Most people familiar with GPS tracking for vehicles and other mobile assets are familiar with the concept of “geofences”, i.e., setting a defined geographic boundary (usually a radius) - and then sending alerts if the vehicle enters or exits the geofenced area. Most GPS tracking software packages have this capability - including ours at Ublip.

But an often overlooked use of Geofences has nothing to do with protecting against theft of assets - or producing alerts. Geofences - and the reports they can create - can be ALSO be used very effectively to document “proof of performance” for any kind of route based business.

For example, we have a customer in the tow truck business. They have contracts with land owners & managers to routinely check specific properties, and make sure people are not parking illegally on their lots. A lot of these checks take place at night - and the only witness is the driver himself. Sometimes property owners complain that the drivers aren’t checking their location as promised. But who wants to get into a “he said” vs. “he said” argument? There’s a much easier way to know: just set geofences for specific locations - then check reports (daily, weekly, monthly) that recap all the times a given Tow Truck enters that property. If a driver claims he’s checking once a night - the evidence will be right there.

Jeff recently posted about about selling peace of mind. I wanted to post some follow-up thoughts on how we’re focusing on what I’ll call the Peace of Mind User Experience. That sounds like the title to a self-help seminar, but at Ublip we focus a lot of our time on user experience. We create GPS tracking products that are easy to use. At least that’s what our customers tell us.

When it comes to peace of mind, there’s nothing more jarring than stumbling to accomplish a task. Think about the olden days of wanting to listen to a particular song from one of your favorite bands:

1. Open your cassette tape drawer
2. Fumble through the cassettes to find Quiet Riot (maybe you were the exact opposite of me and had your tapes alphabetized)
3. Walk over to your stereo and put the cassette in
4. Press play
5. Fast forward or rewind to “Come on Feel the Noise”
6. Rock out

Nowadays that same experience is simpler when you think about accessing your music library on your iPhone or iPod. The information and experience is much more accessible through today’s technologies. Selling peace of mind isn’t ONLY knowing where your kids or employees are, but making it dead simple to gain access to that information. Everyone that I talk to about GPS tracking realizes the opportunity, and there’s a TON of competition in this space, but we feel our competitive advantage is to solve complex problems through simplicity and elegance.

Let me close with a visual of the Peace of Mind User Experience:

We’re developing different ways of making it easy to get information out of the Ublip GPS tracking system. Our iGoogle widget does two things:

1. Creates peace of mind by knowing an asset’s (kid, nanny, employee, vehicle) location
2. Makes the information super-accessible in an environment that is familiar to the end user

I’d also like to point out that the iGoogle GPS tracking widget is powered by our GeoRSS feed, which is the same feed that powers The Joey Tracker and soon to be launched BioBus.

To many customers, who are buying just one or two GPS units, the answer to that question is pretty simple: they just want to know how much for the hardware, installation and service. But when you start dealing with small fleets, the answer gets a little more complicated. The one-time costs aren’t always telling the whole picture. The ones who have had systems in the past know how to ask good questions, like: how easy is it to make changes to our system? can we customize it ourselves? can we add users and change vehicle names ourselves? Lots of so-called low cost GPS tracking systems are really not so low cost because they are so hard to use - and they require going to the vendor for even little changes. So fleet buyers should be sure to consider ease of use in the total cost equation.

I was visiting a prospect the other day who is looking at ripping out their existing GPS tracking system and replacing it with the Ublip Fleet Tracker. We asked the end user (who is a job dispatcher) what was wrong with their existing system and frankly we were shocked: the biggest complaint was that for EVERY change, the vendor had to do the work. Even things as easy as changing the name of a vehicle had to be sent to the vendor. And the dispatcher could only see one vehicle at a time! Finally, because the tracking device was using a Paging Network, the data rarely was current.

It was pretty simple what she needed: “I just want to be able to see at a glance:

- “where are my trucks right now?”

- “where have they been?”

- “how long did they stop at each location?”

- “how fast were they going?”

This business really isn’t brain surgery. Customers just want low-cost GPS tracking that is reliable, simple and easy to use.

We often run into examples of how a customer only really needs one small feature to get a great deal of value from a system. We found one example working with a customer that rents mobile generators. There are a number of solutions out there that provide complex monitoring of fuel levels, battery voltage, and so on. But what really provides value is just total runtime. The difference between a problem generator and a reliable one is more about regular maintenance than anything else. Since rental generators are at remote customer sites for long periods of time and tend to go from one customer site to another, keeping track of total engine hours manually is a difficult task and one that is ripe for a simple and inexpensive remote monitoring solution.