GPS Tracking ROI

OK, I’ll be the first to admit that I am a little at a loss as to how this thing is supposed to work. It has gotten a lot of blogger “buzz” in the past few days, as the winner of a Japanese design competition. There’s a graphic that seems to show that each wand both receives location from GPS (easy to do but very, very nicely implemented in this design) and transmits its location up to some satellite (hard to do, expensive and due to frequency and power considerations not something you would want to put in the hand of a little girl or any other human.

But I can see how these would work if the “wanderer” knew the location of “home” … it will find its location, figure the course back to home and light up its little bud and point the way … very nice.

I also feel the implementation of the Bluetooth PC interconnection and the wireless vase for recharging … now why in heck can’t an electric toothbrush be that simple? Hmmm? Is a great design concept. The absolute idiots who give us a household full of cell phones with disparate chargers, multiple laptops all with separate, expensive and always missing charging “bricks, digital cams with one charger, digital camcorders from the same company with a totally different charger, etc., etc. is sick in today’s world.

Matter of fact I could think of something electrical to do with certain body parts of some of these so-called engineers … but since I no longer live in the US I’m not allowed to practice torture.

What about a home charging management center. Something like that vase in the picture that you dropped your cell phone into when you came home, your toothbrush, your laser briefing pointer pen and so on. The device should be able to learn what devices are in the home, maybe by “introducing” them via Bluetooth or RFID link and should know when an item was last charged, etc.

Sounds difficult? Well name me a good invention that isn’t … that is until the problem gets solved, then it’s simpler and everybody has one. Electric power needs are something pretty easy to define and standardize, it merely requires a couple of the industry giants to actually care about the consumer and the rest of the copycats will fall in line.   RIS  (rechargeable idiocy slaves) of the world, Unite!

Governor Tim Pawlenty wants to explore replacing Minnesota’s motor fuels tax with one based on mileage. He argues that the advent of renewable fuels and more hybrids hitting the roads is already lowering the demand for gasoline.
And, he says, as consumption of gas and diesel drops the reliabilty of the fuel tax as a source will also falter. Currently the state’s fuel tax of 20-cents per gallon raises $650 million a year, but that has leveled off recently and is already projected to fall.
“And this would allow us then to charge by mile driven, regardless of fuel source. It would be a fuel neutral charge for miles driven,” the Governor told reporters in his budget address.
Mr. Pawlenty included $5 million in his 2008-09 budget to launch a pilot project testing a mileage tax system in Minnesota. The state of Oregon started a similar test in March, using 250 volunteers driving specially equipped cars… Rest of the Pay As You Drive article here

Happy President’s Day weekend to my readers in the US.  Although you all know I am a certified (certifiable?) GPS nut I still don’t know if every scheme that someone thinks up for the use of “my” toy is a smart scheme.

States and the federal government obviously are somewhat interested in driver’s economizing on the use of foreign fuel.  Drivers, to some extent, are also interested in savings.  This has the side effect of reducing state’s fuel taxes collected.  There are various solutions offered from time to time, one of which has been having a lot of play lately … all can be lumped under the catch phrase of PAYD, Pay As You Drive.   I’ve written a bit on this already, see

GPS for PAYD? Not the way Oregon is Heading , GPS Tracking For The Consumer — It Ain’t Just For Big Rigs and especially

Dirty Little Secret — When is a Mile not a Mile (or a Kilometer not a Kilometer) for a little background.

Bottom lone still boils down to be the folks who think universal GPS tracking is a solution to the shrinking tax problem have it wrong in several ways:

• Privacy:  The state(s) will collect massive amounts of information that they will either have to devise expensive means to protect or suffer interminable suits by disgruntled citizens … putting one citizen’s total on-road activities on-line in one repository is certain to run afoul of current or future privacy regulations.
• Data Volume: Tracking a fleet of vehicles for a business our a government agency or even a family of teenagers is a definable task which can be scoped and budgeted for,  tracking a whole state full of vehicles will produce a huge burden in data storage, sorting, back up and analysis tasks,
• Accuracy:  If you want to tax me by the gallon or liter of fuel I purchase, great.  The pumps are verifiably accurate and kept that way by weights and measures people.  GPS trackers and even the basic odometers in a car are not covered by any form of national certification and can easily be off by even 10 or more percent.  You can not tax me with a yardstick that can’t be verified.  Trying to do0 so will just be a full time lawyer employment act.

So think this through, Governor Pawlenty an others in this position.  GPS is a great tool, a wonderful tool for many things but it is not a gas tax collector, period.

Yeah, that’s what I though too when I first saw the headline, but stay with me, it does make sense:

This month the U.S. Federal Trade Commission reported that identity theft complaints comprised 36 percent of all those filed with the agency in 2006. Pointing out that laptop thefts often lead to concerns over identity theft, Robert Siciliano, a widely televised and quoted personal security and identity theft expert, encouraged consumers to equip their mobile computing devices with security technology, such as GPS tracking, that thwarts identity thieves…

In April of 2006, a ConsumerAffairs.com article titled “Little Lap tops, Big Problems” linked the theft of laptop computers to the theft of identities. Earlier this month, InfoWorld and others reported that last year grievances related to identity theft continued to constitute more than 35 percent of the total volume of complaints filed with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Symantec has estimated that a laptop computer is stolen every 53 seconds, with just 3 percent of these ever being recovered. Research from Gartner Group has shown that the cost of laptop computer theft can exceed $6,000 for even just one machine, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has reported that losses due to laptop theft totaled more than $6.7 million dollars in 2005; on Feb. 13, in fact, The Washington Post reported that the FBI itself lost 160 laptop computers—at least 10 that stored sensitive information—between February 2002 and September 2005…. Telematics Journal Identity Theft Article here:

I’ve written about using GPS to track stolen laptops before.  MyLaptopGPS (mentioned in the article above) and Apple’s plan to include GPS in the next MAC OS version.  It doesn’t matter if you see one of these solutions as a good fit or if you select a different solution, you need to select a solution, period.

I originally got interested in writing about MyLapTopGPS because they really don’t seem to use the GPS in anyway … but after I saw how clever their solution and how much bang they give for the buck I figured I’d just let them go ahead with their clever, if slightly inaccurate marketing.  Less “geek speak”, more protection I say.

Laptops go missing all the time and letting one out into the wild without protection is just brainless.  If you have other’s sensitive data on it, it might even be critical.

Do something about it now, you have been warned,

As the accountants sometimes say, there are lies, damn lies and statistics.  If you believe a set of numbers or not is completely up to you.  But I found this report quite enlightening:

By Geoff Duncan
Staff Writer, Digital Trends News

Do GPS systems improve traffic safety? A Dutch study finds that use of satellite navigation systems improves driving in unknown areas and reduces driver stress.

Despite some well-publicized instance where a few drivers have driven into construction zones, into buildings, and off roads because their GPS systems told them to, a new study (Dutch) from Dutch research institute TNO purports to find that the use of GPS satellite navigation systems actually improves driving and traffic safety. Read the rest of the Digital trends article here:

As Geoff carefully points out any study run by a company with a vested interest in the outcome must be looked at critically and claims, as always, taken with a grain of salt, but there are some very interesting and easily provable stats in this report that indicate in-car navigation actually can improve highway safety, no matter who paid for the writing.

One thing I can personally testify to is that driver time on the road and distances traveled absolutely will go down by 10 or moor percent as claimed by the study.  One doesn’t need a rocket science degree to understand that a 10% reduction in driving will certainly result in equivalent savings on accidents.  Nor to mention precious fuel, pollution reductions and other benefits derived from reducing miles driven.

The second thing I found interesting was insurance company data that showed a significant (12%) reduction in vehicle damage claims for drivers with GPS installed.  This is insurance company data, not figures that the GPS vendors had anything to do with, so it’s pretty eye opening to me.  What do you think?

How’s that for a boring headline?  Why didn’t I just say, “Look at this”!  Mmm because I’m pedantic, or because you’ve heard that before, or because I think that the YouTubes of the world can fill a need and give themselves a completely new dimension with services like this:

http://icommunity.tv/

From their “About Page”: Our effort is focused on developing an aggregation platform that ties into video-sharing platforms like Youtube.com, extends their services by letting anyone georeference and sort video clips in news categories, and offers multiple convenient ways to subscribe to and watch these custom channels (e.g. “Politics in Berlin, Germany”).

I don’t know about you, but when I go to something like YouTube … most often because someone has pointed me to a video the liked there, I normally watch one video and then leave in confusion … YouTube spits a whole list of supposedly related choice all over the screen …  sorry to have to say this, YouTube but the other day my 15 month old nephew was sick and spewed sour milk all over the living room, my wife and everyone within 10 feet and I thought of your home page layout … not that I don’t like it, mind you … anyway they litter your field of view with “best guess” subjects you might want to watch next but one factor they never consider in trying to choose a related subject is where the original came from.

I also like the idea of building localized news communities.  In some countries you don’t get a lot of local news because the totalitarian government and the rich broadcast channel owners are “good buds” and brand any news that might seem anti-establishment as terrorist-related, or slap a classified label on it if it might make a “Bush” look like a “Shrub”.

And countries other than the US have their issues too.

 Well there you go … any time I go out on a limb with one of my wild thoughts the news comes along and makes a monkey out of me.

The lady in the picture, Erica Chevillar, is not a failed basketball coach.  She’s a graduate teacher, got hired to teach history and then found out that posing for bikini shots paid a lot more money, so she quit school teaching (provably just before the Harper Valley PTA rode her out of town on a rail).  It’s been whispered about that some of her former students found pictures of her in a bikini on the Internet.  How shocking!  Imagine a high school student seeing an attractive woman in a bikini!  The total shame of it all!

So now Erica is in the news again because she got a photo spread in Playboy Magazine.  She’s said to be wearing a bit less than a bikini for Playboy … and making substantially more money according to the rumor mill.

Says a bit as to why Americans can’t read maps or understand history.

Says a bit as to why the US has to send teams here to the Philippines and other Asian countries to find teachers

Says a bit about why most of the names receiving research grants for interesting medical and physics research seem to be of Asian origin.

Says a bit about why there’s really no equivalent to Playboy and its ilk in China.

Or so Mr. GPS opines, anyway

There are a few things in life that come along and touch almost everything we, as the human race do.  Some are new and exciting, some are almost as old as history itself, but they never lose their importance, their beauty and their mystery.  One of those most important tools, one that fascinates me, is maps.

Without maps, GPS wouldn’t be of much use.  I wrote on that recently here and here.  The history, design and use of maps, of course is a science all to itself … cartography.

Now before the last one of you drops off to sleep, remember that those who don’t understand maps are doomed to ask at gas stations .. so men, (especially) this could be an important face saving act for you.

As a product of the American educational system and former part-time Geography classroom proctor I thought I could never again be amazed at the progress our system has made in trying to make these beautiful and useful tools distasteful and foreign to folks.  Of course making geography an obscure elective course in high school certainly helps … I mean why would a school give a care about students who could actually find their country on a map … giving unsuccessful basketball coaches the choice between teaching geography or history hasn’t helped much either.

But this afternoon I was watching a bit of Rachael Ray’s TV talk show … yes, we do get television here in the Philippines and yes men sometimes even watch.  I like Rachael and so does my almost 80 mother-in-law and my 1 and 3 year old nephews.  Rachael’s attractive and vivacious without being as full of herself as Oprah or (Miss Self-declared Center Of The Universe) Tyra. 

Anyway, maps … one of Rachael’s “buddies” was given the task of helping a busy and harried mother of several young children save time and money shopping.  Now I virtually detest shopping so I started watching because anything that could speed up the process is good news to me.  The lady getting the help was relatively young, seemed quite educated, no dummy about life.  Until, that is, they went to an outlet mall and Rachael’s “Buddy” told her the first place they would go … to the mall information desk and ask for … dare I say this on a general interest web site … a MAP.

The look on the poor “helpee’s” face was absolutely priceless.  I think she could have heard a suggestion to calculate her children’s calorie count using simultaneous differential equations and not looked any less mystified.  As I said this was a normal-seeming apparently highly intelligent and well educated woman, but I swear, the look that crossed her face depicted shock, disbelief and downright confusion.  A sad commentary on the people of a country that fights “global wars” and doesn’t even teach their students to not only use maps but embrace them. 

Go find 50 people in favor of the Iraqi War and 50 who are violently opposed.  What do you think the odds are that out of the 100 you’ve assembled you won’t find 50 who can find Iraq on a map?