Sustainability Generates Profit in the Transport Industry in New Zealand
This month I had the pleasure of presenting to the New Zealand Freight Summit at Auckland University to a diverse group of people from all facets of the transport industry. There were a number of common threads and one of them was sustainability. This is a word that is bandied around a lot, together with concepts like carbon emission trading and taxes, but I wonder how seriously a lot of companies are taking it.
One motivator is compliance. Government departments and many corporates today have KPI’s which require that they do business with companies who have sustainability policies and practices. We have responded to a number of tenders recently which have asked us to specify what sustainability practices we have put in place.
I have read many articles that say that companies which have sustainability practices are more profitable than those that don’t. Obviously the above is one good reason, effectively there are contracts they won’t win simply based on the policy.
There are of course other good reasons that also hit the bottom line. The most obvious one is the rising price of oil. If you use tools such as Route Optimisation and Business Intelligence, you can potentially do more work whilst driving shorter times and distance. That means reduced running costs, reduced maintenance costs, saved time which potentially means being able to do more work in the same amount of time and bottom line increase in profit. Whether your fleet is one vehicle or hundreds, there are savings to be made and they are easy to achieve.
I really enjoyed showing people AA Traffic by GeoSmart. Many of the delegates were not aware that we have real time traffic congestion information covering virtually all arterial roads and highways throughout New Zealand and Australia. There will be some announcements about this in the very near future. If you are a transport operator, how would you like to be able to see exactly where the congestion is in real time and on the same map, see your vehicle fleet?
Does traffic congestion cost your company by not letting your vehicles get where they want to be on time? Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a birds eye of what was going on in real time 24/7? What would that mean to your business? We can help you with that.
Utilising technologies like this can help your company to focus on reducing overheads when the economy is tight and allows you to tell the market that you have sustainability practices, not just policies. Of course in doing so, you are actually taking practical steps to reduce your company’s carbon footprint and doing something good for your country and the planet.
Want to know more about how you can use these technologies in your business? We’d love to talk with you. Contact us today.
Group Deals and Bricks and Mortar Business
The number of one day deal sites in New Zealand grows every day. There are dozens of them and many of them now have a separate site for each region with deals for experiences, dining, accommodation, attractions and activities. This is great for bargain seekers, but doesn’t necessarily do a lot for bricks and mortar businesses.
There are scenarios where they have value, for example if a business has very large volumes of aged stock that they need to quit. It can also be useful for new businesses to make customers aware they exist. They also come at a price. The more powerful the site, the more they charge with fees being anything up to 40% of the sale of each item.
If you want to attract new customers to your bricks and mortar store, then obviously you want a coupon or something that needs to be taken to the store for redemption. Even if you are quitting aged stock, there may be advantages in getting people into your store in the hope that they will purchase other products while they are there. There are also benefits to both the customer and the retailer in not having the time, packaging and distribution costs in delivering product to the buyer. More on this in future blogs, looking at check in applications as opposed to group deals.
A study by Rice University found that 32% of businesses surveyed who used Groupon for promotions said they were unprofitable and 40% said they would not do it again. A major issue cited in the research was cannibalising existing business. Mashable quoted a statistic that less than 20% of people who purchased deals where they had to go to a store to redeem them, returned subsequently to buy full priced product.
So the question which I will come to in upcoming blogs is how to get people into your store at quiet times and more often. I believe the answer is in locations based services such as check ins and proximity based marketing. I welcome your experience or opinion on this.
Location Innovation and Navball
How do you combine LBS technology with GPS and mobile phones with a gaming environment that is fun, educational and gives you plenty of exercise? That’s one of the questions we have for Kiwis who enter the GeoSmart Location Innovation Awards.
29 people have entered the awards so far and we know of several more people who are working on projects. A lot of interest has come from universities and we all know that university students love coming up with ideas for fun things to do. The Auckland City Flashmob Group already has 487 members who have signed up through their Facebook page.
In this blog I am going to give you some examples of applications that might gove you ideas on applications to create yourselves. One that I really like as a concept is Navball which comes from Amsterdam. The Netherlands are of course a nation of football fans and it makes a lot of sense to combine their love of the round ball game with GPS and LBS technology to come up with something that is fun, fast, competitive and very Generation Y.
The concept is that you have two teams of 11 players, just like you would in a game of soccer and they compete to kick a virtual ball into a virtual goal. The playground is a set of predefined streets, unknown to the players before they hit the field. The players off course have soccer strips so that they are recognisable from the general public and won’t cause concern for pedestrians as they go about their business.
Each player is equipped with a Nokia N95 which is GPS enabled. The players are shown where the ‘ball’ is and the location of the first ‘goal’. They have to form a line in the shape of an arrow in order to be able to identify the direction the ball will be kicked. The game lasts for 45 minutes and the winner is obviously the team which has achieved the most goals.
The play can be followed on a Google Maps mashup which allows viewers to monitor a scoreboard and see the locations of each of the 22 players as they make their way around the course, which is the streets of Amsterdam.
Here is a promotional video of the game being played in Amsterdam.
Navball is the brainchild of The Saints mobile software, one of many innovative Dutch developers. Another application they have launched which would be great fun for both tourists and locals is Get Lost in Rotterdam. It’s sort of like a treasure hunt, except that it is simply about finding new places and having fun. It is designed such that it could be played in any city in the world.
You send a free txt message to a short code and can then download the application which has 15 consecutive instructions. I watched a video demonstration on the website, which went like this:
1. Get on the tram heading for the city centre and get off at the 5th stop.
2. Take the first Metro (subway) entrance and go one stop.
3. Follow the first dog you see for (x) time and then turn left
4. Catch the first available bus. etc
There are lots of prizes for people who send in photos from their journey and the game will run on many different brands and models of phone that have Java capability.
These games are entertaining, fun, involve adventure and exercise. I don’t know if they allow you to track the people or their trail on a map website like AA Maps, but that would obviously add some more fu, not only to the players but to others.
So there are a couple of cool examples of LBS Games. What do you think you could come up with? You can enter to win prizes with your idea at www.locationinnovation.co.nz. If it’s really good, you could be heading for a free trip to the USA to the Where 2.0 conference in May next year!
Location Innovation Awards
The Location Innovation Awards are off to a great start. So far we have had 18 entries in only 3 weeks which is wonderful.
Over the last 2 weeks we have presented to ITC students at Massey Unversity, Raffles College and the Axcel Institute and in each case students were told that they can use their entry as part of their university assignments, which is fantastic. It gives students several opportunities.
- The can create the future technology they would like to use
- Use the skills and technology they have studied
- Gain experience with new tools and concepts
- Win great prizes including a trip to the 2009 Where 2.0 conference in San Jose where they can mix and mingle with industry leaders such as Google and Yahoo
- Gain recognition and future career opportunities
- Potentially create an business for themselves commercialising their ideas
As well as the main prize and four category prizes, we are also offering 3 prizes for the best student entries. There are no age requirements so entries will also be accepted from secondary or other school students.
-
Archives
- August 2012 (1)
- July 2012 (2)
- June 2012 (2)
- May 2012 (4)
- April 2012 (4)
- March 2012 (2)
- February 2012 (4)
- January 2012 (2)
- December 2011 (1)
- November 2011 (1)
- October 2011 (1)
- September 2011 (9)
-
Categories
- AA Maps
- AA Traffic
- Agencies
- Android
- Auckland
- Australia
- Australia Maps
- awards
- Business Analytics
- Business Intelligence
- Business Tools
- car navigation
- Car Sales
- carbon footprint
- cartography
- channel partner
- Check Ins
- competition
- competitions
- Data Mining
- Delivery
- Distribution
- driving
- driving directions
- education
- Fleet Management
- foursquare
- Freight
- Furniture Delivery
- Gamification
- Garmin Asus
- Geocoding
- geosmart
- GIS
- gps
- Hyves
- ICT
- Indoor Navigation
- iphone
- lbs
- lbs games
- location based services
- location innovation awards
- Loyalty Card
- map tools
- Mapping Applications
- maps
- Marketing
- Meetups
- Mobile maps
- navman
- new zealand
- new zealand maps
- Oil Price
- petrol
- Print Advertising
- proximity based marketing
- Radio Advertising
- Real Estate
- real time traffic
- Retail
- Retail Profit
- Return On Delivery
- Reverse Geocoding
- ROI
- route optimisation
- Route2GO
- Rugby
- Rugby World Cup
- SaaS
- Sales
- sales territory
- satnav
- school
- Social Media
- social networking
- software
- Sport
- Sustainability
- systems integrator
- territory management
- tomtom
- Traffic
- Uncategorized
- university
- universityschool
- viral marketing
- Web Map
- web maps
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS