GPS keeps on coming

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 10:19:00 -0400
/technology

Fast Company on the huge efficiency gains GPS is going to bring.

Struggling to imagine possible uses?

Qualcomm, which supplies satellite tracking and messaging services to 300,000 trucks across North America, is testing GPS truck-trailer locks that would allow cargo to be unloaded only at the correct location. Qualcomm routinely fields inquiries from people wanting to use GPS in new ways. A plasma-screen TV manufacturer wanted to install GPS tracking in each screen as an antitheft measure. A cattle rancher wanted GPS collars for his cows. Two school districts in Pennsylvania with GPS-equipped buses offer families an alert when the school bus is approaching, a system dubbed “Here Comes the Bus.”

Even farming won’t escape this revolution (although subsidies will slow adoption):

The Glenns got another surprise. Matching the fertilizer map with the next year’s harvest map, they saw that weak areas of fields aren’t helped much by fertilizer. But strong areas produce even more strongly with extra fertilizer. “We’ve cut our nitrogen use by 10% to 12% in the last few years, with the same yields or better,” Don says.
“And that’s environmentally friendly,” says Brian.

“And we’ve saved $5,000 or $6,000 in nitrogen costs, just on corn,” Don says. With their iPAQs, the Glenns use GPS the same way that the concrete companies do. Data gathered during the day — automatically, instead of scribbled in notebooks — is loaded into computers at sundown. Don now keeps track of how much every seed and drop of pesticide costs for every field, as well as how much the harvest brings — and he can easily call up a P&L statement on his laptop for every field.

The present may be looked back on as the time of the blind organisation.