GPS Tracking ROI

Nothing really earth-shaking yet today, except of course the usual lies and cover-ups. Kudos for the authorities for getting this underway. The Bronx cheer for saying that the deaths of victims who could have been helped had the ambulances been there earlier.

Perhaps, after enough people die, including (very definitely including) here in the US,

people will get the message that this doesn’t cost but it pays. Time and time again, individual ambulance company trials have shown that active GPS systems can save significant money. During a trial I personally witnessed in the City of Seattle, the contractor involved was able to take 3, count them three, ambulances and crews off the contract and still reduce their response time .. saving more lives and earning a performance bonus.

Given this evidence it’s surprising every ambulance company isn’t on the bandwagon .. but my years of business have shown me that the capacity for American businessmen to bury their head in the sand is almost infinite. However, when a government agency jumps on board the savings potential (lives and money) is even greater. The only reason we don’t have a nation-wide means of dispatching and controlling emergency assistance isn’t the cost of the system .. it’s the fact that no one could guarantee whose pocket would get lined with the savings. Sad.

At least some countries, Japan for one, have a federally approved price for different categories of people lost in accidents or by negligence. Here in the USA, you are only worth what your lawyer can get for you.

Students at Beasley Elementary have been working on map skills with their Global Positioning System devices, purchased with a grant from the Lamar Educational Awards Foundation….
Rest of article here:

Now this is a nice little piece that ought to be coming in on the wire from every elementary school in the country. A big, really big fallacy of or current education system is that we postpone so many skills until later in a student’s career. This bores the living you know what out of elementary kids, who are a lot smarter than their teachers give them credit for. It also eliminates a lot of opportunities for teachers to teach indirectly … you can spend a couple hours with a kid and a consumer-grade GPS handset and teach a lot of arithmetic, reading, reasoning, geography, etc. without the kid even knowing s/he got taught.

More…It also bores teachers in later years … saddling them with trying to stay awake teaching concepts the kids already earned on their own some years back. Kudos to Beasley Elementary.

Of course you’ll notice I didn’t say where Beasley was, yet. Yep, they get an onion award for hiding their identity again. The ‘Net is international, folks. When you put up local news items you are going to find people reading them from all over the world. In the case of a large state like Texas (yes, that’s where Beasley is ….

Fort Bend County is a county located along the Gulf Coast region in the U.S. state

of Texas within the Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown metropolitan area

you even need the definition for home state folks … there’s more than one Beasley Elementary in Texas. But that’s ok, I found it and soon the students there will too … using their GPS handsets I am sure.

The other thing you have to give Garmin a lot of credit for is that they are located in
the heartland … Kansas. It’s very fashionable for “sophisticated”
folk on the eat and west coast .. and for the silver spoon with cowboy
boots crowd that passes for our current “compassionate Conservative”
leadership to dismiss states like Kansas as ‘fly over country’.

(more…)

I started reading this short article this morning strictly because of the headline. So many of my posts and so much of the media content produced regarding GPS and the subset of GPS Tracking just does not _get_ it, it’s very refreshing to find a paper and a reporter who does.

Now I will say that I don’t like a certain editorial license taken in the first paragraph, which only helps add to the confusion.

Police don’t have radar to help them find stolen vehicles and GPS doesn’t “literally” put a stolen vehicle on that radar, but, actually, it does better.

Theft of commercial vehicles, especially those carrying or hauling high-value commodities like skid steer loaders (the real name for Bobcat and its competitors is a growing problem. This issue is no longer restricted to major US population centers but is rapidly spreading everywhere, even across the plains of Alberta.

There are a number of solutions. The one that comes first to most people’s mind is LoJack, so often mentioned in news and TV dramas it’s a household word. (Tony Soprano to his wife, who has just asked him to recover the stolen car of his their son’s teacher: “I thought I told you I changed our family name from LoJack to Soprano”)

LoJack is a fine product but it is as far removed from GPS Tracking as posting a sentry with a shotgun on a construction site. LoJack puts a low-power radio transmitter in a vehicle and is the vehicle is on the road in a location where there happens to be a police department who happens to have purchased the proper tracking receiver from LoJack Inc., then the police officer gets a notification that he’s near a stolen vehicle and help from the receiver to get near the vehicle in alarm.

Now that’s a fine technique as far as it goes but there are a lot of ifs, ands and buts involved. The right police department has to be in the right place ant the right time and they have had to make a substantial investment in equipment for LoJack to work at all.

OnStar is another service that many people have heard of. Unlike the ancient technology of LoJack, OnStar actually is a GPS Tracking technology. For a cost buried in the price of a new vehicle, a General Motors vehicle purchaser can get a nice tracking unit combined with a voice cell phone installed in the vehicle. If a button is pushed (or if the OnStar tracking headquarters acts on a court order … think about this…) the OnStar control center can hear everything going on inside the vehicle. Is a crash occurs and an airbag deploys, OnStar also receives notification. Many useful convenience and safety services are included in OnStar’s $18 a month and up charges.

Theft recovery is one of the services. But, much like LoJack, an owner has to know the vehicle is stolen because he or she has to file a formal report with the police and OnStar will only cooperate with the police in determining the vehicle’s location. That’s right, you spend however much the OnStar system costs, pay whatever the monthly fee is, and when you need to know what’s up with your vehicle, OnStar tells you “we can’t give you that information”. Customer service at its finest .. should have been a Ford product as it harks back to the Henry Ford days … “any color they want, so long as it’s black”

Contrast this with the inexpensive GPS Tracking systems that the business owners ‘in the know’ are using. For the price of a GPS Tracker far less than the cost of say a set of tires, the owner himself can find out the vehicle’s location any time …no police report is needed and no one except the owner ever needs to know a tracking request was made.

The number one thing holding back the GPS Tracking market today is education. It’s not the technology or even the price (which has ramped down substantially in just the past year or so). What’s needed is education to let vehicle and business owners know that yes, they have the right to know and they have the right to have access to systems that they own and pay for.

So if you have vehicles that you feel would hurt your business if stolen, then protect them. And when you protect them, chose a system that actually works for you, not some third-party who will spend their time telling you what rights you don’t have to use the system _you_ bought and paid for.

(Paid commercial announcement.. if you want to learn more, you can go here: http://www.satviz.com/)

Now before I get a bad rep and a ticket .. I do drive in California at times .. laws that restriction dangerous activities ought to be enforced. Putting something significant in the driver’s vision is a no no for sound safety reasons.

But, of course, the state hangs emissions tickers, toll transponders and other handy things on the inside of the windshield just as quickly as they find a way to make money with them. I’m sure that most portable GPS navigation units may pose a small impediment to vision if they are mounted stupidly, but most of all I think the cops are just worrying that they might be radar detectors and therefore they could miss a chance to give out a dandy little ticket.

One of the advantages/disadvantages of age .. I can clearly remember when California was the only honest state in the union .. didn’t allow the use of radar guns .. in inaccuracies and problems with these things could fill a book .. they have filled several books .. but instead of protection its citizens, California fell into the trap that the other 49 have … who cares if it’s honest and fair as long as the police can bring us in some money while sitting on their ass.

Anyway, back to GPS and the windscreen. If you are buying a unit, either one of those stick-on ones for personal navigation or a commercial tracking one to monitor vehicle and drive performance, then be sure to look at it closely before you plunk down you money for it. If it doesn’t have a remote antenna or a very low profile then look further to find one that will.

Any GPS antenna will work best if it’s up on your roof or on the rear deck lid. But for many, that’s impractical. Running wires inside the car from the outside can literally be a pain .. and prone to leaks as well. Well designed inside antennas, especially those that are powered, will do an excellent job through the car’s glass. In addition, most will do a surprisingly good job through platic so mounting the antenna under a typicla dashboard should work fine.

When you go out to buy a unit from an ordinary retailer, make sure you, yourself know where the antenna will go. If you buy from a GPS specialist, they should know the rules and best mounting locations .. but you’d better ask anyway. Safety is paramount and antenna location is the number one variable that can influence GPS accuracy in the field.

Well you can’t say I didn’t warn you, folks. I’ve mentioned this issue a number of times in the past. The commercial GPS vehicle tracking market is saturated with old-technology and obsolete CDPD (Cellular Digital Packet Data) tracking systems. These devices were the cat’s pajamas 10 or 12 years ago when cell phone networks operated on the AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service). Ten years ago they were a good deal, too. But things are changing and tracking customers, as well as tracking providers, if @Raod is any indication, owe it to themselves to pay attention to network changes.

Contrary to the meaning of the letter ‘A’ in AMPS, this system is no longer “Advanced”. It’s outdated and analog, hard to maintain and bandwidth-limited. No cellular carrier who is going to stay in business is going to prolong the use of AMPS and CDPD a day longer than humanly possible.

@Road and other established tracking services have been milking a cash cow… selling black boxes that have long been completely amortized for yesterday’s prices and enjoying huge markups; while more advanced systems that will work on past 2006 have had an uphill battle to fight.

Well now a few folks will certainly take notice. @Road plans to discuss this at their 7 Feb teleconference? Hint for first slide in the briefing: “We’re out of business”

Folks if you are thinking of buying into a tracking system … and if you aren’t, you’re screwing yourself because I can guarantee you can save money with one, then do yourself a favor and make damn sure it uses GSM (Global Standard for Mobile)/GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), the modern, future supported standards. If your salesman/service provider doesn’t know the difference .. put your hand on your wallet and run.

If you are among the customers who are going to be left in the lurch by CDPD services shutting down, call me (contact data on my website: www.satviz.com) and talk, perhaps I can help make you whole again.