A few days ago I blogged about a new application we are launching soon which will allow you to create business territories in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment. The great thing about this is that it doesn’t require the installation of any software, all you need is a web browser and an account.
Location based business analytics usually requires expensive GIS software and people with GIS experience to operate. One of the concepts we are big on at GeoSmart Maps is providing access to this type of technology to any business people who need information, without requiring specialist skills. By providing solutions like this, Route2GO route optimisation and others in a browser environment all you really need is business expertise and the desire to improve business efficiency and profit.
The franchise industry is of course about location and often involves creating territories, which are then licensed to the franchisee. Key concerns about these territories is that they offer a viable business opportunity and are priced according to the potential earning capacity and customer base. The GeoSmart solution makes it easy to do this. First of all, creating a territory is as simple as clicking with your mouse to create a polygon covering the area of the territory. Territories can be ‘snapped’ to each other so that boundaries can align perfectly.
Where a territory comes with existing clients, they can be displayed on the map and an associated table can provide the ability to display a count of existing clients and related tabular information, which can contain any required information that can be uploaded from the accounting package, CRM or franchise software.
For example if it was a lawnmowing franchise, it could display and list each customer with their address, frequency of mowing, the dollar value per job, whether there payments are up to date, how the customer was acquired and how long they have been a client and so on. It might show the last date the client was serviced, or the next date that their lawn is due for mowing.
Within the application, Boolean queries can allow the franchisee or franchisor to visualise their clients on the web map based on the criteria in the tables. For example you could display all clients on the map that are due for mowing and use this to plan which clients to visit today. You could view the most profitable customers on a map.
You could view customers by acquisition method which could be valuable for marketing purposes, displaying all clients who responded to print advertising, letter box flyers or word of mouth recommendations. This could be analysed to identify not only what methods of marketing work, differences by neighbourhood. It is amazing how visualising information on a map can highlight information that you may not notice when looking at reports and spreadsheets.
Franchise territory mapping can be a major asset to the franchise industry, helping people quickly and easily work on their business as well as in it. If this is of interest to you, please feel free to contact us and bookmark or subscribe to this blog where we will be providing more information on how to using territory mapping to improve your business.
The car is the brainchild of our GM Phil Allen who says “This is the most advanced mapping car to drive New Zealand roads. We have driven all of New Zealand’s roads with differential GPS before, but this car has leading edge technology. New technologies demand superior quality data.”
While other cars are getting pretty good information and imagery, pretty good isn’t enough for today’s needs. This car is collecting up to a terabyte of data a month from five cameras catching lane information, street signs, turn restrictions and points of interest. We are capturing lane information, road curb and other information of value to councils, road maintenance, utility companies (managing roadside assets) and much more. We are also taking a 360 degree panorama photo every 50 metres.
So what’s leading edge? How about an IMU? This is an Inertial Measurement Unit as used in modern missile tracking systems and allows us to capture data with accuracy of 15 centimetres, even when the GPS signals are weak or lost. With traditional differential GPS accuracy is lost when the satellite signal is poor such as behind volcanic hill shadows and particularly in places in the South Island where the satellites are very low on the horizon or totally obscured from the GPS antenna.
The car is capturing valuable information including inclinometer (the rate of incline and decline of the hill which can be useful for all sorts of things beyond navigation, for example in data for cycling, training for marathons, car rallies. It is also measuring road camber. By providing road camber information to services such as Fleet Management it may be possible to reduce truck accidents where they approach corners to fast for the height and load, based on knowing the angle of the road camber through corners.
Nothing has been spared when it comes to accuracy. The nature of the work means that we had to use a SUV and the trade off is body roll. To compensate for this we have sonic technology which measures the body roll and this is used in data calculation algorithms making sure that our data is highly accurate.
This unique vehicle is going to enable us to provide for the ever changing demands of new technologies with the best national data ever collected in New Zealand. It is part of our continuous ongoing driving program supporting a range of products including the leading brands in Car Navigation (brands such as Navman and TomTom) and Fleet Management (brands such as Navman, Xlerate, Astrata) as well as clients who will use the imagery to reduce the need to do their own driving.
GeoSmart has built a console to monitor the information and is also creating plug-ins to allow the visual data to be used in conjunction with GIS systems such as Intergraph and has the ability to pinpoint the location of street hardware such as power poles and transformers.
When people see the vehicle, we want them to know what we are up to, so they will understand that we are working to enhance the mapping products and services they use including websites like AA Maps and Wises, the Map Books they carry in their cars and the car navigation devices they use.
Free New Zealand web cartography tools for educational and non-commercial purposes.
As the Gold Sponsor for GeoCart’2008, the National Cartography Conference at Auckland University from 1-3 September, GeoSmart Maps Ltd General Manager Phil Allen has announced that GeoSmart is offering a set of web tools for web cartographers for use free of charge for educational and non-commercial use. He will outline these in a presentation at the conference on Wednesday 3 September.
“As the leading supplier of commercial cartographic products in New Zealand, we would like to encourage development of new applications,” said Phil Allen. “There are so many opportunities for people to develop wonderful web and mobile applications and we have the API’s and web services, as well as a wealth of geo-spatial data about New Zealand. “
Using such tools, web cartographers can build complex web, Location Based Services (LBS) and Mobile based GIS solutions such as; Carbon footprints for businesses by measuring the journey times of staff going to and from work and including their business activities to computing calorie burn when a user creates a walk/cycle/running route. The tools include all of the APIs required and a set of maps with many code examples. Allen’s paper will present these tools and advise how educational institutes and the web cartography community at large can take advantage of these for promoting and enhancing our industry.
GeoSmart is a New Zealand based Geospatial Solutions Provider. What does that mean? If you want anything to do with location, we are the people for you to get in touch with. We have driven all of New Zealand as well as flown most of it to gather orthophotography which is used by many GIS departments in regional and local government. We have the only full turn restriction database in New Zealand, which in simple terms means that we have eliminated the paper roads designed in Scotland in the 1800’s which still exist on paper and in many mapping products, we know all about the no left or right turns, one way streets, legal and implicit turn restrictions and much more including a huge database of Points of Interest including businesses, accommodation, petrol stations right down to public toilets, boat ramps, places of geographic or historic interest and more.
Our products include:
Cartography including Wises and NZ Automobile Association Maps
Custom map jobs small and large, street maps, need a digital map for an advertisement, call us
Car Navigation, we supply around 93% of car navigation product in New Zealand including TomTom, Navman, Metroview, Garmin Asus, Nav N Go, Horizon, BMW and more
Fleet Management, vehicle and personal tracking including Navman, Astrata, Xlerate, Argus Tracking and more
Route Optimisation including Travelling Salesman through to complex problems
Demographic, sales and franchise territory applications
Web Mapping API’s and Web Services for applications of all sorts with the most thorough information available including GeoCoding, Points of Interest, Driving Directions, Vector Graphics, Reverse GeoCoding and much more.
The location based tools you need to make mobile apps for iPhone, Android and other location aware devices
We love to hear from and work with new ventures, people trying to solve spatial problems, develop new web sites, games, social networks or anything to do with location.
As Sales & Marketing Manager, this is a semi informal place for me to share ideas, knowledge and generally share some of the things we are working on. Feel free to comment or make contact with me.
