Dynamic Phone Number

CALL 866-GPS-4321
GPS Fleet Tracking System

GPS Insight Blog

Syndicate content
Advanced GPS Fleet Tracking
Updated: 51 min 7 sec ago

Tracking Keir across the desert in Chile

Tue, 2010/03/09 - 14:14


My Brother-in-law Keir Oxley is at it again, doing another “Racing the Planet” 126 mile extreme race through the desert in Chile (his blog is available here).

Last time we tracked him through the Sahara Desert.

They are raising money for earthquake victims.  Again we are tracking him using a TT-1900, which weighs 5.9 ounces, and reports world-wide, every hour.

So far he has gone 22 miles (we show about 19 since the tracking device only transmits once an hour and he’s not traveling in a straight line):

Keir traveling across the Chilean desert (Atacama crossing)

I’ll try to keep the site updated with tracking screen shots.

Good luck Keir!

Rob.

Not all ski slope GPS Tracking devices are made equal

Tue, 2010/03/09 - 13:54


I’m on a vacation at Park City Utah, and I have a new app for my iPhone called Navionics. It lets you see where all the ski trails are, and search for them, as well as track your own trail.

It’s got great features, but is a shining example of how inaccurate phones are for tracking purposes.  The “pins” are GPS Insight, and the little yellow “O”s are my Garmin Edge 705.  The red line which goes off the mountain then back at the top of the lift is the iPhone based tracking device.  I did not go over the side of the mountain, trust me…

GPS Insight vs. Cell Phone Tracking

It’s a nice app nonetheless – here are a few screen shots:

Ski trails on Navionics

List of trails you can choose to see in NAVIONICS

Highlighting a single trail in NAVIONICS

But when you take the inaccurate iPhone “track” which NAVIONICS provides out of the map, you can see that GPS Insight (light blue) and the Garmin 705 (red) are both very accurate.  The GPS Insight EZ-1000 was set for 1 minute updates, and the Garmin is about 10 seconds between points.  The big difference is the EZ-1000 transmits its location every minute, and with the Garmin (meant for bike riding), you need to upload the data when you get back to a PC.

GPS Insight vs. Garmin to track snowboarding

The speeds even match up pretty closely:

snowboard speed using GPS

Note that this view (from the Garmin website) shows both speed AND elevation (so you can see I went on the long run 4 times, & smaller runs 5 times through the day):

GPS Tracking snowboard activity & speed

That was enough to kill my newbie snowboarder legs, so I’m taking today off & have plenty of time to write about it…

Rob.

Drag and Drop to create Fleet Tracking Maps in GPS Insight’s dashboard

Mon, 2010/03/01 - 14:34


We just added a couple nice new capabilities to make it trivial to create a map on the GPS Insight dashboard by dragging and dropping either a single vehicle or the name of the group up at the top of the dashboard.

Just be careful to move dashlets by dragging on the RIGHT side of the title bar now (or you’ll create a map accidentally).

Here’s a quick video which shows how to do it:


Thanks,

Rob

GPS Insight checks our BILLIONTH alert !

Tue, 2010/02/23 - 07:05


Sometime yesterday GPS Insight checked our ONE BILLIONTH alert for our customers.

Every night I get a small report showing how many checks and how many actual alerts have been processed/sent.

GPS Insight checks our one billionth GPS Tracking alert

Last night it showed that we have passed ONE BILLION alert checks, and just over one MILLION alerts (1,036,790 to be exact).

Again, just about one in one thousand times GPS Insight checks your vehicles’ status, we send you an alert email or Text Message about it.

That’s the beauty of managing the exceptions — GPS Insight does everything for you, and you just find out once every thousand times we check — once a minute per vehicle.

FYI, the popularity of alerts is in this order:

idling alerts, speeding alerts, odd hour alerts, geofence alerts, long stop alerts, panic alerts, and powercycle alerts.

Rob.

Better GPS Tracking than EZ-1000’s for Skiing

Sun, 2010/02/21 - 22:14


I took my  boys (7 & 9) skiing (snowboarding they correct me every time…) up to Flagstaff AZ this weekend.

I brought my Garmin Edge 705 (a Garmin for bikes, basically) & put it in my coat pocket to get a really good feel for where we went during the weekend.  It logs every 10 seconds for eventual upload (vs. once a minute in real time for the EZ-1000 I brought along as well).

Garmin EDGE 705

They are really nice, and we don’t sell them — I bought mine at the bike shop.  [We do sell Garmin's for vehicles and can integrate them with our GPSI-4000 GPS tracking solution though...]

The Garmin is an optimist, and thinks I ran up all those hills & burned 5248 calories in the process (had I brought the wireless heart monitor it would have known better):

Garmin's interpretation of my Skiing with my kids

This is a great image of GPS Insight vs. Garmin (bear in mind we are an “ACTIVE” tracking system whereas the Garmin is “PASSIVE” and needs you to upload the data eventually):

GPS Insight vs. Garmin for ski tracking

The “pins” are EZ-1000 points [every minute while in cell coverage, which is spotty on the mountain].  The yellow circles are Garmin points (a LOT more of them).

Here is the Garmin unit track of where we went (and where I remembered to turn the unit on…):

Skiing at Snowbowl in Flagstaff AZ

It’s nice to have that for sports usage.  But if you want to track your vehicles in real time, that’s not an option — you need an active tracking solution like GPS Insight. Both are great products — just for entirely different needs.

And here are my cold kids.  Lots of snow this weekend, and way colder than they’re used to living in the desert.

Rob's kids in their cold-weather snowboarding attire

Rob.

REALLY convenient new mapping feature — drag a vehicle onto the dashboard to create an instant “follow me” map

Thu, 2010/02/18 - 20:22


Recently a prospective customer asked us to add a “half-height” map. We did that within a few days (as well as a 2x, 3x height map).

When using it though, I thought it took too long to use the menus to choose the right vehicle, etc.

I decided it would be really convenient to allow the user to “tear off” a vehicle from a location, alert, etc. dashlet.

Now you can just drag & drop ANY VEHICLE from any dashlet onto the dashboard to create an instant half-height “follow this vehicle” map:

Drag a vehicle to instantly create a half-height "follow this vehicle" map

As soon as you drop the “map” icon which is displayed, that vehicle is now displaying in a map which follows it, and shows all of the vehicles from the group associated with the dashlet you dragged it from (this was a complaint from the prospective customer about their current vendor — this type of map only showed the single vehicle):

Instantly create 5 maps just by dragging 5 vehicles to the dashboard

We let you show up to 8 maps per dashboard window.  This took me 2 seconds per moving vehicle to create these maps using this new capability.  We will start allowing other drag & drop capabilities on the dashboard now that we’ve started to use this type of functionality.

Really convenient!  Remember, if you want to keep this particular layout, you need to save it or save as in the hierarchy save tools:

Save your Hierarchy Changes!

As usual, if you have any tips or requests for new capabilities or ideas, please let us know!

Thanks,

Rob.

Powerful new Hierarchy capability — save a custom Hierarchy Group

Thu, 2010/02/18 - 20:07


We now have support for saving a custom hierarchical view — as well as using that in a scheduled report.

We still have not given access to the hierarchy to all customers, but are happy to allow you access as a beta customer if you just ask.

Here’s how it works:

When running a report, select “Custom Hierarchy Selection”:

Saving a Custom Hierarchy Selection

Then after running the report, an intermediate screen is shown where you can choose/exclude any groups from the hierarchies you have defined:

Drag and Drop hierarchy nodes to include them in the custom group

Choose another hierarchy and drag/drop nodes to “intersect” (restrict to the vehicles in the SouthWest which are Delivery, Parts, or Service), and “exclude” (in this case get rid of all Nevada and “big rig’s.”

Restricting to just the 55 vehicles you need

Then save this highly custom group as “MySavedHierarchy” by typing the group name and pressing “save.”

Saving a custom hierarchy group

Then click on “Run Report” to run the report you started & you’ll see that the Vehicle Group is a Custom Hierarchy with those 55 vehicles:

Report based on a custom hierarchy

(tip: make sure to refresh the main site to pick up the newly created hierarchy group in the main menu) Now you can use it to run any report moving forward:

Recalling a saved hierarchy group for running your GPS Tracking reports

Additionally, they now show up under scheduled report choices:

Use a Custom Hierarchy Group in your scheduled reports

Any time you make a change to your hierarchy structure or members moving forward, they will automatically be reflected in the ad-hoc or scheduled reports you run using that custom group.

This is a big deal for large organizations since they can “intersect” multiple functional/organizational/geographic groups of vehicles very easily without having to manually (tediously) create groups for every combination of interest.

Rob.

GPS Insight sends out our Millionth Alert!

Wed, 2010/02/17 - 01:32


GPS Insight sends out our Millionth Alert

GPS Insight sent out our millionth alert on Sunday, February 14.  GPS Insight has checked just shy of one BILLION alerts, so that means that only one out of 1,000 driver events is “exceptional.”  Depending on how the alerts are defined, that could be good or bad…

Either way, we’re glad to be sending these to our customers, and ensuring they know what is happening with their fleets at all times — day or night, 24 hours a day, 60 minutes an hour.

If you’re not using our alerts, you should be — let us do the work.  “Set it and forget it!”

Rob.

About to send our MILLIONTH Alert and perform our BILLIONTH Alert Check

Wed, 2010/02/03 - 23:50


I have a daily report which comes to me which tells me how close we are to hitting 2 major Alert milestones:

GPS Insight's Millionth Alert and Billionth Check are coming soon!

We are very close to sending our MILLIONTH alert out.

Shortly thereafter (unless drivers stop causing alerts which, uh, isn’t very likely…), we will process our BILLIONTH alert check.

We process a huge number of alerts checks and send quite a few each day.

In the short time I’ve been typing this blog article, we have processed 15,282 checks, yielding a relatively small number of alerts — 3.

This is because it’s night and most of our customers’ drivers aren’t driving, let alone speeding, idling, or going in or out of landmarks.  Chances are those were odd-hours alerts…

I’ll let everyone know when we hit these marks.

[worth noting, on 8/15/2009, when I last wrote about this, we were only at 350 million checks and 419,000 alerts.  Customers are really starting to utilize our alerts more now than they have in the past]

Rob.

New Map Dashlet size & “Follow Me” capabilities

Wed, 2010/02/03 - 23:28


We recently made some new enhancements to our Dashboard Maps.

Now you can size them in any of 4 heights (and the width is determined by the dashboard style you choose).

Additionally, we allow you to display 8 maps per window now, vs. 4. You can still open as many windows as your PC is OK with.

In addition, we now allow you to “follow” a single vehicle, and display ALL the vehicles around it (determined by which vehicle group you choose).

Here is a screen shot of 3 “half-height” maps which are all “following” a different vehicle (noted in the title area of each map):

3 "Follow me" half-height maps in GPS Insight's Dashboard

These are only the right-most column of the full dashboard, which has a “twice-height map in the middle:

New multi-height maps within GPS Insight

You can choose which vehicle or vehicle group to SHOW, which landmark group to DISPLAY, which vehicle or vehicle group to FOLLOW, and which zoom level to use.  Additionally, the same Map Group choices apply so you can “tie” these maps to the other various dashlets (e.g. location, alerts, landmarks, etc.).

As always, click on the “pencil” icon at the top right of the map dashlet to open the edit settings screen which looks like this:

GPS Insight Map Dashlet Settings

Make sure to save your dashboard here:

Save your changes to the GPS Insight dashboard!

An upcoming enhancement will allow you to simply “tear off” a vehicle from a dashlet to automatically show that vehicle in a “follow me” map, which will make it quicker to create these ad-hoc maps for vehicles you may have a short term interest in following closely.

Rob.

HUGE safety addition to GPS Insight — the Speed Summary Report

Tue, 2010/02/02 - 18:24


This new report shows the speeding and “slow-poke” tendencies of your individual drivers.

It can be run for a month at a time, and is available here (we are running the report for just the OKL group for the month of January):

Launching the GPS Insight Speed Summary report

Here is the part which allows you to rank by any of the major columns (click on the column heading) and you can see that OKL-69633-Service-Jasoncb is the top speeder on average. This is relative to the speed limit ONLY when he is exceeding the speed limit.

Ranking your speeders using GPS Insight's new Speed Summary Report

Conversely, you can click on “Laggard Avg” which will give you the top “slow-poke” (tie between the Manager and Chadc). This is ONLY when the driver is going LESS than the posted speed limit.

This is useful because both activities are undesirable. Padding hours by going slow is just as bad as being reckless and wasting fuel by speeding.

Clicking on any of the “at a glance” graphs to the right brings up a graph which compares a single driver’s speeding profile to the the entire group:

Graphically showing differences between a driver and the group average

This is the 4th in a series of enhancements to our speeding reports and graphs.

Since occasional discrepancies between GPS Insight’s data and actual posted speed limits occur, we have found it much more useful to run on a month-by-month “Macro” level to indicate undeniable trends in speeding.

Future enhancements will include posted speed limit alerts, group-by-group comparisons of speeding/lagging trends, and historical comparisons to prove that progress has been made in improving efficiency and curbing speeding using GPS Insight reports and alerts. Additionally, certain fields within these reports will launch supporting reports (e.g. a speeding report for just that single vehicle, to include violations on a map, etc.). Rapid acceleration and deceleration will be detected and reported upon for certain GPS Insight devices (notably the GO-3000 and GPSI-4000).

This report is available for all customers immediately, and currently has data going back to December 2009. We will add support for earlier months as we add functionality.

Thanks,
Rob.

Lots of new dashboard features just released!

Sat, 2010/01/23 - 11:25


We have been busy this month and released several new features to the dashboard (as well as posted speed limit reports/graphs which I will talk about separately).

First, there are new dashboard layouts, and they are more intuitively labeled:

Intuitive dashboard styles

Choosing “2 wide L” will give you a wider column on the left and a thinner column on the right.  Choosing “4 wide” will give you 4 columns.  These various layouts are useful depending on what type of style you like for your dashboard setup.

As always, after making changes, make sure to save your dashboard settings!

Next, we have added the ability to send routes to Garmins from the Route Dashlet.

After optimizing a route with the route dashlet (and optional feature), just choose a Garmin-integrated vehicle and click on send — the optimized route is sent instantly to that Garmin:

Send a full optimized route to a Garmin

Send a full optimized route to a Garmin

Last, we made our “closest to” dashlet more useful by adding both drive distance and drive time, in addition to the “crow flies” distance which is all we previously supported.  You can sort by any of the columns, choose your vehicle, and click on the “dispatch” button if you are using Garmin integration:

Closest To Dashlet includes drive distance/time now

And for users of the dashboard map book tool which turns an address into a map book page/grid coordinate, you can now “sanity check” the location by clicking on “Map Address” — it will pull up a convenient map for you to make sure you typed it correctly & have a reasonable address:

Sanity check your mapbook addresses now in the dashlet

And another recent dashlet worth mentioning again — the legend.  Now you can have a convenient reference to what the various colors and vehicle icon shapes mean:

GPS Insight map legend

Thanks for using these new capabilities and we appreciate your feedback which has led to their creation.

Rob.

We have launched our brand new GPS Insight website!

Sat, 2010/01/23 - 10:52

After months of work, we are pleased to announce a brand new www.gpsinsight.com!

The new one will allow us to keep our rapidly enhanced product better documented for our customers and prospective customers.

Brand New GPS Insight website

Additionally, we have begun work on a comprehensive training site at training.gpsinsight.com.  This site will allow us to keep all of the documentation for GPS Insight up to date and available for both customers and prospective customers.

Brand New GPS Insight Training website

Please check them both out and expect many new features and much more content for both coming soon!

Thanks,
Rob.

Finding my snowboarding kid on the mountain with GPS Insight

Tue, 2010/01/19 - 23:27

I pretty much have a never-ending supply of EZ-1000’s so I brought one skiing with my 2 boys on a recent trip.

Jack, my older son, is old enough to go skiing (boarding, he would correct me) without me.  Actually, he has officially passed me by — he does black runs I refuse to do (small on a board is way better than big on skis when it comes to moguls).

I wanted to know where he was at one point so I ran a quick mobile map on my iPhone & put it in “compass mode” so I could see what direction he was from me.

Here it is (I’m the blue dot, Jack is the red pin):

GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain

Here he really was (my eyes are better than the 3 megapixel camera on the iPhone…) — note that he’s between the lift & the ski patrol “house” just like the map shows it:

GPS Insight EZ-1000 tracks my snowboarding son on the mountain

I ran a 3D history of that device for the 2 days I remembered to bring it and put it in Jack’s pocket & it puts him exactly where my iPhone shows him at 1:44 (note the time in the first screen shot).  Waiting 4 minutes at the bottom of the hill for his 2 friends:

Showing skiing activity using an EZ-1000 from GPS Insight

Also interesting is the straight lines which depict the lifts very clearly.  The main lifts are in the “clutter” of dots on the left side, but the lifts we went on once each are really easy to spot toward the top right.

It’s easy to see which runs got the most use by turning off the “time slider” and looking at just the blue path:

GPS Tracking my son on the ski (board) slopes

Here are my two boarders:

Jack & Ryan on a snowboarding trip

And by looking at the GPS track as well as how well he was jumping and grinding, I can tell Jack went through the terrain park most of all:

Jack grinding/jumping off a box in the terrain park

I’ll try embedding a Facebook video I have of him going through the terrain park here:

Rob.

New Graphs showing speeding relative to speed limit

Thu, 2010/01/14 - 16:31

Next week we will release this new capability which will be part of the Activity Detail Report.  Next month you will be able to run it for all the vehicles in your fleet and sort in a way that you can identify your Lead-Foots, your Slow-Pokes, and your efficient, safe drivers:

Identify which drivers are going too fast or too slow relative to the speed limit

This is a really useful report, and is just the beginning of many new graph-oriented capabilities we plan to release in 2010.

Here is a close-up of just the graph area which shows the driver efficiency — within 10 MPH of the limit 44% of the time:

Efficient Driving Graph in GPS Insight

Rob.

I lost my keys — and got to use our improved Driver-to-Vehicle Mapping as a result

Sat, 2010/01/09 - 18:43

I lost my keys the other day which is awesome. I think they’re in a toy chest somewhere courtesy of my daughter.

So today after we rolled out a new improved Driver-to-Vehicle mapping product, I grabbed a new DriverID at work and put it on my (new) keychain.

I forgot to “log in” — we do however support mandatory login using a really obnoxious buzzer which goes off after 30 seconds until you press the driver ID button to the reader.

So after dinner, I decided to test everything for myself. Since I’m not the only person who will lose a DriverID or their keys, we made sure to make it easy to give out & assign new driverID’s.

After my drive, I logged in and launched the right administrative screen where we see 3 unassigned driverID buttons — one has been used in my car (Rob 4000) and has today’s date and a recent time.

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So I choose my previously defined Driver record with the drop-down:

Assign a new DriverID button within GPS Insight

So then we run an activity detail report for my vehicle for today to see the driverID switch.  My “wife’s” driverID had been recently assigned to my car, so the change was very apparent.  (I quote “wife” not because she’s not real, but she doesn’t really use a driverID — she might be more colorful than some of our customers’ drivers about telling me where to put my driverID if I asked her to use one…)

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

So here’s the switch — exactly when I took the car for a quick spin around the neighborhood:

Run a GPS Insight GPS Tracking report to show a new driver assignment

And here is my path with my name now in the Driver field within the information bubble:

New DriverID assigned to my vehicle after losing my keys

After working diligently lately, we’ve streamlined this process as much as possible for as many use case/problem cases (e.g. drivers losing their keys…) as possible, and it’s trivial to reassign a new driverID to a driver now.

I wish we tracked keys though…

[Side note, I found them today, 1/24/10, finally, outside by the hose, rusted after a couple weeks of sitting out in the rain, but the car door openers still work...]

Rob.

Dashboard Maps now include Landmarks!

Sat, 2010/01/09 - 11:45

We have recently added the ability to view a single group (or all) of your landmarks within GPS Insight’s dashboard maps.

Here is how you do it:

Click on Edit (the pencil icon) then choose your group of landmarks, and click “Apply”:

Including landmarks within GPS Insight Dashboard Maps

They show up in both Map as well as Satellite/Hybrid views:

Including landmarks within GPS Insight Dashboard Maps

Large landmark groups are not allowed due to typical browser limitations.  If you need to include more than 500 landmarks, GPS Insight’s 3D Mapping is the way to go and can handle thousands, probably even tens of thousands depending on your PC.

All users have access to this convenient capability.  Please be sure to use it!

Thanks,
Rob.

New Routing Dashlet capabilities — save fuel by streamlining your drivers’ daily route!

Sat, 2010/01/09 - 11:32

This feature really helps to make sure you are saving miles/hours/dollars by streamlining your drivers’ daily route!

Before I talk about this, please realize that the routing dashlet is not a standard feature, and is included with our routing package, which is an enhancement to the base GPS Insight product. You may not have access to it currently.  Call your salesperson for information.

Here is a new ability we added to the Route dashlet:

You can enter multiple addresses as always, as well as a start/stop landmark.

GPS Insight routing dashlet

Click on Optimize to get the proper order (which you can cut and paste into an email to the driver, etc.):

Click on GPS Insight's "Map This" button for optimized directions

Here is the result:

Map and directions for optimized set of destinations

You can click on print, send (email), or link (to cut/paste a direct link) at the top right for your convenience.

We will add more functionality to this dashlet over time (e.g. more landmark/landmark group inclusion, optimization options, Garmin integration, etc.).

If you would like to try it out and you are not an existing routing customer, please call us for a 14 day trial.

Thanks,

Rob.

Rob.

Very cool new feature — 30 Day History in 3D Current Mapping

Fri, 2010/01/08 - 15:21

A big customer of ours wanted their sales vehicles to be able to pull up where they have been for the past 30 days.

This is so they could “eyeball” where they have been within their territory & how recently they’ve been there, where they’ve stopped, etc.

Here is where you can go to get this new functionality now:

30 Day History Map within GPS Insight

This will show my vehicle’s location for the past 30 days, plus today.  We color the vehicle’s history from yellow to green, and with thin lines representing older activity, thicker lines representing newer activity.

Then we show the full “today” line in Blue (thin-to-thick indicates the time of travel) and the link updates every minute.

We limit this functionality to a single vehicle since it is pretty computationally intensive, and since the purpose is for the driver to run it for his or her own vehicle on their laptop with an aircard.

The yellow lines are “older” activity, & the thicker green lines are more “recent” activity.  The Blue lines are the current day’s activity and the red dot is the current status, along with information which shows up when it is clicked:

GPS Insight 30 day history plus current status map

If desired, the stops themselves can be displayed by “opening” the time slider on the top right:

Viewing stops within GPS Insight's 30 Day History/Current Status GPS Tracking map

This is available for all of our customers with access to 3D Mapping using Google Earth.

It’s mostly useful if you’re driving around, trying to figure out where you HAVEN’T been in the past 15-30 days — perfect for salespeople who need to cover a territory and do a lot of driving around, looking for customers.

I’m sure other uses for this capability will show up — as always, let us know if you need a slightly different version for your exact requirements.

Thanks,

Rob.

2 major new additions coming in January 2010 to GPS Insight!

Mon, 2010/01/04 - 17:52

Well, the holidays are over, and we’re getting back to business at GPS Insight.

There are 2 MAJOR additions coming in January.

  1. We will release our Posted Speed Limit Report late this week or early next week
  2. We will release an iPhone App toward the end of January (although Apple may take longer to approve for the App Store than that)

The Posted Speed Limit Report will let you know where your drivers are driving fast relative to the actual speed limit.  It will come with other graphing enhancements to our regular speed alerts which will let you graph the 30 minutes before & after the speeding event in order to better understand what your drivers are doing.  Additionally, if you use GPS Insight’s 3D Mapping with Google Earth, you will be able to click on the graph for an instant download of that vehicle for those 60 minutes.

Here are some screenshots:

Running a Posted Speed Limits Report on the “Robgroup” (my vehicles, and “Rob” has several devices installed):

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Disclaimer!!!*** — I was not really doing 28 MPH over the speed limit — I’ll explain this after the report:

GPS Insight Posted Speed Limits Report

Clicking on the “Google Earth” button shows this:

GPS Insight 3D Posted Speed Violations View

That street is actually a 40 MPH zone (although I was definitely speeding — I live in the middle of the desert and it was 50 MPH when I moved there so I’m grandfathered in — is that a good excuse?  How about I only needed some sample data for this article?  My scofflaw COO borrowed the car?  How about I have big brakes?  Either way, I was speeding and this report picked it up.)

What is important to know is that the standard speeding report wouldn’t have really called attention to it so much.  I was only doing 63 [65 max].  It’s 65 MPH standard on the highways out here.  What’s important is the difference between ACTUAL and POSTED speed limits.  28 (really 23) in this case.

So how do you check to see what the real speed limit is?  Just quickly go into street view in that area & find a speed limit sign:

Finding Stop Signs in GPS Insight's Google Earth Mode

Soon we will allow our customers to “override” certain street speed limits in order to accurately report on violations.  Not every speed limit in our system is 100% up to date.  It’s the ease of using it which makes this a quick and powerful tool.  We plan to begin a “sanity check” service on our customers’ behalf where the most flagrant speeding will result in our double-checking the actual speed limits in that area.

Even if they are off by 5-15 MPH, this report is REALLY good at finding your opportunistic speeders.

Note the “inline” graph in the 3D “bubble” will also show up in the report for an instant check of recent/subsequent activity.  Clicking on it gives a 30 minutes before/after map in Google Earth.

Speed Graphs in GPS Insight

[we're still working on the best way to graph it, so this will change soon]

Here is the 60 minute “quick map” you get when clicking on the graph:

60 minute "quick map" around a speeding violation

This is useful in order to get some context for what the driver was doing.

So this report will be EXTREMELY USEFUL to companies, and comes with a lengthy disclaimer that you need to put some time into investigating the speed limits initially before going off and firing drivers.  It will also come with a follow-on report which “ranks” your drivers with graphs which show their typical speeding patterns.  Since speed limits differ from our data equally across drivers, you will quickly get a feel for which of your drivers are speeders, which are ideal, and which intentionally go slower than they should in order to pad hours.

Moving on, we have an iPhone app coming in January.  It will do a nicer job of mobile fleet management than the current GPS Insight Mobile Mapping option.  Here are a few screen shots:

GPS Insight iPhone App coming soon!

You launch it from the iPhone like a normal app.

You are then given a set of options to choose from in terms of moving/stopped vehicles, various vehicle groups, etc.:

List of vehicles within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Choosing one will give you various information, to include a map of just that one vehicle (or choose “Map” to see them all):

Vehicle location within GPS Insight's iPhone app

Quick View lets you choose just a few vehicles at a time

And you will be able to set certain settings (right now they’re pretty limited):

Settings tab in the GPS Insight iPhone App

So that about covers the 2 new exciting features coming soon in January 2010.  Based on licensing restrictions, both capabilities MAY have an additional cost, either now or in the future.  If they do, it won’t be much, and chances are they’ll both be free to customers or cost the same as the existing mobile mapping capabilities.

Happy New Year everyone!

Rob.

Live Software Demo Footer CTA

GPS Fleet Tracking Footer