What is the state of the art in GPS tracking these days?  Here’s a good example in the form of products and services offered by a company called CPS Insight.  Their primary customers are trucking and service companies such as roofing, construction, plumbing.  Pretty much any company that has an on the road sales force or service personnel, delivery vehicles, over the road trucking and so on.

The idea is that this tool gives companies the ability to monitor a wide range of things from fuel consumption and speed violations to preventing unauthorized after hours use of company vehicles and an engine maintenance report that can automatically notify someone by email when a vehicle reports a diagnostic trouble code.

Trucking and delivery companies of all kinds use services like this to keep track of where they are and when, help with routing information and more.  GPS Insight offers their service for a mere $1.50 to $2.00 per day for each vehicle tracked.  The hardware involved is easy to install because it plugs directly into the vehicles diagnostics port which makes it possible for them to get engine diagnostic information like fault codes, speed, fuel consumption, odometer readings and more.  Part of the reasons that companies use technology like this is because of the money they can save due to more efficient routing, fuel savings, and of course, not having to pay someone when they’re not really working.

The GPS Insight product gets data updates every 2 minutes and they’ve got a very detailed map option and allows high level zoom and very detailed satellite and hybrid map displays.  Map details can be customized to suit the customers individual needs.  This includes not only zooming and overlaying satellite images on a map but also some really impressive looking 3-d mapping technology.

The hardware part of this system is actually only a little less than half of the whole thing.  The rest of it involves GPS satellites, data being collected from each vehicles tracking system and then uploaded by cellphone to the GPS Insight computers where it’s processed and made available in the form of maps and a wide range of reports.  Their website not only contains product and sales related information, but there is also a very impressive interactive demo, a movie and a slide show that demonstrates some of their system’s capabilities.  They also have a GPS Tracking blog that talks about a lot of GPS tracking related issues and technology.

I can only say two things about this story….

Wisconsin
retailer criticised for anti-war e-mail (Reuters)

Reuters – A U.S. retailer has been deluged with angry messages since an
employee sent an e-mail to an American soldier in Iraq saying "if you
were sensible, you and your troops would pull out of Iraq."

First, If he wants American soldiers out of Iraq, then he needs to work
through lawful means of convincing the President to order our troops to
return home. No one soldier has the authority to just pull out because
they don’t want to be there, at the very least that’s called desertion.
Encouraging a soldier to desert his post can easily be a crime in and of
itself.

Second, I’m not surprised that Bargain Suppliers of West Allis,
Wisconsin fired the employee who sent the email. I have no doubt that if
this person’s name becomes known they’re going to have a hard time
getting a good job.