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Many of you have wondered about our coverage of CES 2007 this year and our focus will be GPS Fleet Management tools and Home Automation Products and usage.

GPS Fleet Management
It looks like the GPS equipment manufacturers have achieved fair pricing levels for their products so that most businesses can take advantage of this emerging GPS technology as GPS equipment prices have continued to fall and are now in the $400 - $500 range for a unit that will be a good tool for managing people, vehicles and assets.

GPS Fleet Management systems still suffer from usability issues but on-line tracking prices have stabilized in the $30 - $90/month/unit range. The lower pricing is for checking asset location; higher pricing is for constant tracking and dispatch features used by towing, taxi or limo companies.

Last year at CES we saw overpriced equipment and service rates. This year we hope to find ‘asset tracking’ and GPS Fleet Management tools for people that are serious about tracking and managing their wandering assets. We think that GPS Equipment and online tracking has the potential to become one of the most cost effective management tools for small business fleets ever sold or imagined.

Businesses are demanding sensible features and maybe the lights are beginning to go off for some of these GPS vendors. There is finally some acknowledgment that this technology can do more than remotely unlock a car or give someone directions to the nearest restaurant. Not only are these features un-necessary for business owners to have, they are expensive to staff and the features raise the installation costs of GPS units.

We feel that business owners that have a few trucks in their service fleet need less features but better reporting that the current GPS Fleet management offerings. We will be looking for initial service plans that have full time tracking plans for 2 - 3 months then allow you to back-off to a cheaper plan for maintenance, monitoring and theft recovery.

A normal business GPS equipment install should take a half-hour or less. Complicating the install with remote shut-off (not-recommended) or door un-lock can add $150 - $300 to the install cost, not to mention the down-time of your equipment.

GPS Equipment Installation is pretty straightforward and with equipment that takes advantage of your standard ODB Port Installation can take as little as 20 minutes so beware some of the looks you get as the service rep estimates $400 and half a day with a raised eye-brow to justify his price.

No joke $400, use your imagination to figure out which national installer of automotive accessories gave us that bid with a straight face but when challenged, the manager ran out and said, ‘Oh, we could do it for our standard shop rate of $60/hour if you prefer.’ We said, ‘We would prefer a better bid and we’ll get back to you…’

Home Automation Products
We are thrilled with our Control 4 Home Automation system and will compare Control4 to other vendors as CES approaches. More later…