GPS Tracking ROI

Something good in the news this morning:

A new GPS manufacturer is the first to add an in-car local search engine to its features, and the umpteenth millionth company to issue a rotten press release. But let’s stick to the good news. Dash Navigation’s soon-to-be-released GPS device will feature Yahoo! Local search.
Dash says it is the first GPS manufacturer to offer a local search function on its product. Nearly a year ago, Google teamed up with Volkswagen to show off a Fahrvergoogle Earth 3D map overlay for “dead-reckoning and laser-radar imaging” and “car-to-infrastructure communication.”
Now that’s how you write a press release. But, as far as we know, you couldn’t type in “croissants” and bring up a list of nearby bakeries, cafes and stores along with directions. But with Dash’s product, you can.
With the Dash Express, Yahoo! Local search results are arranged into “address cards,” which can be selected, routing the driver to where he or she can find the goods.
Yahoo! Local ratings and reviews are also presented with results where available. This is great news for the perpetually lost, the touring, and the proud I-know-where-I’m-going crowd. But services like this are also good news for local brick-and-mortar shops that often go overlooked… Full Story Here

Both Google and Yahoo! have invested heavily in local search engines that can return results based on an address or (little known it seems) on a geographic latitude/longitude. These features are technological marvels … would have been impossible at any price not many years ago and today are free. They don’t have as much utility as they should because (in my observation) businesses haven’t been bothering to get their information included.

Most likely most businesses haven’t bothered because they did not see the need for a service that many mobile folks wouldn’t need … and in their perception there weren’t all that many mobile folks. Sort of the chicken and the egg conundrum. Well, Mr. Chicken, meet Mr. Egg.

There are significant and growing numbers of GPS-equipped mobile phone users and large numbers of folks with in-car GPS navigation … some with GPS Tracking capabilities, some with GPS Positional data only. Tracking doesn’t really matter in this case, position does.

Want to know where the nearest Starbucks is … even if you aren’t so sure where you are? Need to know where there’s a Wal*Mart so you can buy some Pampers and find a changing station to do the dirty deed? The uses are infinite and the market is growing toward that point. Very nice business idea.

Business Tip: It doesn’t matter what business you are in, if clients or suppliers need to find you (and someone always will, even if you don’t normally deal from a storefront or office) get you business into Yahoo! and Google’s local search. The price is right and if your business shows up on a query and your competition doesn’t? Ummm, what competition?

I’ve written recently on this subject several times, here and here. Today I came across this item which makes me wonder even more what goes through people’s minds when they consistently reject the legitimate use of GPS technology in a fully disclosed, business environment.

From a blog named the Phoenix Insurgent: … Because of the nature of the job, it’s often hard for bosses to evaluate exactly how much work has been done, and workers routinely reorganize their workload themselves by dumping flyers in the garbage, taking much longer than necessary to complete assigned tasks and deviating from assigned routes for their own purposes. Frequently out of the direct surveillance powers of the boss, the relative autonomy of the job is a bonus from the perspective of the worker and a problem from the point of the view of the boss, perpetual enemy of human freedom that s/he is. (emphasis mine)

This article is bemoaning the fact that many businesses are using GPS tracking technology to improve service, cut costs and enhance worker safety. Due to the title and general tone I wasn’t going to spend much time reading farther … then I took a look at the article’s original inspiration, here: , a respected “mainstream” newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald.

IT USED to be such a simple job.

The 14-year-old girl would pick up the pamphlets at a warehouse in Artarmon and deliver them around Lane Cove.

Not any more. One Saturday recently she turned up at the warehouse to find that she would have to strap a global positioning system around her waist.

Her employers would be able to track every step she took, ensuring not only that she visited every house she was paid to, but that she followed the route devised by management to save time, and that she did the deliveries within the set time frame. Instead she quit….The president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, said the move was a “disgraceful attack on people’s right to basic privacy at work”… Mr Evans said PMP was the first business in the world to use GPS technology in this manner and that it allowed the company to demonstrate to its customers that all their pamphlets were delivered on time…”We’ve cut the amount of time it takes to do their job by 40 per cent and we are still paying the same rate,” he said.`… “The professional people who do this job are happy they can now prove they have done a good job,..

Go read the full article and tell me what is so negative about monitoring worker’s behavior and insuring customers are getting what they are paid for? A business owner or other boss is a “perpetual enemy of human freedom”? Well I have news for some of you … a business (or government agency) doesn’t exist to provide income for workers. It exists to perform a job and make a profit/fulfill a public need. Workers are free to leave any work … that’s real freedom.

In one of my early GPS tracking sales experiences I had a client question the accuracy of the installed system. it seemed everything was in order except that one vehicle never seemed to move on Saturday, when the driver was assigned to work 8 hours at time and a half. When questioned the driver had no problem in stating that he, in fact was doing the Saturday work along with his regular Monday through Friday work and happily forging a time sheet that indicated he worked each Saturday when, in fact, he never even went to work. He finished his own self-incrimination by loudly telling his manager that “if you don’t trust me, I quit.”

That’s “worker freedom and “worker autonomy” at its finest for you, folks. If you feel your role as a business owner or manager is to furnish charity handouts to recalcitrant workers who don’t even show up, or who dump their fliers in the trash, who speed 80 mph in school zones, etc., then press right on.

If you feel that business and management has a different role and that an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay is still a valid principle … get over your fear and manage your business properly. You can’t manage what you can’t measure.

Technorati tags: gPS abuse, gps tracking, geoslavery, worker autonomy, gps roi

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Nov. 14 (UPI) — Police in British Columbia are testing an innovative new mobile system to scanned vehicle license plates.

The new system can be used to track everything from traffic law violators to terrorists… Full Article Here

yes it can be used to track all those ‘persons of interest’ … and more, actually. Read the full article and note the little sort of throw away paragraph at the end … stationary systems are being used at some border crossing points. Now is I were a Canadian one of the things I’d worry about is my shopping. It’s no secret that thousands of Canadians who live close to the US border routinely drive across to by food, booze and even gasoline. It’s been an accepted practice for years … but now each time their car passes the border it will be automatically tallied … who knows how many trips it will take before the tax man is automatically notified to wake up and take notice.

We’ve been talking quite a bit lately about the implications of GPS tracking on personal freedoms and privacy … even about professor Dobson’s “GeoSlavery” presentations. There is of course something to be said on both sides of the issue. Advocates may be pushing the technology too strongly and trampling rights. GPS-phobes may be genning up one too many conspiracy theories and forgetting to wear their tinfoil hats. But the cute … or scary thing I’ve discovered looking deeper and deeper into this discussion is … take away GPS completely and we still have a huge issue revolving around who can collect data, who should collect the data and what they should be allowed to do with it.

The ALPR(Automated License Plate Recognition) system mentioned in the lead article is nothing more than a camera and character recognition software. At $30K a pop it won’t be in every police car any time soon … but having dealt in the police and public safety marker anything sold to the police at $30K can probably be marketed on the commercial segment for $3K today … and much of the electronics involved is in virtual free-fall as far as price is concerned. So price won’t keep this restricted to known and theoretically trustworthy law enforcement agencies.

Laws? There virtually are none. It’s pretty well established in law that you have no expectation of privacy when you drive on a public road and it’s unlikely there are many local laws or ordinances that make it illegal to photograph cars on a public highway … especially if the faces of the occupants aren’t seen. If I have a file of credit card numbers it’s almost certainly illegal for me to sell them on the open market … but a file of license plate numbers? heck in most states you can buy them from the DMV. A file listing plate numbers passing a given point at a given time? Might not be a hacker’s goldmine but certainly marketable to the right user.

The systems work, too. Look at the results British Columbia is coming up with … an average of 10 cars per hour who are already on someone’s “hit list”. I don’t know the actual stats but I think it would be a pretty lucky and pretty overworked patrol officer to be able to nab 10 cars per hour, 80 per shift.

There are also units with substantially higher processing rates than the 600 per hour quoted here.

Bottom Line? better think long and hard about what data you think should be collected and how you want it handled. Invasive surveillance is already a fact of life and it doesn’t require GPS or RFID or any other overt action on your part to bring yourself into the system. Does your favorite law maker even know about the issue, let alone have legislation in the works to help?

Technorati tags: GPS tracking, surveillance, spying, cameras, ALPR, GPS abuse

Don’t blame me for the headline, it came from Jalopnik.com the guys who originally broke the story. Thought it was pretty cute myself. It also is worth writing about because it illustrates how massive the educational problem still is in the tracking industry, even among engineers investors and marketers who are supposed to be able to “get” the technology .

Here’s the situation in a nutshell. One company, specializing in RFID technology is touting their solution for tracking cars on the highway versus a plan to use ALPR (Automated License Plate Recognition) technology. In one sense it’s just a business squabble but in a larger sense it clearly shows that people just do not “get it”. Let’s review the bidding a bit.

RFID (Radio Frequency identification) is a broad technology that is divided into two main branches, Passive and Active. The basis of both techniques is a chip with a permanent (or at least semi-permanent) identification code … often called a license plate code … embedded in silicon. active chips have a power source and a transmitter that broadcasts to code over short distances to a reader that collects and time stamps codes received from compatible chips. The advantages to Active RFID is that it’s relatively easy to collect data from passing devices. Disadvantages are that the power source has a finite life, the radiated signal is detectable by sensors other than the intended ones and, in common with their passive cousins, the chip has to be placed on the assets to be tracked in the first place. Passive RFID employs an inert chip or wire grid that reflects radio energy back to a receiver when it is excited by a specific interrogation signal. This gives passive technology the great advantage of infinite life (no power source onboard the asset), virtual undetectably … no signals are emitted unless properly radiated and generally much smaller and significantly cheaper onboard units. The disadvantages include more limited range, much greater chance that the chip will be shielded from read command energy by the structure of the asset being tracked, and, in common with Active techniques, the chip must somehow be placed onboard to begin with.

In order to effectively track vehicle activity RFID currently has very limited applications. The most common are automated toll collection or automated truck checkpoint reporting systems. These serve a very useful purpose in commercial applications but because they are hardly ubiquitous they don’t seem to me a very useful technology that will scale to cover all, or the majority of, vehicles on the road.

In contrast we have a much sexier competitor which is just no emerging from the world of clandestine surveillance where it has been effectively in use for many years. ALPR. In virtually every country of the world vehicles have carried license plates for a hundred years or more. The infrastructure for registering and “plating” vehicles is well established and the acceptance factor of motorists is near universal. A vehicle without license plates is readily apparent, even to the casual observer. I’ve written about Automated License Plate Readers here before.

These devices are nothing more than a digital camera and character recognition software … both ubiquitous, relatively cheap and getting cheaper by the day … tried to buy a cell phone without a camera lately? For years many countries have made use of speed cameras at the side of the road that take a picture of speeding cars. The other uses of these systems, should their be any, have been shrouded in secrecy. But I do know that in japan there is a huge government program that tracks movement of every car that passes such a camera. For some years it was even described on a government web site … since removed … perhaps to help secure the “Global War On Terrorism”?

Look up next time you pass under a traffic light. In a growing number of cities you’ll see a camera. Some cities have already experimented with traffic tickets by cameras for red light violations. Much more will come from this, believe me. On one toll road I sued to frequent (where tolls were collected by a passive RFID transponder in the vehicle) the backup for the transponder are cameras at the toll booths that record each and every license plate and send out summonses to those who bypass the tolls by whizzing through without a transponder. Ummm, if they already are recording who goes through can you tell me why the expensive transponder is even necessary? Why not just match each license plate to the know database of subscribers and eliminate them from the auto ticket queue? Hmm, they already do that, so again … what purpose does the transponder actually serve?

Takes away’s from today’s post?

First of all, companies ought to learn what purposes their technology really serves and stop wasting time trying to sell into markets they are not suited from. When tracking vehicles, cameras beat RFID solutions hands down.

Secondly, “geoslavery” and indiscriminate tracking of private citizens and workers is becoming a big issues and it looks like it will be become much larger in the next year or two. Banning or controlling GPS, RFID tags or any other single technology is not the solution, we are already being watched on a much wider spectrum than we think.

Kind of a day late and a dollar short here you might say, but getting something worthwhile done is better than never doing it at all, just because you put it off.

Most humans in the civilized world make New year resolutions. Many of my Chinese friends make two sets because they happily celebrate the 1 January date as well as the “real” Chinese (Lunar) New Year (18 February this coming year). So I’ve decided to make some New year resolution for this blog … they may never happen but they for sure won’t happen if I don’t put them up there for the world to see.

1. A minimum of one post per day. I’m falling a little behind on that but catching up nicely … there is so much going on in the GPS world that it’s inexcusable to miss a day.
2. Get the blog on it’s own dedicated (not a sub-domain) URL. Remove the remnants of my old SatViz.com business and give the blog the scope it needs.
3. Revamp the blog …perhaps change format to more of a CMS so I an post news items more effectively.
4. Increase reader participation … comments, anyone?
5. Make the blog more of a resource by finding and highlighting more GPS tracking systems. There are perhaps a dozen or more blogs covering GPS car navigators and pocket caching tools and even golf GPS, I’m the only one I know who has the business experience and writes about implementing GPS tracking in the commercial and government world and how to calculate the ROI of these ventures.

A few designs I have been toying with:

Elifoner

Bright House

Bosco

So what do you think …about my goals or my appearance upgrades? Write me at; davestarr (at) gmail (dot) com or call me at 1-719-423-8872 or text to 63-0919-231-5625. And have a GREAT 2007!