GPS Tracking ROI

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.

I’ve written several times before about GPS shoes.   This particular item here is a re-cycle if I’m not mistaken, it came from Wired Magazine’s blog in response to an initiative of the Aphrodite projects, an international organization devoted to making life safer for sex workers.  learn more about the Aphrodite project here.

Now in today’s Shrub oops, sorry Carnivore, I meant George W. Bush’s ‘eye for an eye”, “blame the victim” world perhaps you don’t really think protection of street walkers has any validity.  It’s OK with me if you want to just say, “let the sluts die” but you should read a little farther into the program and learn from the technique they are using.

Encapsulating a GPS receiver into a shoe is a lot easier than these ugly monstrosities make it look … perhaps they could bring Jimmy Choo or even Manolo on board for a little style advice.  The interesting part is not the ugliness but the fact that unlike almost any GPS people locating effort these guys have been smart enough not to put themselves in the clutches of the major phone (cellular) carriers … you might want to read this post, Mr. Jobs.

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Being in business is both simple and difficult.  The simple part is just filling in the blanks on a day-to-day basis.  Put the products in the trucks, send the trucks off on their daily missions, collect the fees, fill out the government forms … on and on it goes, but believe me this isn’t difficult.  Time consuming, mind-numbing, irritating, all that and more, but administrivia is not what business success is really about.

The difficult part is having vision, thinking strategically and making the decisions that some law or government agency didn’t force you to make.  That’s the truly hard part of running a business.  And because it’s the most difficult, in life’s overall scheme of fairness, it’s also the most rewarding.

My colleague, Rob Donat runs a GPS Tracking company that I’ve mentioned here before … GPS Insight, based in Arizona.  Rpob is the kind of businessman and service provider I would want in my corner.  I’m shamelessly plagiarizing a recent post he made about the hidden benefits of GPS tracking (one of my favorite subjects) simply because he lays out the problem and solution better than I could and this is valuable stuff … if you are trying to make a living in business you need to take a look at this and think it through.

This all boils down to the phrase that ESRI president Jack Dangerfield coined some years back … the “Power of Place”.  There is virtually no business data and no business decisions that do not have location and geography as part of the equation.  Problem is, businesses often don’t properly consider “place” in the business process.  GPS tracking isn’t a cure for this problem, but it’s an important tool that lets you make location part of the decision process.

Read Rob’s excellent analysis of a business making an informed decision about serving a lone, remote customer and notice how often locations and the demographics of a location fit into a well thought out decision.  Remember as I always say, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”

Years ago, through Peter Dana’s tutorials and other sources I learned about alternative tracking systems to be used as a substitute or enhancement to the geographic standard of latitude/longitude reference systems.  Except for a line inscribed in the floor of the Royal Naval Observatory, Greenwich, latitude and longitude are not directly related to the earth … nor are they necessary to define a position on the earth’s surface.

We grew used to using lat/long though and it seems to have become a world standard.  Doesn’t mean there isn’t room for another standard, especially one able to be expressed in standard textual methods and one capable of being expended in accuracy over and over:

NAC Enhanced Google Earth Flies You to Natural Wonders with Universal Addresses  
Thursday, 16 August 2007
August 20, 2007, Toronto, Canada, NAC Geographic Products Inc. announced the release of the NAC Enhanced Google Earth (NAC Earth) with a new user interface to bridge Natural Area Codes (NAC) and Google Earth through Google Earth’s COM APIs to provide a truely language-independent, geographic coverage complete and highly efficient way for users to fly around, search nearby businesses and get driving directions on Google Earth no matter a destination is a famous museum with street address or a newly found natural wonder without street address…

Very useful idea and very interesting potential for the future of location-based services.  Can we get the world to change how they express position?  Sounds like a daunting task to me, but if anyone can do it, I’d bet on Larry and Sergy.

Sometimes the simplest things just turn on one of those cartoon image “light bulbs” in my mind.  One would think this idea would just be so intuitive it is too simple to post.  But then, reviewing years of watching people using various models of GPS navigators and GPS tracking systems one realizes one would be wrong.  So …

Talking Electronics: The GPS zoom

By Bill Diedrich, Special to the Star Tribune

Last update: August 08, 2007 – 1:37 AM

The zoom feature on your GPS helps improve your destination accuracy. As you approach your destination, continue to zoom in, 1 mile, 0.1 mile, 0.05 mile. This allows you to accurately interpret your waypoint location. Here’s why: One pixel on a 480-pixel-width screen and a 1-mile scale represents 11 feet; on a 0.1-mile scale one pixel represents 0.9 feet. Smaller scale, more accurate interpretation.   Full article here:

Bill Diedrich Of Minnetonka Is A Retired Math Teacher With A Love Of Fishing electronics…

Simplistic?  You bet.  Needed?  You bet.  Another simple trick that seems not so intuitive is to adjust your screen resolution when viewing GPS tracking data on your computer.  Today’s monitors are capable of absolutely astounding screen resolution but they normally default to a lowest common denominator like 1024×768 or even (I see them coming to this site all the time) 640×480.  This is like buying expensive eyeglasses and leaving them home while you sightsee .. or subscribing to HBO and watching your TV through a tiny square cut in cardboard and taped over the screen … widen up, sharpen up, zoom in and enjoy … you’ll be glad Bill and I told you to once you try it.

A lot of my posts fall under the general category of negativity … why don’t more people use GPS, why doesn’t this work that way, etc.  Well today the positive thinkers can rejoice.  I’m positive this is a great idea and I’m positive a lot of smart people out there are going to take up on this product.

As many of you know there are three main components to GPS tracking.  The GPS system itself … 24 plus satellites in orbit continuously broadcasting timing messages and system status reports to the second component … a GPS receiver that calculates its position mathematically from the signals it receives.  There is very little difference in any GPS tracking system up to this point in the equation.  Some use more satellites than others, some calculate position to a greater degree of accuracy, some solve the positioning equation more often than others … but at the consumer and business owner levels these differences don’t matter all that much.

What does matter, and matters large, especially in countries like the US, Canada, Australia and others with wide open spaces is the third leg in the three-legged stool of GPS tracking.  “The Backhaul”.  In order to get any useful information for personal tracking, business tracking or emergency search and rescue location, the positron calculated by the receiver has got to be brought back to the user/business operations center/search and rescue command post.  Without this part of the puzzle there is no reason to even consider GPS tracking … remember the GPS does not “track” anything … it only provides the means to calculate a positron for the asset you want to track.  Until that positron is on your screen, in the words of Tony Soprano’s lawyers, “You have bupkus.”

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A recap in case you didn’t read the first part of this series … here … we are talking about what a commercial vehicle actual is, as defined by the FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration) and what commercial vehicles might be exempt from the general FCMSA requirement for RODS (Record Of Duty Status), commonly known in the business as a “Logbook”.

If your vehicles fall into one of the groups that do not require the maintenance of driver logbooks, don’t jump to another subject too quickly. Many activities your vehicles are engaged in might “cross the line” into RODS territory at a moment’s notice. Work hour records are almost always required as well … and if a vehicle or driver goes into an activity that does require RODS, remember that you are going to have to be able to “reconstruct” the work hours of the driver, perhaps as far back as the preceding 10 or 11 days (7 or 8 workdays and the last time the driver can be shown to have been “free of duties” for 34 continuous hours) in order to prove he or she is “legal” to drive. These rules aren’t like criminal law, where the state has the obligation to prove guilt. The FMCSA can assert that you and/or your driver violated the rules and the burden will be upon you to prove them wrong. This is one reason I have always been surprised at the reluctance of so many businesses to maintain detailed and provable records … the cost of not doing so can be far, far greater than the cost of keeping the records.

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