GPS Tracking ROI

Speed trap? Or something much more insidious? This police officer seems to be striking a pose familiar to many, many drivers. Is he aiming a radar gun at passing traffic looking for the guy going 10 or 15 miles over so he can issue a ticket and meet his monthly quota? (Sorry, made a mistake there, in my city they emphatically have no quotas; they have “Monthly Performance Standards” … makes one feel a lot better about getting a ticket.) But annoying as a traffic ticket may be, there’s an already well-advanced police activity out there today … not next decade … that could be one heck of a lot more troublesome than a couple more points on your license. I’m writing about this today because in my field, GPS tracking technology, invasion of privacy is one of the prime issues on many people’s minds. Folks, especially rabid privacy advocates, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

… In recent years, police around the country have started to use powerful infrared cameras to read plates and catch carjackers and ticket scofflaws. But the technology will soon migrate into the private sector, and morph into a tool for tracking individual motorists’ movements, says former policeman Andy Bucholz, who’s on the board of Virginia-based G2 Tactics, a manufacturer of the technology.

Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says… Rest of Wired News article here:

I thought this was pretty interesting, to say the least. The criticisms of GPS tracking technology center around the fact that it is invasive, may give people a lot of problems for the tiniest lapses that are only human nature, and may divulge information to parties who never were envisioned by the folks who originally set out to collect the data.

Certainly all of these objections have some substance and are worthy of discussion. As a GPS tracking advocate I counter that there are safeguards which can mitigate the issues. In general the court system has pretty much sided with me.

The general rule for law enforcement is that they can use GPS tracking technology, with little or no probable cause, because GPS tracking is, essentially, only an electronic way of replicating a law enforcement officer following a suspect to observe behavior. In most cases, a private citizen would not have the right to place tracking technology on another citizen’s car … although, in general, it’s not illegal to follow and observe another’s activities on public thoroughfares. (more…)

Iridium Announces Second Quarter 2006 Results

Monday July 24, 9:31 am ET

Subscribers and Earnings Up Significantly; EBITDA Doubles

BETHESDA, Md., July 24 /PRNewswire/ — Iridium Satellite LLC, the global supplier of mobile satellite communication services, announces that its subscriber base increased by 25.4 percent from the second quarter of 2005. Reflecting continued growth of its commercial and government businesses, the company had approximately 159,000 subscribers worldwide as of June 30, 2006. Iridium’s revenue in the second quarter was $53.6 million, an increase of 31.4 percent over second quarter 2005. Second quarter 2006 EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization) was $13.2 million, which represents a 99.6 percent increase over the same quarter last year. Commercial service revenue in the quarter was up 24.8 percent versus the same quarter last year, and comprises approximately 70 percent of Iridium’s total revenue…. Full Article Here:

I’m really glad to see this report out of Iridium. What has this got to do with GPS you might ask? Actually it’s got two important GPS connections.

Several years ago Iridium was put together by some of the major communication players. It was going to be a constellation of 77 satellites (the atomic number of the element Iridium … hence the name) and it was going to revolutionize voice communications, world-wide. Problem was, like happens so often in the communications industry, the senior engineers and leadership are always designing last century’s system and then putting fancy buttons on it and trying to sell it at next century’s prices. The basic thought behind Iridium was sound, clever even. You can easily cover the entire populated earth with as few as 4 satellites … Inmarsat being a prime example. But Inmarsat “birds” fly at geostationary altitude … 23,000 plus miles above the equator. It takes radio signals about 400 milliseconds to go “up” to the birds and the same ~400 ms. to come “down”. That’s 800 milliseconds, plus a little time for the on-board processing so it adds up to nearly a full second of delay. You may have used a satellite phone running off geostationary satellites … if you haven’t, you’ve seen those annoying television interviews where the anchor person says something to the correspondent in Iraq and it seems to take forever for her to hear the question and answer back … when you’re looking/listening to a conversation like that on USW television it’s nearly a 2 second delay … and two seconds of delay in an interactive conversation is a problem.

(more…)

If you’re using technology for your mobile work force, or thinking about implementing or upgrading, you should certainly look into these roadshows:

My prime supplier, GeoTab is one of the featured partners.  Nobody likes paying the prices we do for gas, but you can turn the tables on your competition if you play your cards right.  A year or two ago you could save a hundred or two per month per vehicle … now it’s easy to save more … you’ll be saving, they won’t … something like power play in hockey, isn’t it?

Here’s a little view of where we were on Staurday … spent a couple days at a neat little “Mountain Cabin’ resort in Redstone, Colorado and drove home to the Springs Friday. And if anyone, like the IRS when I try to claim this as a business trip wants veification of time, disatnce and places stopped, then here they go:

My wife posted some much more entertaining pictures here:

Enjoy

I’m expecting a colleague, Carl Kurt, for lunch here in the Springs tomorrow. Here’s Carl’s current progress … see if he makes the meeting and maybe you can even figure out where we have lunch.

Live tracking link, courtesy of EnGraph Inc.

Here’s the last day of a little road trip we took end of last week. Pretty country out there on the western slope.

Nice article here in MultiChannel Merchant.  If you use a vehicle in your work drive, you ought to go and read it.  My headline grabbed your attention, didn’t it?

Well the truth is, since everyone’s business has a certain potential profit and a certain amount of unavoidable costs, everything you can do that will reduce avoidable costs translates direct to your bottom line.  And if your competitor is too “unsmart” to reduce his costs …. You gain that much ground.

UPS runs on the order of 80,000 vehicles … many of them the ubiquitous “package cars” that come down your street making deliveries.  They aren’t trucks, by the way, and if you look closely you won’t see manufacturer.  That’s because UPS is so big it designs and has built its own task-specific vehicles … so they obviously know what they are doing.

In addition to the routing software the article mentions, and the rigorous avoidance of idling, I have it on pretty good authority UPS has been testing a sophisticated GPS tracking system that not only monitors where the package car was driven but the specific engine performance as well.

I can sell you one, along with commercial off the shelf mapping software that will optimize your routes.  Or you can go ahead, knowing you are wasting 15%, 20% or more of your vehicle operating costs … you’ve been notified.