An inside source? No, not really. They caught my attention several years ago when they made a big splash about ultra-cheap tracking devices, so cheap (and small) that you could place them in just about everything you own, so that if something got stolen it could quickly and easily be traced. A great idea for things like laptops and hard drives on university campuses and places like the Los Alamos National Lab (hehe). They touted the eventual capability of parents being able to track their kids in real time via the Internet.
That's where it gets a little creepy, because as soon as the devices become small enough to easily conceal, the abuses will start almost immediately. The real-time tracking devices aren't that small, yet, at least for the consumer market, but it may get there soon.
The most popular tracking device right now is the Passive Tracker, which is about the size of a beeper or a vehicle key remote thingy (it's an industry term) and can be placed (hidden) almost anywhere in a vehicle, or under a bumper, and will record GPS positions. The device can then later be hooked up to a PocketPC or something (in some cases via Bluetooth or other wireless connections) and will play back the "bread crumb" trail, including times, that show you where it's been.
Obviously, if the driver of the vehicle doesn't know they are being passively tracked for later data retrieval, it gets a little scummy, as the potential abuses boggle the mind. Everything from a suspicious spouse to a suspicious parent of a 16 year old with a new drivers license. I know a few of these devices have been found under the bumpers of some celebrity vehicles, a paparazzi's (or a fan/stalker's) dream. If you can track patterns, you can predict where someone will be.
But this kind of tracking has all kinds of great uses, not the least of which is driver compliance and the tracking of personal use of company vehicles.
They have a satellite tracking thing, like Qualcomm, as well. They also have software that will track the GPS embedded inside cell phones, pagers and PocketPC's, allowing people to track via a Web site a fleet of vehicles or one vehicle.
TeleType has some really good tracking technology, but they are best in the aviation and marine fields. Their land maps, though, mapping and routing, is just bad, bad, bad. The technology is good enough that the Coast Guard uses some of it for Marine tracking and surveillance, and the land-based tracking (not mapping and routing) is good enough that Progressive Insurance has pioneered the use of TeleType GPS tracking technology in cell phones to track drivers and then charge them insurance rates based on their driving habits. It's known as Telematic Auto Insurance.
Progressive is developing that for use in Europe. A Spanish company came up with a way to passively track vehicle movement via the engine control computer and base insurance rates on the retrieved data. A big European insurer is developing the Progressive model for use in Europe, and Progressive is developing the Spanish model for use in the US. Apparently, Europeans don't mind being tracked in real-time and have some aspects of their personal lives be on a pay-per-view basis, Americans do. But I digress.
I'm not a GPS freak by any stretch. This is just one company that attracted my attention rather early on, and because of a few developments along the way they have kept my attention. Not so much the company itself, as I really know very little about them, but more so in what they've come up with and how the technology is being used, that's what's kept my attention.
In any case, I don't want to come off as bashing TeleType. I'm not. I'm only bashing their vehicle GPS mapping and routing efforts. They actually have superior tracking technology, but they use dramatically inferior software and mapping data. Cheap, quick and dirty, mostly out of date. They get raving reviews from the PocketPC crowd, then again, they're an easily impressed bunch. If they had to actually rely on accurate GPS mapping and routing the reviews might not be so glowing. If only TeleType and someone like Garmin or Tom Tom would merge...
