GPS Tracking ROI

Declan McCullagh at C|Net had a pretty good look at this issue last month in his column. I’m a little bit less pessimistic and privacy paranoid than Mr. McCullagh, but his general ideas are very much on target.

Actually the privacy issues, while important, are overshadowed in my view by the use of the wrong tool for the job approach. It’s like the old saying about the fellow with on one tool, a hammer .. and because of that, everything looks like a nail.

Now I sell these GPS tracking units for a living, so I probably wouldn’t kick the chance to sell them to an entire state’s automobile population out of bed very quickly.

But GPS tracking as it exists today is not really the way to approach most of the PAYD issue. Our company sells relatively sophisticated units that enable fleet managers and corporate operations officers to tailor the performance of both their vehicles and drivers for profit. If they couldn’t see a profit .. and I certainly am often tasked to provide that proof, they won’t buy. And, they darn well shouldn’t. But none of the savings is automatic. Someone has to run the reports and compare them to standards. Someone, interested in profit, has to look at the maps and determine if the drivers have been where the company told them to be.

In the case of a private user the same economies through efficiency can accrue, but is the average motorist going to take advantage? heck you can’t get most of them to take their cell phones out of their ear .. or to not tailgate three feet off the car in from going 85 in a 75.

States already have the technology to collect data from very simple RFID tags to a large degree. Passive RF tags for vehicles would cost only pennies in quantity. Every automated freeway road sign, every centralized traffic light controlled and many other points already owned by government organizations could collect the ID of passing cars and forward it to a central collection database. In point of fact this method is not only cheaper it’s world’s more practical for the idea of collecting tolls or monitoring the use of special lanes. If you have the HPS tracking information from one of my sophisticated commercial units you can find out a lot, but to tell if I drove on I-25, you have to look at the map and determine that fact visually. If I drive past an RF reader or a camera on I-25, there’s nothing else needed to show I was there.

Anyway, it going to be an interesting next few years with this PAYD bandwagon picking up speed. It won’t all be boring.

1/13/2006 

By: Corey Maple
CEO, Powel-MiniMax

GIS is a technology,
not a business process. As a result, taking GIS into the field by
itself creates a number of potential challenges. Applications can be
too slow, with learning curves that are too steep for rapid acceptance
among end-users. To ensure a successful transition, utilities will
likely need to implement GIS with integrated field design. When
considering your options, it is important to focus first on the
end-user — not the solution itself……

Full Article Here:

This is an interesting read
this morning, especially after my last blog entry yesterday regarding the power
of place and the need to make GPS and GIS tools business-related and not simply
technology for technology’s sake.

This article makes two
important points:  Let field designers focus on design.  In other words tools
designed for designers should have very human, intuitive interfaces.  Pen on
tablet as an example.  This is more than making it easy for the designer, it’s a
way to make the designer more effective.  After all, a designer isn’t a minimum
wage person (unless you’re a Colorado corporation) so you might as well get all
the gusto you can out of what you are paying her or him.

Second (and this one is so
intuitive I can not believe how little we’ve advanced on this) Let the designer
work directly on maps.  Do not put artificial interfaces between the designer’s
pen (stylus) and the drawing the designer is modifying.  Simplistic? 
Absolutely, yet how many software and equipment originators have done
this?

You want to be the next big supplier to the industry?  Read and heed.

Technorati Tags: gps, gpstracking, gis, using gps.using gis

For every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under the heaven ….

or so states Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. For much of the world’s history time has been essential, In the world of business and government today time has become critical. In the discipline of business known as Information Technology time’s importance surpasses criticality. The GPS system and functions such as GPS asset tracking are built essentially on time. Time signals from the satellites determine the location on earth.

Samuel Smiles (1812-1904) in writing in Thrift noted there is

‘A place for everything, and everything in its place.’

So, what do all these quotes point to? Bit by bit business, world-wide business, is coming to realize that every business problem, every business process, every business opportunity has a element of “place” involved. Maps coupled with precision timing are what drives the power of place.

Jack Dangermond, founder and CEO of ESRI, the world’s leader in Geographic Information Systems is very fond of a phrase he coined:

The Power Of Place

Whether it’s GPS tracking company assets for efficiency, deciding on locations for new branches and divisions, allocating marketing funds to attain the most bang for the buck, selecting suppliers for maximum efficiency in shipping or even planning for business continuity in the event of disasters, business can no longer opt for the luxury of ignorance of place.

Dave’s advice of the day? If you’re a budding college student considering a business career, or a business executive thinking of going back to school for that MBA, or anyone thinking about a career change? Consider the role that “place” and the technicalities of “place”, GPS, GIS, overhead imagery, thematic mapping and all the other disciplines will affect your future. Don’t settle for study that concentrates on the balance sheet alone. Be the person who understands the power of place.

Some further write ups on the mess have come up today .. here’s a typical, well-written analysis:
http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=1933&source=HOME
If you notice the mercenary $25 service fee seems to have disappeared … even a company as caviler and uncaring as Sprint has some threshold of embarrassment.

But look what has popped up now! “we were only protecting the public from a possible stalker, don’t you see, the police officer could have been an impostor … without a court order we couldn’t have known” … or weasel words to that effect.

HELLO Sprint management (I’ve just spent about 10 minutes on their corporate site … even in the investor relations section there is no human being with enough guts to have his name posted) you are a FreakiN phone company! You knew the call was coming from the sheriff’s department .. or are you so clueless you can’t even figure out caller ID?

OK, enough, my blood pressure’s up and Sprint isn’t worth it. If you’re a Sprint subscriber? My sympathies.

You may recall I wrote about the very issue of this article just a couple days ago:
http://satviz.com/GPS_Blog/?p=48
I predict we are going to see a lot more of this before the year is through.

The gist of today’s story is that a family was getting their kids into the car for a trip and when the husband went back inside to hurry the toddler along and low-life car thief drove off with the car, baby strapped inside.

Frantic the family called 911 and when the sheriff’s department got on the phone the father remembered his Spring GPS-enabled cell phone was in the vehicle with the kidnapped child.

The sheriff’s deputies called Sprint and asked if the phone could be tracked. Sprint replied that they could indeed but they would not because the sheriff did not have a court order instructing them to do so and besides, there was a matter of who was going to pay a $25 service fee.

Luckily for all concerned the missing boy was found 2 ½ hours later by a passer-by. Could you even begin to imagine how long the 2.5 hours was for the frantic family? Or to the helpless deputies, searching in the blind while a lard-ass company bureaucrat had the boy’s location on screen the whole time?

Later a Sprint public relations spin artist said it was all a “mistake”, Sprint allegedly had a policy in place to handle these cases but “Mr. Company Man” didn’t follow internal instruction. Personally, I suspect the “policy” was hastily written by a company lawyer about the time the news hit the TV and some management official at Sprint realized how badly Sprint had stuck its mammary in the mangle. However, even if I am wrong, Mr. Spin Doctor, what action is going to be taken against that Sprint employee? As far as I am concerned he or she was a willing accessory in a kidnapping.

Faithful readers? This is the time to get hold of your nearest Congress-critter and especially for you Californians to get hold of Governor “Fat Lip” .. oops I mean Schwarzenegger and (as soon as he clears up his driving without a license issue) ask that they or he get on Sprint and the other cellular carrier’s case and let them know that when law enforcement official asks for help, you give it to him and worry about the $25 fee later. Perhaps Sprint could hold a bake sale, they certainly must be too poor to find $25 to save a child.

Brought to you from the folks at SatViz where tracking assistance to law enforcement is always free, 7/24/365

PAYD … Pay As You Drive is the new buzzword. It’s already becoming popular in the UK and in Australia. It theory this should be a great way to be fair to both the supplier and the consumer.

Several US states have been talking about usage based road taxes and car registration fees as well. There is some “goodness” in all the ideas but there are two key elements missing before systems like this can become truly viable.

First, there has to be a way to definitely and accurately track the usage. We could just ask motorists to send in the mileage figures, but it’s easy to see how open to abuse that idea would be. If it costs money per mile, people are going to under-report, and the process of collecting and tabulating the data is going to incur huge overheads. In addition, to be really fair to the parties involved the process should not just be miles alone, it should take into account where the miles were accumulated. So, let’s set up a program where driver sort car owners can use a cheap, commercial-off-shelf GPS tracking system that reports to the insurance company, the state government, or whomever wants to set up a PAYD program at no cost. Are there such systems readily available out there? You bet. I even sell one viable contender, there are others.

Wait a Damn Minute!!!! GPS track all my driving? You’re crazier than you look, Starr … I Ain’t A Gonna Do It!

That’s right, the second yet to be solved issue is privacy. Assume a magic wand is waved and every mile traveled and where you travel is tracked. Who is going to have access and how is the data going to be used?

The issue of privacy and access control is, like almost all potentially good ideas, much more political and procedural than technical. However, before the length of this post gets out of hand, I’ll propose a quick straw man of one possible way, using only technology I can test and supply today.

The company or agency who wants to track vehicle usage and set up a PAYD program purchases a small GPS tracker “black box” which is installed on the PAYD subscriber’s vehicle. The cost of the unit and installation is handled by absorbing it in the company’s overhead, having the subscriber pay up front, leasing the systems for a buck a day from a third party lessor, or???

The participating program can have simple, hands-off private radio frequency download units at the programs main and/or branch office, at the subscriber’s home or office, or any number of other geographic locations. The output of information from the vehicle is already encrypted so that the over the air data can’t be read by a third party, and the vehicle’s unit is identified only by a permanently installed ID number, very much like a MAC address in a computer. Only the subscriber and the service provider can know who is personally represented by the ID number.

If a second provider comes on the screen, let’s say the original system is a state government initiative and an insurance company wants to offer in state customers a PAYD program, the second and subsequent suppliers don’t need to re-invent the wheel, they can simply go to the original supplier and pay a very small fee to “piggy back” on the original GPS initiative. The subscriber’s data can still only be identified if the subscriber then tells the secondary service provider the subscriber’s own unit ID number, thus linking it to his or her name.

If only 2 or 3 major subscribers in a state come on board it would be easy to offer subscribers free equipment, cover the costs of operating the network and gathering the data and still improve the provider’s bottom lines as well as giving the consumer a better deal in life.

Not to mention, the subscriber could also use the data for his or her income tax report … a whole nother big money issue we’ll talk about here soon.