October 2008 Archives

The demonstration server now shows units in Australia, Switzerland, Belgium, UK and Ireland.  It is great to see tracking units all over the world.  Normally, because of data protection you cant see all of the trackers with one login.  You have to login to an administration account for each customer and access to these is controlled. Today we can see sales demo trackers charging across Belgium going to the beach in Australia and heading down the M1 towards London (and parked on the M50 in Ireland in a traffic jam!).

I spent some time on an emergency line we run for people who have lost a relative they are caring for.  Today I was called by a lady who's husband has Alzheimer's.  They were out for the day and he had disappeared. She was away from her computer and did not know where to look.  Normally this would have resulted in the police getting together a search party and scouring the area.  Luckily she had done everything right. She had charged the KoolTrax Ranger and set the tracking interval to 600 seconds because she was with him (so no need to drain the battery).  He had the unit on him and she called us as soon as she realised there was a problem. As it happens he was heading for the mountains (Scotland) and she was on the other side of town heading the other way.  I directed her to him in about 15 minutes and the hardest part was when she could see him in the field in the distance but could not catch him as he was moving too quickly.

It occurred to me that this man was about to be lost in the Scottish mountains in very cold weather, and was saved with little fuss or expense. The cost of the KoolTrax Ranger is about £299+VAT the cost of a search party would be many thousands of pounds.  Makes you think, the police should give these away!

There are several versions of KoolTrax Mobile available today. Just in case you don't know, KoolTrax Mobile is a fairly inexpensive location program that runs on your windows mobile phone.  It is designed to report your location only; there is no map on the phone as there is with KoolTrax Handset.  However there are variations, and the most interesting to me is the "clock in" version.  Imagine that you are working on a building site (unlikely in post credit crunch world but lets go with it), you turn up press the "clock in" button on your phone and then you get on with what ever you do.  The head office is aware of whom they have working wear, and if you have need of others, call the office and they will instantly know where they are.

This version is called KoolTrax MTM (Mobile Time Management).

Reverse geocoding sounds like something you do in rally car to go backwards.  It is actually the term for working out the street name from the gps coordinates. This is useful because the coordinates are no good to humans for direction finding.  So put simply reverse geocoding is a way of making sense of machine telemetry speak.  So who cares - I hear you ask, and what has this to do with taxis?  Well let me set the scene for you.  It is late on a Friday night, you might have had a few drinks and you really really want to go home now.  You could go and stand in the taxi rank, or you could send a text to your favourite taxi firm who comes to get you.  You ask the bar tender (or waiter or ....) what the post code of their establishment is, and you text it to you cab company.

Today you might have a person who has a look to see which taxis are close to you and then you might get a call from the firm itself.  However, now you can cut out the middleman. Your text goes to a server, it has a look at all the taxis carrying a Blue Tree Ranger and then selects the closest free taxi, and sends them your mobile number along with an approximate location.

The responding taxi driver gets to the location and gives you a call. 

Sounds like a lot of work?  Not really, all you see is your text and a phone call from your taxi.  You might get a confirmation text from the server but that is it.  The taxi firm sees the jobs being allocated to the taxis but does not touch them, which reduces costs and possibly fairs.

Ultimately you stay warm, relax, and get your taxi really quickly.  You probably never use a different taxi firm again.  Good all round.  So where is this system?  You will see a taxi firm offering it soon so why not try it out!

We pride ourselves on our infrastructure.  We design and build our own hardware, and we write the software for the PC, Phones, servers and even the firmware for the Rangers.  So we have traditionally kept the server to ourselves.  We did not install it on other peoples systems and we certainly did not give them access to any of the servers.

However there are some people out there who do not trust us!  Shocking I know, but fine upstanding chaps that we are, this is not enough to quell the fears of companies trying to protect their executives etc.

As a result we have created a package which is a completely closed system.  I have to say that it is pretty damn good (but then I would say that wouldn't I).  So here is a description of it:

Blue Tree's high security option is called Stand Alone Security and involves the entire location system being operated from within the client's infrastructure.  This means that you as the client operates and controls the server at the heart of the location system. Neither Blue Tree nor any other company has access to the location server or the information on it. All tracking information is encrypted on the trackers themselves and is only decrypted when it reaches the location server inside your company. 

All data access is also controlled by you, including access to logins, audit trails of who is watching whom, as well as the data history of every unit.

This system is completely closed and all information is controlled by you the client company.  The level of encryption is adjustable depending on the performance required from the trackers.  (For example if you need 128 bit encryption you may only be able to obtain a position every 20 seconds instead of every 10 seconds).

Ranger Firmware

Each Ranger has customised firmware installed to secure the location information it collects. As the information is gathered it is encrypted before transmission.  This prevents any scanner from "capturing" the information from the mobile phone network.  The Rangers are also "port specific" which means that a dedicated port on the server listens only for a specific Ranger making the system more resilient and improving server performance.

OK so who cares?  Well, now any company can own and operate a complete and secure tracking system from their offices.  They do not have any data in the public domain and their infra structure requirement is minimal.  Pretty cool if you are a security company!

Working alone used to be something that meant trust and freedom.  Your employer trusted you were where you were supposed to be and you had the freedom to do what you thought was important without them looking over your shoulder.  We are selling an increasing number of personal tracking devices for lone workers and when I went to some of the meetings I was surprised at the employer's attitude.

I was expecting "we can see where they are" and "we can monitor their time on site" type of comments.  It seems I am a little out of touch.   The primary use of these devices is for health and safety. If you have a problem and you are the only cleaner in an office block out of hours who are you going to call - yes you can try the "Ghost Busters" (slight glimpse into my age there). In reality the 2 main issues are 1) you are hurt and not near a phone 2) you call someone, it is out of hours and they are not there.

The Panic alarm and location given by the Ranger is idea for this purpose and people work out very quickly that there is no fun in watching a screen with a location blip for more than a few seconds.  So the message in the lone worker arena seems to be - No one is watching you, but they can find you if they need to.