Vehicle tracking provider admits to being Big Brother

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 02 September 2008 14:18

IT Industry - Strategy

A new system to automatically generate a vehicle log book from GPS data goes an sale around Australia this week, but even the distributor says people may regard it as having "some nasty 'Big Brother' implications".

Gofinder Reporter - developed by phantomEye -  uses GPS hardware to track the location of a truck or other company vehicle. It employs Telstra's Next G 3G network to relay this information. Next G was selected because it has the largest coverage area of all the Australian mobile carrier networks.

The system automatically generates a daily time sheet for the vehicle, which includes start and finish times, distance covered and maximum speed. A second report lists addresses visited and the time spent at each. For service operations that charge by time, this information can feed into the invoicing process.

Also available are daily or monthly mileage reports that can be cross-checked against fuel purchases. What? People are siphoning fuel into other vehicles, or slipping a few litres into another car at the servo? Surely not!

And if you just want to keep an eye on where the vehicles in your fleet are  at any time, Gofinder Reporter will display the most recent locations (sampled every five to ten minutes) on Google Earth. Apart from providing a supervisory mechanism, this can also be used to help dispatch the most appropriate vehicle to a new job.

Pricing depends on whether you want to pay monthly, quarterly or annually.

Find out how much it costs on page two.