we know the vehicle was towed between 16:12 and 17:11 (4:12 PM and 5:11 PM) we can use the "time slider" to show ONLY the location "points" during that time & a little bit before & after. It shows exactly what I thought -- the vehicle "towing" the other vehicle leaves that location shortly after it stops at 4:12, and arrives just a couple minutes before it starts again at its new location at 5:11 PM.

I have put big red arrows to show the direction it traveled to get there, and have highlighed the fact that it was just pulling in at 5:05 PM, 6 minutes before the vehicle was started up again, probably to back it off of the large delivery vehicle it was parked upon:



Another way to quantify this would be to create a "TowStart" and "TowStop" landmark at each of the two ends of the line and then run a route report for them for that day to see which vehicles went from one to the other -- this is done by clicking on "Landmark: Create from point" which brings up this screen to easily place/adjust your landmarks.



Routes are a good topic for another blog article, so I'll just show you how easy it is to create a route in our system, and the next article I will cover this topic in greater detail:



In a nutshell, with no knowledge of this customer's business activity today, I was able to gain insight into an event which occurred to one of their trucks. It was towed by another one of their trucks, and evidence of this fact took only a couple minutes to get out of tens of thousands of data points, using GPS Insight. That's what we do -- give our customers (and sometimes ourselves) insight into what their fleets are doing at all times.

Thanks,
Rob.

My pool guy uses GPS Insight to prove service to his customers

I was talking to Jerry, my pool guy the other day while he was servicing my pool in the morning, and he has been using GPS Insight for some time. He has a customer who complained that he hadn't been to her house while she was out of town, and she said she was canceling and not going to pay. Jerry owns AZ's Best Pool Service and does a great job, & does half of my neighborhood based on my referrals, so I know he wouldn't skip a customer.

He was able to prove service in the following way. He remembered he goes there Thursday, and she was gone sometime in the middle of September, but not which truck he would have sent or used. So with a couple mouse clicks, he ran a history report for Thursday the 13th of Sep through Thursday the 20th:



This yields the following map (after selecting only the first/last days of service and turning off roads to see the two vehicles' paths more clearly in Green/Blue):



We can easily adapt the map to show ONLY stops > a certain number of minutes (e.g. 5 minutes) and then zoom down to the neighborhood and see several "pairs" of stop pins (in yellow, which indicates a stop less than 60 minutes):



Clicking on one of the two stops shows the number of minutes stopped (13) and the exact time to the second that the vehicle was turned off. For space reasons I only show one of the two stops. With this information, Jerry can easily prove that he attended to his customer's pool.

Another way to prove a service is to use a circular or polygon shaped landmark.

I can show the amount of time Jerry spends at my house on my pool for the month, to include last Friday, which should be a longer than usual stop because we were talking about this & pulling it up on my office computer since he wanted me to see how it helped him. Or better yet, we can draw a polygon around our neighborhood like so, and run a polygon inclusion report which will show the visits and the amount of time between visits:



We run a polygon Geofence report like this:



And can see just exactly when Jerry (or one of his employees) drive any of their vehicles into and out of our neighborhood, how long the visit was for, and additionally how long "between" visits:



I highlighted the trip from the other day where I talked with Jerry for 20 minutes, which slowed him down and made his neighborhood visit longer than the typical. He obviously had some single visits scattered throughout the month, and if you wanted to do things like average/max/min stop times, you can easily export the data into Excel by clicking on "Download Now."

This is one of the best aspects of the GPS Insight product, and GPS tracking in general -- service companies are always able to prove (or disprove) service in order to ensure the customer is being taken care of, and that additionally, billing which is due can be proven. Comparing historical times of service can be used to determine how efficient a driver is, or alternatively, if that driver is not taking the necessary time at each of his or her stops.

Rob.