GPS foils Portland-area carjacking

Here's a brief newspaper story and a TV clip about a vehicle we recovered after a woman had been carjacked at knifepoint in Vancouver, Washington, which is located near Portland. The 22-year old victim called 911 and told them she had a Guidepoint in her car. Police notified us and we tracked the vehicle, which was recovered in approximately 40 minutes. The suspect was also arrested and brought into custody. Our success rate continues to hold at more than 99%, which compares pretty favorably to our prime competitor, Lojack, which uses an older technology and only works in markets where the vehicles are equipped with their tracking equipment. It's great to hear a member of law enforcement say that we were "incredibly helpful" in recovering the car, as the Vancouver PD spokeperson says in the TV clip. (NOTE: Sorry about the YouTube clip, but you have to go the 3:40 mark in the video to see the story about the GPS recovery).

Mapping Updates

The development team, lead by our erstwhile whiz kid Tom Gafford, has made some changes to our mapping system that offer some cool benefits for users. The actual, physical maps we purchase from Maptuit are the same, but the interface is new and that's allowed us to offer some new functionality. A few sample functions: you can roll the cursor over different parts of the map and it will calculate how far that cursor point is from the vehicle. That's kind of handy when you're trying to estimate distances for directions or a quick trip. (Actually, I used it this morning to see how far my morning run was since my car is parked in front of the house).

Anyway, they also added a function so users can now just highlight an area of the map and it will automatically zoom in to that area. Best of all, they add the availability of much larger maps that take up nearly the whole screen. That's helpful for guys (like me) who need to wear dimestore glasses to read street names.

To be sure, the changes are incremental, but when you preach continuous improvement, everything is (or at least ought to be). And customers notice. Within a few hours of the new mapping going live, a customer called in and said: "I was tracking my car, and I noticed the dot on the map changed from blue to red. Does that mean something is wrong with my system?" The answer: No. We just decided to change the dot color. Thanks for paying attention!

We're all in sales.

We're looking for a sales manager to lead our inside sales efforts. The job is posted on Monster, but also on the Guidepoint website. At the moment, we have a four-person team that handles activation calls and upgrades, but the reality is that everyone at Guidepoint is accountable for sales. All of our CSRs do upgrade selling, handle customer renewals and look for opportunities to drive revenue. It's a cultural thing that comes from our CEO, Rand, who's a born peddler (albeit one who's an electronics whiz and serial entrepreneur). At any rate, if you know of anyone who's looking to work 60-70 hours per week, training, teaching and motivating, please have them contact me at brian@guidepointsystems.com.