GPS Tracking ROI

"Your call can not be completed as dialed, please deposit $14.00 and place your call again."

I have no idea what the cost would be, but if I had any hair lefty I would have pulled it out after reading this masterpiece of human thought …

… Police are obligated to treat 911 hang-up calls as a potential emergency. They try to locate the source of the call and call back to check for trouble and send an officer to the scene if contact can’t be established.

But these calls, coming from a deactivated Nextel phone that had been reprogrammed to dial only 911, couldn’t be tracked through the GPS capabilities most cell phones now have, Leatherman said. Police only knew they were coming from the north side of Kendallville.  Full article here.

Two boys decide to cause the sort of disruption that many young boys do.  They make false 911 calls, tying up police resources and potentially endangering others while emergency responders are off chasing the wild goose.

They used a cell phone.  Duh.  Federal law, based on many tragedies in the past, requires cell phone carriers to supply the location of 911 calls to applicable 911 PSAPs (Public Service Answering Points).  This can be done by means of phone-based GPS coordinates or other means (multilateration) are the choice of the phone carrier.  failing to provide the location is not a choice.

Phone carriers also participate in programs that allow phone owners to ‘downgrade’ old or unneeded phones so that they only call 911 … this the phone can stay ‘in the network’ and be live, with no one paying a monthly bill.

So .. when the phone is ‘downgraded" to emergency calls only, what features does the phone company take away?  Emergency Position Reporting!  How frickin’ dumb is that?

What id one of those calls had been a real emergency?  Not only would the victim have suffered, the phone company would, I believe, have been in violation of federal law.  The law was put in place (I’m no big fan of laws, but since the carriers were doing nada, this one was needed) to enable Emergency Services to find people in emergency situation.  By what right, authority or even drug-induced dream would a company "downgrade" the phone to remove the emergency location tracking?  And how dumb are the police and other public officials who are supposed to enforce the law .. all law … to just blindly accept this idiocy, because it seems to have been perpetrated by ‘the phone company’, rather than a private citizen?  Why even bother to have 911-only phone service if 911 service is not really provided?  Is a phone that doesn’t work any better than no phone at all?  Go figure.

Strictly speaking today’s feature isn’t about GPS tracking at all … but it certainly has been mad possible by the increased use of GPS and other location-based technologies, such as GIS (Geographic Information Services), encoding and Reverse encoding (converting between latitude and longitude and street addresses) and most importantly, the million-dollar Google Map services that out good grinds at Google furnish for free (or nearly free commercial) use.

I was reading news on a subject this morning completely removed from GPS or location issues when i came across an article describing what I was looking for on the Orlando sentinel’s excellent web site.

There I happened across a very interesting link that brings you to a page that lets you enter Zip Codes of neighborhoods you are interested in … say, perhaps, where you are thinking about buying a house … and you get back customized listings of crimes in that areas as furnished by law enforcement agencies.

Just a few years ago a map like this would have cost tens of thousands to develop and no newspaper in its right mind could have sponsored it.  But with modern web hosts and especially free or near-free Google Maps, the paper can now easily afford to post this sort of information as  a public service … and as a source of advertising income since thousands and thousands of "eye balls" visit each month.

Kudos to the Orlando Sentinel and the hardworking folks in law enforcement who help provide the information.  I think any city newspaper that isn’t doing this is really missing out on a great service as well as some nice ad revenue.

What use could your business, your city, your school district, your street department or your charitable organization make of the power of Google Maps and the compelling nature of location-based information.

Write me if you’d like more ideas … and Google?  Thank you guys, Google Maps is just more powerful than many can even imagine.

Here’s an interesting article with two important GPS tracking issues rolled into one….

MIAMI — Florida’s child welfare workers will soon be carrying Global Positioning System devices, similar to ones carried by UPS employees to track packages, (emphasis added) to electronically update case information during home visits and show they were made. The touch-screen devices will track the amount of time caseworkers spend with each family and provide a photographic record of children in state care, officials said Thursday. It will also provide proof that caseworkers went to the homes — a few have lied about that in the past, resulting in death and injury to children… Full Florida caseworker GPS article here.

Issue one is a great story that deserves a hat tip to Governor Crist and the state of Florida, which has been a leader in using GPS tracking to make government more efficient and citizens safer and better served.  This initiative will ‘catch’ the few caseworkers who goofed off or neglect their jobs, and will make life better for the vast majority who want to do a good job, by automating the collection of job-related data and proving the who, what where and hen of great job performance.

Issue two, however is the part I highlighted in red, however.  if only it were true.  We’ve reached the point now where any handheld device seems to be taken as a GPS device by the news media and the public in general … it’s nice in a way … but totally incorrect and leads to a lot of wasted time and motion in business, raising the costs of doing business to everyone.

The handheld’s carried by UPS (and FedEx) delivery persons are not GPS tracking devices, and the fact that major delivery companies have steadfastly refused to move to this technology coast them … and use users … millions.  When a UP driver scans the code on your package, what gets recorded is the date and time of the delivery and/or signature event.  But the location?  Not part of the equation.

As one who has driven many a weary mile trying to find delivered packages taken to the wrong address … or wasted many an hour when I should have been on the road waiting for a package whose location data was "On truck for delivery" at 8 am, and finally came to the door at 5 or 6 pm, I really can’t understand why these companies, otherwise leaders in technology have steadfastly refused to enter "real" location data into their business equation.

These companies affix a bar coded label to your package at the time it is turned in for shipment.  After the first scan the package enters the system with a location listed as the office you turned the package in to.  From there on, the package passes through certain gateways where it again scanned, showing the major stops along the way.  But once the package is released to the local delivery driver you have no clue as to where the package is until it reaches your door … if, in fact it does reach your door.

You really haven’t lived the realities of small business until you have an installation crew, ready to depart on an evening flight for a scheduled installation the following morning … non-refundable tickets in hand, hotel reservations made, rental car waiting, etc. and then seen the USP status of the thousands of dollars of product they were waiting for change to delivered … when in fact it hasn’t been delivered to your office at all … but instead went to a different address miles away.

This happens, sadly, more often than you might think, and yet the newspapers, TV stations, etc. give the package companies free false advertising that convinces the general public of a lie … that the package is being GPS tracked.  Sad.

REAL-TIME ASSET TRACKING
03/14/2007
Stemco’s ‘BAT RF’ system has been teamed with the SkyBitz Global Locating System (GLS) to offer mileage readings in conjunction with real-time trailer tracking. They’ll provide a direct interface between the two to enable accurate trailer mileage readings. Availability is mid-year 2007.
Using a wireless module installed with the SkyBitz GLS 200 trailer-tracking unit, the Stemco TracBAT wireless hubodometer transmits mileage updates along with the vehicle location data to the SkyBitz website. These reports can easily be downloaded into Microsoft Excel for customer billing as well as preventive-maintenance scheduling.
SkyBitz says this makes it the first trailer-tracking provider to enable up-to-the-minute mileage reports. Having access to actual mileage readings will take the guesswork out of scheduling preventive maintenance, Stemco says…More here:

A mile is not always a mile … especially when you measure it with GPS. Only in some special cases (such as the GeoTab units I used to sell) can a GPS Tracking unit actually give you an accurate mileage readout. GPS is accurate enough but most units only computer their position every minute, two minute and even up to 15 or 30 or more minute intervals. because roads aren’t straight the line drawn between locations points is a straight line, but the vehicle’s path isn’t … leading GPS-obtained mileage to be significantly low.

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Had a lot of interest from my post a few days ago about the “Strange” map using existing US states to illustrate international Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Poking around on the same site I came across this most interesting map. I always thought the states of Australia were laid out a little bit strange. Now it looks as if back in the beginning they could have been laid out even worse. Or better, guess it depends upon how you look at it.

This is a map from one of the original Australian provisional conferences where the plan for dividing up the country into individual states and forming a federation first was undertaken.

It looks to me as if they were a little too concerned with geometry and finding a way to make the states somewhat equal in size. Go take a look at the Strange Maps Australian Proposal full size, read the informative write-up and come back and tell me what you think.

March 13, 2007
Nissan Motors Co., Ltd. is entering the next test-phase of its intelligent transportation system (ITS) project, employing vehicle-to-infrastructure communication that allows synchronized communication between vehicles and traffic light signals. Nissan will invest in the installation of an advanced traffic signal infrastructure within the site of the Nissan Technical Center, located in the Kanagawa Prefecture, to collect real-world vehicle data from several hundred employee cars participating in the project.
The new advanced traffic system will help reduce accidents as well as ease traffic congestion - specifically at traffic light intersections - leading to improved on-the-road fuel consumption. Since October 2006, Nissan has been conducting various experiments under its ITS Project in Kanagawa to help reduce accidents and ease traffic congestion… Read the full Telematics Journal description here:

I’ve been working … a bit slowly I must admit … on some further updates to my series on GPS (and other sensor devices) for Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS). In the middle of researching a number of companies … thanks again to Robert Stack for the pictures used here and the ITS tips, I came across the Nissan news item featured above.

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You’ve seen me talk about the usefulness and the distinct return on investment (ROI) of tracking your city’s public transportation with GPS many times in the past. One of the principal reasons you get an ROI is the fact that it makes your system more accessible and useful to the rider … ergo … better returns in the farebox.

Aside from the cost of equipping your vehicles the really big cost of systems like this is making the data available to the public. Specialized transportation route maps are expensive to produce and, if you’ve ever looked at many of them there’s a depressing lack of standardization and user friendliness between different systems. What to do? here’s this Mr. GPS guy advocating that we spend our hard-earned tax dollar again, right?

Wrong. Mr. GPS says … Google it! See the nice little map snippet? Looks familiar, even at this scale. The gray line down the right-hand side is a test trip planning route I plugged into the system and got back a (literally) step by step route that told me when I could leave, how far I had to walk, what public transport to take for the main part of the trip, and how much it would cost me.

If you don’t recognize the mapped area, it is down town Portland, Oregon. And how much does this service cost Portland you might ask? Zero. Zip. Nada. No cost. It’s one of many cities already accommodated in Google’s Transit Trip Planner, part of the ever-growing Google labs.

I’ve already shown you numerous times how cities can put their live GPS tracking data on Google Maps, making it available to the public. Now, even if you don’t have live data, Google can make your transit system sing, for residents and visitors alike.

To test the usefulness to visitors I changed the parameters of my search and typed in PDX as my distant end. PDX is the three-letter airport designator for the Portland airport .. don’t worry you don’t have to remember it, it will be plastered all over your luggage and ticket if you fly to Portland. Why would I care about the airport designator for a tool like this? That’s easy. Quick, give me street address of your closest airport. Give me the street address for the Los Angeles International Airport? bet you don’t have it memorized (it’s LAX Airport, 7301 World Way West, Los Angeles, CA 90045 by the way) but travelers all over the world understand LAX, and so does Google. Clever.

Here’s how you would get from the original test address to Portland’s airport, the times you can leave, the costs and every thing you need to travel smartly and arrive on time, as cheaply as possible and in an environmentally sound manner. (more…)