GPS Tracking ROI

GPS keeps tabs on Gerlach

By MIA SIMPSON/mia.simpson@austindailyherald.com

Terms of release were changed yesterday for Brownsdale (MN) resident David Andrew Gerlach, 49, who spent the weekend in jail after being tracked by his GPS system driving around following a visit with a probation officer in Rochester.
He had posted $100,000 conditional bail in Mower County following sex crime charges filed Aug. 1 that included 12 counts of criminal sexual misconduct in the 1st degree, four counts of criminal sexual conduct in the 2nd degree and felony burglary.

The complaint alleges that from 1993 to 2001 Gerlach molested a boy, starting when the boy was 8 years old.

The eight-year-old boy doesn’t know who he is, but he, his parents and I are all happy the Mower County Minnesota cares enough to “get over” the nonsense that GPS tracking of suspects and criminals is too expensive and smart enough to get to the bottom line …. it doesn’t cost it pays to track these folks.

Now, what was the guy in question doing, driving around?  In the full child molester story from the Austin Herald, his somewhat less than inspiring defense attorney mumbled an fumbled through a half-baked excuse about taking the quickest route home versus the fastest route.  Since the inner workings of molesters of children are not well known to us, perhaps the lawyer was right.  But perhaps the serial predator was cruising for another victim … probably had a successful meeting with his parole officer and was looking to put a pleasant “cap” on a lovely summer afternoon.

The number one reason that every violent crime suspect or inmate should be tracked is public safety.  Especially sexual child predators and violent  wife-beater threats.  But cities, counties and states are so programmed to cry poor mouth at every opportunity that they frequently pout dollars and cents before victim safety.

The truth of the matter is that GPS tracking criminals pats off.  There is a positive rate of return (ROI) in using the technology.

• It saves money over actual incarceration.  Big money.
• It leverages the efforts of law enforcement.  They don’t need to sit and watch those who are obeying their court orders.
• preventing a crime always coasts a lot less in dollars and cents than investigating, arresting and trying the case that results from actual crime committed.

So if you work in law enforcement … or you are interested in seeing better law enforcement in your community … learn to add two plus two.

A few days ago I started this multi-part article on using Google maps for your business. We went to maps.google.com and started making a personal map from the “My maps” tab.

If you’re following along go open the personal map you started and you should see this icon:
Put a placemark anywhere you want. You can move it freehand, selct an address or select an airport code in the search maps window and then “fine tune” where the placemark goes. As you can see there is alot of room to add/edit information about each placemaark … the story of your company’s founds, the times and contact information for branch offices, your most important customers and why they like you … anything at all depending on your business plan.

Save your map early and often. this is the beauty of using Google .. Google provides th emaps an imagery, stores the info for you and serves it up so that your server doesn’t have to … such a deal.

Once your map is the way you want it, look in the top right corner. there is a “Link to this map” link. Click it and two windows will open, one will have a standard emauil-type link so you cna send the map to anyone you wish … likemaybe a spart of abranch manager training session? The second link is the cose that will let you embed the map in any web page or even a blog post like this one. here’s a sample. My life in places. Enjoy making maps work for you rather thna against you.

View Larger Map

Many business executives and owners are among my readers. Also many folks who work in government agencies, belong to civic organizations, churches, clubs or just occasionally wish they could make a map for other people to find something of interest. I’ve written before about Google giving away what formerly were closely guarded as the “keys of the kingdom’ … map data. And now Google has made it even easier. It’s really pretty simple.

First go to www.maps.google.com.

This is the default view you will see. If you do not already have a Google Account you’ll need to set one up. I recommend getting a Google Mail (gmail) account, it’s very useful … but you can use any existing email account as your “Google Account”. Once you sign in with a valid Google account you’ll see that the “My maps” tab is active. You can make as many Google Maps in your account as you care to and Google stores them and serves them for you. This is really nice for a business that wants to make a special map of branch offices, clients, etc. It’s on Google but it’s under your own account and you control how public or private it is.

Navigate to where you want the map to “start” from … and decide if you want the “Map” view, overhead imagery (called “satellite” by Google but much of what is there is from aircraft flyovers). You also have the choice of a “Hybrid .. imagery with the streets overlayed … and in some areas of the country, a map with traffic reports.

A tip many don’t think about is that Google “knows” the airport codes for almost all airports, so if you are familiar with a city ionly by it’s airport, justtpe in the three (or four) letter code and you’re there.

Save and give the new map a title. If you click on my thumbnail above you’ll see the place I grew up, Lincoln park Airport in New Jersey. The ‘Net is very sow today and I wnat to make sure I can get this posted with the pictures, so the next part in building your own Google Map for Business ROI will follow shortly.

Enjoy your labor day weekend.

Dang, it’s September already?  Time surely does go fast when you are having fun!  I like to take a minute every month or so to give some credit where credit is due … even though this blog is strictly a one man show (any potential guest writes feel free to drop me a line)  it takes a lot of people behind the scene to keep the place running.

First and foremost there wouldn’t be any website to view if it were not for my good friends at www.qualityhostonline.com .  I’ve used these folks as my server provider for more than two years now.  Their plans are excellent and well priced and their support service is second to none.  As some of you know, although I am from the US and write mainly about US subjects I currently live in the Philippines (which I also blog about here: www.philfaqs.com).

Running servers from overseas presents some special challenges … not always server-related.  But an email about any issue, 24×7 to Quality Host always gets me an answer, right away quick.  Highly recommended.

The reason I know Quality Host is doing a good job for me are the folks at: http://www.hyperspin.com/index.php . They give me comprehensive 24×7 uptime service and thus I always know how the site is working.  They have many plans, some as low as f*r*e*e .. hard to beat that.  here’s a sample report: 

From: Aug 27 2007 12:00 AM (GMT +8:00)
To: Sep 03 2007 12:00 AM (GMT +8:00)

1. SatViz
- uptime: 100.000%
- downtime: 00min
- outage: 0

As my old friend Peter Drucker used to say, you can’t manage what you can’t measure … and that’s what Hyperspin does.  You can’t blog blind.  recommended.

If you have a blog or any other kind of web site there are two things you really would like to do … and that is get people to come and read what you produce and also to make a little money if you can.

That’s what TextLink Ads is all about.  They find advertisers who want to be listed on your site and pay you for the privilege.  They find sites who want advertisers and match them up.  And they also pay anyone for referring customers to TextLink Ads.  hard to beat if you ask me … I make money from them, you can too.

And I guess this post is already over-long and over commercial so I better close it up with a recommendation for the best in the business, Google AdSense.  Google introduced me to actually making money on line back in 2004 and they have been faithful payers ever since.  It’s not just the money from the ads that I like, either.  Unlike almost any other on-line advertiser, Google has a huge inventory of technical and scientific advertisers.  So when you come here to the GPS Tracking ROI blog and you want to learn about GPS tracking, you don’t (often) see ads for “how to tune a piano” or some other off-the-wall subject.  It’s called “contextual advertising” and there is no doubt in my mind that Google AdSense is tops.  Highly recommended.

OK, there’s more people to thank but no more time or space.  Thanks for reading and do make sure that you subscribe to my RSS feed also … just click the bog orange button up in the top right and never miss an issue.