GPS Tracking ROI

Another Google Maps “mashup” to look at today.  In case you are wondering the view above is an imaginary hike up Pikes Peak … actually the Pikes Peak Cog Railway route that I put together just as an example.  You can see this route for real at this URL:

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=878800

And you can save or create your own routes by simply clicking on the map/overhead imagery with your mouse. At the bottom of the picture you can see a representation of the vertical distance along the trip (a few unexplained “canyons spoil the effect”, and if you type in your weight the site will even tell you how many calories you would burn.

It’s not just for walking and running, you can plot a trip to and from just about anywhere with it … a very useful tool … especially if you have a list of GPS coordinates and wonder how you can get them on a map … you can type latitude and longitude directly into the Google Maps search window and Google will put it on the map for you.  Recommended.

It isn’t the weekend yet for most of you but it is Friday morning here in the Philippines and I just couldn’t resist this eye candy.

UAV (Unmanned or Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles) are hot items in today’s world of war fighting, surveillance, mapping and other sciences demanding an aerial platform for sensors.

I originally got pointed at this curvaceous beauty by a Reuters article slugged: Venezuela launches Zeppelin to tackle rampant crime.  Zeppelin thinks I?  Wow, who is building that and how big is it?  I try to keep up on most of the lighter than air “new ideas”, see here and here for a couple neat examples … but a Zeppelin?  Wow.

OK, Reuters, it is not a Zeppelin.  But it is a really nice blimp (or non-rigid airship) made by a company in South Korea by the name of HanGIS.

The GIS in Han’s name stands for Geographic Information Systems, a buzzword from the late 1990’s that refers to systems that use both geographic data and “old style” information systems … what we used to call databases.  I worked for a great little GIS company a few years back .. one of my dearest friends was the chief tech guy and he and I were both fascinated with LTA (Lighter Than Air) vehicles.  We even had a remote control indoor blimp for our trade show appearances … but we were never smart enough to realize we could have made money from our “boys and toys” fascination.  Hats off to Han GIS and to Caracas, Venezuela for using an innovative and modern “old technology” for the right reasons.  You may now click next to read what the curmudgeon has to say about Reuters 9and other mass media’s reportage … or not.

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I think I have been pretty open about the drawbacks and weaknesses of GPS … anyone who reads this blog a month or more certainly  knows the term “urban canyon” and if you didn’t you will learn more today.  The industry in general is pretty honest when making claims for performance .. especially claims of rapid ROI (Return On Investment) which can be verified easily.  But one place even a few of the big boys fall down is failure to acknowledge the places where GPS doesn’t really work well, or work at all.

URBAN CANYONS: This is a generic term for any place where a GPS receiver can’t see an adequate expanse of sky because of crowded city buildings.  No matter what the manufacturer tells you, all units will suffer from this effect.  And the effect will vary significantly from day to day and hour to hour.  I get quite a chuckle out of schemes to put GPS units on taxis in (as just one example) New York City, where the drivers are in strong opposition to the plan.  Since New York has probably the largest and deepest concentration of “urban canons”, the units are going to perform abysmally a great deal of the time and the drivers are surely going to point this out.

By definition any other place the sky is obstructed is going to cause poor or no performance as well.  Heavy canopies of tree foliage, tunnels and underground parking garages are the worst culprits.  Just imagine a GPS receiver heading east along ah highway locked on to 4 satellites to the North, West and South … nothing to the East, where the receiver’s vehicle is headed, because there’s a huge mountain up ahead.  Suddenly the road goes into a tunnel, and when the vehicle pops out on the East side of the tunnel perhaps none of the former “ok” satellites are going to be in view.  I’m not sure if there’s a command in the processing chip of most receivers labeled “WTF?”, but that’s an accurate description of how the unit is going to feel.

Reception Problems: For reasons as far ranging as huge eruptions on the Sun’s surface to Homer Simpson’s unshielded sparkplugs on his rusted out 1982 Belchfire sedan, GPS signals are not guaranteed to get down from the satellites to your receiver 100% of the time.  Typical GPS systems just “jump” from where they last knew their whereabouts to where they finally find themselves after signals resume … but that’s not what actually happened to the vehicle during the reception outage and would be really disconcerting to a person watching supposedly “live” real-time tracking of the vehicle.

One Smart Provider: ublox is a Swiss company who is one of the few manufacturers if GPS chip sets (the “engines” that power all GPS receivers) who is smart about the needs of the system.  They have been steadfastly designing and rolling out products with a RD Dead Reckoning components .. sensors that take the speed of the vehicle as measured by the turning of the wheels and the compass course made good and continually update the supposed position based on actual vehicle behavior until the satellites one again provide an adequate update.

Before you invest in a system, ask your provider what’s going to happen when your units lose signal … because it is not a question of if you’ll enter and urban canyon, but rather when.

Teleogis is just one of what seems to be a million GPS Tracking providers out there. But they are well established and unlike many are doing something to add visibility to the market segment and provide data on what GPS vehicle Tracking and GPS Fleet Management is really worth.

They funded and have released a free, third-party report with some very interesting business data. (simple registration required, but worth it). Now you know and I know that you can’t accept reports funded by someone with a vested interest in the outcome, except with a large grain of salt. But this report is pretty comprehensive and believable. Go get a free copy for yourself and read it with your rose-colored glasses safely put away in your desk drawer. I think you’ll find, as I did, that the data pretty much speak for themselves, regardless of who paid for the collection, collation and authoring. (more…)

A lot of traffic here that the GPS ROI blog comes from people who used a search term similar to how can I keep my boss (or parent, spouse, local law enforcement, etc.) from tracking me? It’s a very understandable question and I can understand why the thought of being monitored sets people’s nerves on edge. But something I’ve noticed lately is that GPS has become the “bogey man de jour” … as folks become aware of how many businesses have chosen to increase safety and profitability by GPS tracking employee vehicles, how many parents are now interested in GPS tracking for their teens, how many crime investigations are now influenced by GPS tracking data, they have focused on the issues and fears surrounding GPS technology.

For those who are passionate about privacy and protection from surveillance and self-incrimination I would suggest that you are focusing on only a very narrow subset of the devices “big brother” is keep tabs on you with.

Except for certain highly sophisticated clandestine law enforcement type GPS trackers it is pretty easy to tell when one is installed on a vehicle. And pretty easy to defeat since there has to be an antenna that can see the sky. For the cell phone “worries” the situation is even simpler … turn off the tracking feature from the menu on the phone … or turn the damn phone off. Of course, if you drive a GM car (and now a few other brands) you may be pretty sure there’s a GPS on board … if you are the owner of the car you can have it turned off, if you aren’t, there are several destructive or non-destructive measures you can take to defeat the ubiquitous On Star GPS tracking. (more…)

John Chow is an Internet Guru/Online Entrepreneur with a lot of experience in the online and off line business world. One of his major Online ventures is a fairly huge site called The Tech Zone which is one of those sites which I frequently avoid, not because it’s poorly done, it’s actually a great resource, but there’s just so much information and so many new things I just “gotta have” that it is depressing. I really don’t know how John and his staff keep up with it all, but it’s pretty amazing.

But this post isn’t about the Tech Zone. It’s about John’s well-know (and relatively new) how to make money online blog. John Chow dot Com is blog that helps you make money online. You may think you aren’t interested in online commerce, but believe me, you either are today or you will be tomorrow. There are more than 230,000,000 active Internet users in North America alone and that is just too large a market not to learn about.

www.johnchow.com covers three main themes:

• Making money with a blog (broadest coverage, most frequent subject, and by far the most worthwhile)
• Restaurant and Travel Reviews
• Toys and Gadgets interesting enough to be, or become, mainstream

That’s the reason for the obligatory GPS picture here. It comes from John actually using a gadget he recommends and writing about an actual return on his investment in it. Many people yak about things, John writes from actual experience.

Should you read John’s blog? There are so many out there and there are certainly other bloggers who know something about making money. Like most of you who follow any sort of blogs at all, I use a feed reader (Google Reader is by far the most flexible) and I have way too many feeds. I made a personal rule that I would delete at least two feeds for every one I added … when I added John’s blog I deleted five others. It’s just that useful. He:

• Discloses all the “tricks” he uses .. (like having people link to him with anchor text that boost his Google ranking). If you review of his blog, he’ll link to it and send you a ton of traffic.
• He lays out the dollar and cents figures for all his ads and other site and self promotional efforts, so you can make better choices for your own efforts. Many writers talk about their income but few are willing to lay it on the table as John does, regularly.
• He writes frequent, to-the-point “how to” articles … there is something of value to read almost any time you drift over.
• He has actually provided a great service with this “review my blog” ongoing feature. If you visit the reviewing blogs that John lists you will find hundreds of smart bloggers and their different ways of “attacking” blogging give a graduate level snapshot of how blogging is being done … and you don’t have to read any of the clueless folks who want to make money but won’t be bothered to learn.

Recommended. Keep on GPSing, (and writing) John.

Suspect’s car had tracking device

Man arraigned on drug charges believed to have been involved in slaying

By JAMIE SATTERFIELD, satterfield@knews.com
April 13, 2007

It couldn’t save Michael Grimes, but it might well bring his killer to justice.

Toby Tobias Senter’s car had been secretly outfitted with a tracking device when he allegedly either committed or participated in the slaying Sunday of a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation agent’s nephew, a federal prosecutor revealed Thursday at a hearing in U.S. District Court. Read the rest of the GPS tracking non-success story here:

We talk quite a bit here in the GPS Tracking ROI blog about fighting crime with GPS. Many law enforcement agencies and private investigators have already found the advantages of keeping track of suspects via GPS “bugs” on private vehicles. The law, in most states even allows such surveillance without a court order, and in cases like this sad one it probably would have been easy enough to get a court order … there was plenty of evidence to show the suspected drug dealer was a truly bad guy.

The long and the short of this case so far is that TBI (Tennessee Bureau of Investigation) agents knew they had a truly bad guy in their sights and decided to use a GPS device to track his movements. They used an off-the-shelf device popular with many law enforcement agencies and it certainly appears that they now have evidence from that device that will solve a grizzly murder and convict the guilty party. So why didn’t GPS save a life instead of just supporting a conviction? That boils down to the big question everyone who is thinking about GPS tracking has to answer … live GPS tracking versus passive passive GPS tracking. (more…)