A customer needed a large amount of historical fuel consumption data, and thankfully we have this data going back for one year for all of our customers, and will keep it moving forward indefinitely.  In a few days, based on this request, we released the new GPS Insight “Fuel Consumption” report which uses real data from the vehicles’ computer to determine actual fuel (gas or diesel) consumption for all compatible vehicles (just about 95% of the vehicles we track are compatible with some old vehicles, and occasional exceptions).

Here is how you run the report:

And within a few seconds (.26 seconds in this case), you have a fuel consumption report for all of 2008 for all vehicles or a particular group of vehicles (26 in this case):

This is good for budgeting, charging back fuel to certain cost centers/drivers, etc.

We’ve made this report available for all customers (free of charge, of course).

We hope it helps, unfortunately with the price of fuel these days, I’m sure it will.

Rob.

On the way home from a client visit in the Northern suburbs of Chicago, both Josh and I were heading back on 294.

Here is how we can pull a speed history (bear in mind since I’m logged in with a Phoenix account, times are in MST — if Josh were logged in it would show his stop at 8:42, not 6:42):

See Josh stop:

See Josh speed:

See Josh pull over for 6 minutes, get a ticket, then start obeying the speed limit again:

See Josh’s Ticket (the officer was nice and dropped it to 75 from 80 to save him $20):

Note the time is slightly off (1:32 PM vs. 1: 35 (11:35 with 2 hours of timezone adjustment)) — our times are from the satellites & definitive — her watch is a little off.

I was just ahead of him in a rental (no tracking…) and am glad I wasn’t doing 80 when I passed her…

Doh!

Sorry Josh, slow down next time!

Rob.

GPS Insight makes it easy to answer quick ad-hoc questions like this. Someone asked me if I had been doing a lot of travel lately. Seems like it, but if I want to quantify it accurately, I can just run a quick geofence reoprt on the airport, where I leave my car every time I get on a plane to go somewhere.

I can just type “PHX” (the airport code) in to Google Earth and it takes me right there:

Then just draw a quick polygon geofence around it:

Then run a quick report (and I mean quick, it takes .14 seconds to create with 31 days of history for my vehicle). Note that we allow customers to go back as far as they have data with GPS Insight in order to run these types of reports. I am choosing only 31 days here just to avoid too much disclosure…

And .14 seconds later, we see I’ve spent roughly 12 days (11 days, 22 hours, 35 minutes) parked at or driving through the airport. We can even tell that my Jun 6 flight was on a different airline since I drove 5.7 miles (further West to Terminal 3 for Jet Blue to NYC than the typical Terminal 4 for US Air & Southwest) vs. the typical 1.8-2.1 miles.

This is a nice, quick example of how people (particularly management who allow GPS tracking on their own vehicles) help to determine answers to ad-hoc questions like “how much time did you spend traveling last month” without having to consult a calendar, ticket receipts, etc.

Rob.

Apparently that’s what is starting to happen with Diesel nearing $6 per gallon.

We got a call from a long-time customer asking for our help sorting out the crazy behavior he was seeing from a brand new employee driving one of his big rig trucks.  Since not all of our customers use every feature (notably our 3-D mapping in this case), we occasionally help customers out with these types of investigative requests.

The new driver was driving back and forth in a particular part of town, stopping for a period of time, then doing it again.

It became clear to us what was happening as soon as we pulled up these pictures (plus the police filled us in on the details once he was questioned):

High concentration of activity inside the town the driver should have driven straight through:

Zooming down, we see a semi-truck driving around almost canvassing the local area looking for people to buy diesel from him in order to fund his drug habit:

Here is one apparent set of stops where he is siphoning fuel out of his tanks and selling it on the side of the road.

Here is another where much of the activity seems to have taken place (note how many red, yellow, and blue dots there are — they correspond to stops > 1 hour, stops < 1 hour, and idle stops):

Our customer called the state troopers which were hesitant to do anything about it until he told them the driver was severely incoherent on the cell phone when he called him. Then they were happy to pull the driver over (with GPS Insight’s help pinpointing the location), and arrest him for driving while under the influence.  Our customer had to have someone drive to pick up the truck and trailer, but that beats any of the other possible outcomes:

• lost vehicle
• wrecked vehicle with a driver under the influence of drugs
• harm to other drivers/pedestrians by the driver
• stolen/illegally sold goods in the trailer

This is the second “drugged up driver” we’ve helped a customer with in the past two weeks, and we’ve heard MANY stories from thankful customers of how they’re able to detect, and immediately put an end to problems such as this by watching new driver behavior closely, monitoring for off-hours/weekend usage, excessive speeding, etc. — all using the GPS Insight product which costs between $1-2 per day.

If we were curious how much time, how many miles, and and how many stops were made in this town, we could just draw a quick polygon landmark around it and run a report (as I did here):

Then run a quick report (.36 seconds to complete for all vehicles & 7 days history):

This report is available in this format only at GPS Insight:

It clearly shows that truck 402 drove 100 miles in this small area in one day, which itself cost roughly $90 (I ran a MPG report and saw this vehicle gets 6.2 MPG, and guessed that diesel costs $5.50 in that area).  The time spent in that small area was 14 1/2 hours.

The next truck to enter and exit took only 2-4 minutes to get through town, and was probably the vehicle used to drop off a driver to retrieve the vehicle after the driver was arrested.

This is obviously a sad situation, but could have been a whole lot more sad if our customer wasn’t scrutinizing his new driver’s activity, and had we not been able to show him very clearly what was going on.  By alerting the police and ending it quickly, everyone is a lot happier with the end of the story (maybe even eventually the driver).

This is a little off the GPS topic, but this is a hilarious site, and it’s an honor that they chose my name for this particular strip.

Nothing like obscure SQL humor. Only “select 8 from users” could possibly be more funny.

Rob “Bobby Tables” Donat

Don’t buy this type of GPS Navigation device!:

Here at GPS Insight, we love TomTom navigation devices, and allow our customers to do the following with them:

• import all your landmarks (e.g. customers)
• import your optimized routes
• “send” a driver his or her next stop (using a bluetooth enabled phone with a data plan)

This allows you to use the TomTom to guide you to any of your customers or along your pre-determined route (optimized courtesy of GPS Insight).  They’re great devices, & I would personally be lost every time I travel without my TomTom One XL ($249.95).  If you’re one of our customers, please call and we’re happy to sell them to you to add to your GPS Insight solution.  If you’re not a customer, just pick one up at Best Buy and you will be happy you did (we only sell them to customers so they work with GPS Insight, unless you have 50 or more you want to purchase).

If you don’t buy a TomTom through GPS Insight, you can’t use your PND (Personal Navigation Device) with the GPS Insight solution.  There are good alternatives, just avoid the ones that look like the one at the top.

That joke is courtesy of the funny (but geeky) people at xkcd.com.

If you’re into Unix or really geeky humor (or as the people at TomTom would spell it humour — they’re European), that site will get you both laughing and scratching your head in alternating cartoons.

Rob.

I see a lot of commercial vehicles pulling boats here in Scottsdale, and I sometimes use that as an example when talking to customers about how their vehicles are used off-hours and on weekends.

But today I actually saw the first one online as I was showing a friend the way GPS Insight works.

Not too many vehicles are moving on a Sunday morning, but I found one as an example, and it was idling (blue dot).

After zooming in, I saw this:

That’s pretty telling evidence of what’s going on with that company vehicle. It may be perfectly OK for this company, and the names have been blurred out to preserve anonymity, but it’s good to know you can check your vehicles’ history for this type of thing any time you need to using GPS Insight.

I put a quick landmark around that dock so I could run a report to see how frequently that vehicle goes there to drop off and pick up the boat:

Now I can run a simple report which tells me when in the past 30 days that vehicle went within that Geofence:

And we see there have been 3 days in the past 30 (all weekend dates) where that vehicle went to the “Boat” geofence:

Obviously this fuel usage and wear and tear, as well as liability, is not something most companies want happening on the weekends with their trucks.

We also have a new “weekend” option on our “off hours driving” report — this allows you to choose a Friday through Monday, and report any activity after a specified time on Friday, all of Saturday and Sunday, and then only activity prior to a specified time on Monday:

Note that for last weekend, there were 6 hours of usage, and 200 miles spent by this vehicle — probably all on the company dime and not for their benefit:

And if you want to see a map of it, just click on any of the several mapping options — here’s one:

As always, you can zoom right in:

And moving to street view tells you that this employee ate at Macaroni Grill that day:

Again, you may be perfectly OK with your drivers using vehicles for personal usage on the weekend & outside of business hours, but a lot of our customers aren’t, and this is a good example of how to catch, quantify, and prove this behavior using GPS Insight.

We were asked recently to provide a solution for a large mobile advertising company which wanted to be able to:

• More effectively define, document, and sell their routes to customers
• Assure their customers of the time spent driving those routes
• Alert their staff to any infractions of vehicles leaving those routes

GPS Insight now has a “Route Path Tool” which allows you to define a route, document that route, and quantify how much time and mileage was spent on that route.

I will demonstrate on my own vehicle here by running a quick “Rob” 3D Mapping History” for the past “7d” (7 days):

Here is JUST the path (the 2 minute location dots can be easily turned on for more information) :

Using that information, I can select and create a path which is “authorized” which still leaves some activity outside the official route this vehicle should travel:

The orange path (you can choose the color) is simply me clicking the major intersections in order that I want them driven by my driver. Remember we want to drive this path frequently so that our advertising on the side of the truck is seen by as many people, and certain streets (Pinnacle Peak Road, for instance) are driven more frequently in order to backtrack and to allow more people there to see your advertisement.

We save this path into GPS Insight and can display it in many colors, with a “thin to thick” and “light to dark” indicator of direction of travel/order. Additionally, we have numbered icons to tell us which order these intersections should be driven:

I have annotated the blue-lined/numbered path with white arrows to help understand the direction of travel:

Now we can run a report on whether or not my vehicle actually stayed on this path, for how many miles, hours, etc. More importantly, we can find out very easily how much time and how many miles were spent OFF the path. The distance “off path” is configurable depending on the circumstances.

I can show the map of this and circle these two “off route” trips. One was to see my son’s “Heroes” presentation at school (where they talked and sang songs about their favorite heroes), and one was taking the kids to see Iron Man at the theater last night for Ryan’s birthday (good movie, by the way).

Zooming down we can see more information and specific times for both trips to the school (dropping off in the AM and attending the presentation in the evening):

And here were the heroes on stage.  They were Christopher Columbus, Sally Ride, Teddy Roosevelt, Orville & Wilbur Wright, & others:

And my hero Ryan, who portrayed Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Heroes Presentation:

You can hardly fault me for driving off-route to go see him in this school presentation, right…?

A group of GPS Insight employees exhibited at NAFA (National Association of Fleet Administrators) in Salt Lake City last weekend.

We showed off some of our newest capabilities, and helped attendees to understand how GPS Insight differentiates itself from the 20 other GPS vendors which also attended.

Here are some pictures:

Jolene, Rob, Evelyn, Elliot, Alissa, and David :

What kept us going for the endless visits, questions, and demonstrations?

The 3 nights in a row of sushi and saki…:

I believe this man is from Iron Chef:

And a couple of near-beers here & there in Salt Lake City, where they have slightly different alcohol rules then the rest of the planet (maybe for good reason)…

All in all, we had a great time at the best conference we do each year.  Hundreds of large fleet administrators come to NAFA, who all take their positions very seriously, and attend to advance their knowledge of all things fleet related.  GPS Insight is very happy to participate, and do what we can to help them run those large fleets more efficiently.

Thanks very much to everyone who came to the booth and allowed us to meet them in person.

Google just released a new version of Google Earth at earth.google.com. It’s slightly different from a navigation standpoint, but one of the nicest new features is the “Street View” which helps our customers to put their vehicles’ activity in context.

Here is a picture of many thousands of our vehicles which we track, most of which are red (it’s Sunday & everyone’s been parked > 1 hour). What’s new are these little camera icons in major metro areas, which appear when you turn on “Street View” under Layers on the left.

These cameras indicate that street views are available for that area.

Now when you want to know where someone is (or was) stopped you can see more than just an overhead image:

Here is one of our resellers named John and he’s parked at a large warehouse with many pools set up. I happen to know it’s Paddock Pools in Phoenix since that’s where we got our pool.

But John is there right now, & if I wanted to see this “as if you were there” you just click on that camera on the road to “zoom into” a real picture:

Clicking on “Show Full Screen” brings you into a 3-D picture where you can look around by dragging the world whichever direction you need:

If you want to go down the road a bit you can just click on a new camera icon which represents another photo.

Now you can look at the same building but from a completely different angle:

And when you click on “exit photo” you can then show where the various photos are along the road to pick the best one for your investigative needs…:

All very cool and powerful capabilities, I’m sure this will shed some light on where drivers are taking their lunches for some of our customers…

In addition, you can always turn on “Bars/Clubs” under “Places of Interests” under “Layers” for a comprehensive listing along-side the cameras (they show up as martini glasses) to get a feel for what restaurants/bars are located near driver activity:

There are almost an unlimited number of street photos, and it’s getting more comprehensive, so start making use of this information within your organization.

Rob