10 Ideas: New use cases if the price of GPS dropped by 90%

This post is a collection of responses from the weekly 10 ideas email. If you’d like to be more creative every week, you can sign up to receive the email here.

Some of my favourites this week:

• Making art more accessible: Public art has typically been constrained by the idea that it needs to be fixed in place. If you track the art, is there any reason that you couldn’t have art that people can move around the city.
• Improving security in house-sharing: AirBNB starts a program where every member gets an AirBNB hotel card with inbuilt GPS to unlock the door of any apartment or house they’re staying at. The big benefit is AirBNB gets access to all the travel and location data about what a person does in that city and on other trips that they aren’t using airbnb for.
• Keeping track of the most important thing in life: Stitched into kids clothing, so you don’t lose the kid OR the clothing!
• Added security on transactions: Payments: use your GPS location (phone) together with the GPS location of any item (purchased / sold / lent) to be 2 factor encryption for a payment. When the 2 appear matched then title transfers and payment is made. You can take whatever it is since you are there.
• Keeping track of the most vulnerable: Dementia patient monitoring

The full list:

Tracking valuables

1. Insurance companies give clients one for every item, reduce premium, help them to recover stolen items
2. Asset management businesses who do things like laptops and computer monitors can track where all the assets are at any given time. Reduces insurance premiums and risk of theft.
3. Pet tracking business — Never lose Fido again. There’s probably a real business to be built here, with Vets as your primary resellers.
4. Long life batteries with daily pings so you can have battery powered GPS on collectibles that lasts for years.
5. I saw an ACA news snippet on people having their plants stolen from their front yard. If people are really paranoid about their plants, then attaching a GPS tracker to every plant should do the trick.
6. Stitched into pet collars to avoid losing pets
7. Footies, for when they get stuck in a high tree, when they fall out of the tree you get notified and you go collect
8. Books, because you can never remember who you lent it to, or who you borrowed it from
9. New where’s my? App — use standard protocol to enroll anything with a GPS so you can see it on a map. If no one will ask you How you seen the …?
10. Premium goods with privacy — sell 2 versions of items one with tracking and one without. Charge more for having one without so your privacy is protected
11. Track all public bikes so all can be kept properly
12. Art works
13. Trackers on all livestock and ag assets

Used in transit

1. All bags and luggage come with GPS tracking inbuilt
2. Track your bottle of Grange. Know where it is at any point in time.
3. GPS in your parcel. Whenever you buy something from overseas, you can now see where it is on a map in real time.
4. Letters — do your own tracking of delivery
5. Trackers on all luggage
6. Parcel tracking
7. Trackers on all postal/courier deliveries
8. Trackers on all shipping containers

Marketing

1. Put GPS inside loyalty cards, and then you can dynamically push specials to people based on location
2. Put GPS unit inside your Qantas Frequent Flyer card. QFF is already becoming the default loyalty card for Australian business. With a GPSunit integrated to notifications on the phone, you could suggest specials and deals based on location. In addition you’d know when and where people were travelling not using Qantas, which presents opportunities for cross sell.
3. Loyalty cards from existing restaurants track your customer base — tells you the best locations where to open new restaurants. Even if the GPSbattery only lasts weeks you still get the data you need.
4. pamphlets/flyers at conferences — get analytics on how many people engaged with the information (i.e. they took it with them)

Improved safety measures

1. All life jackets have a GPS unit integrated. Activated by submersion in water. Makes it much easier to find people when someone goes overboard.
2. Hundreds of people each year die by falling off cruise ships (generally when drunk). They aren’t seen going overboard and the alarm isn’t raised.
3. Add a water activated GPS + accelerometer to the lanyards that people wear onboard. As soon as the accelerometer triggers a 9.8m/s acceleration followed by a water activation, the boat alarm is raised and engines stop. Would save lives.
4. Stitched into kids clothing, so you don’t lose the kid OR the clothing!
5. Car tracking
6. Trackers on all pets and people
7. All remand/ probationary prisoners
8. Dementia patient monitoring
9. Zoo animals
10. Pre school children
11. Trackers on all bush walkers and outback desert goers
12. Trackers on all school kids bags

Improving the travel experience

1. Travel insurance, that’s variably priced based on your risk profile. Depends on where you go.
2. The government can make money out of the smart traveller app. You buy a beacon at the airport and based on your location you receive SMS alerts to your phone. If things get bad in your location, you location is automatically provided to the local embassy. This would sell like hotcakes for pensioners travelling.
3. AirBNB starts a program where every member gets an AirBNB hotel card with inbuilt GPS to unlock the door of any apartment or house they’re staying at. The big benefit is AirBNB gets access to all the travel and location data about what a person does in that city and on other trips that they aren’t using airbnb for.

Crime prevention

1. Graft GPS units into all elephant tusks. Poachers know they will be tracked.
2. Campaign to install GPS trackers on bikes. Stop bikes getting stolen.
3. Anti-money laundering — track $100 notes
4. Put one on all your marginally valuable items in case of theft
5. Payments: use your GPS location (phone) together with the GPSlocation of any item (purchased / sold / lent) to be 2 factor encryption for a payment. When the 2 appear matched then title transfers and payment is made. You can take whatever it is since you are there.
6. Wildlife tracking — esp endangered species
7. Trackers on endangered animals

Tracking city use

1. They probably already do this, but GPS inside the e-tag units, so that Transurban has complete knowledge of traffic movements across the city.
2. For urban design and architecture projects, the data collection phase is usually pretty poor. Replace that by giving everyone in an area a disposable GPS tracker that’s disguised within a free coffee card (or something similar). You get a free coffee for the next 5 days as long as you carry the tracker with you (need to think about how you make sure the location of the cafe doesn’t bias the results).
3. That data allows Transurban to bid more for projects that other companies just can’t make economic, because there’s less risk around the data / predictions on any project. This could be the case with the West Gate Tunnel — who knows!
4. Insurance companies give clients one for car insurance, the gps allows them to track driver behaviour, and premiums are lower for safer driving
5. Every car/vehicle/bike would be tracked

Data management

1. Buy data centers and fibre assets — if prices fall that much usage will explode and data created will also increase massively. Demand for compute and connection (data centres and fibre) will increase massively (already happening..)
2. Remote AI — if there is an explosion in devices and therefore in associated information in order to manage the compute requirement there will need to be more ‘smart’ devices (like Alexa) distributed near the data creation — as a result make devices that link all these GPStrackers together

Other

1. Public art has typically been constrained by the idea that it needs to be fixed in place. If you track the art, is there any reason that you couldn’t have art that people can move around the city.
2. Embed in business cards to see who really took it with them, so you know who to bother following up with
3. Sell GPS jammers — allows you to maintain privacy and find things that others can’t
4. Sharing economy — use tracking of things (eg lawnmower) combined with small payments system (like Opal card) to convert everything you buy to a available for rent model. Get an app that notifies you if someone wants to borrow your thing (lawnmower) and leave it where it can get picked up and then use GPS to automatically charge rent / a penalty if not returned. That way all the semi big stuff you use infrequently can actually earn you money / you don’t need a shed full of it if you know someone nearby has it
5. Virtual you — Run a service that fakes the various high value item GPStracking codes that will come to exist so that it makes it look like you own a really expensive car / high end sporting goods / other stuff that people seem to like to post on Instagram about. If it ran off your phone you could appear so rich that you take your car overseas on holidays with you…

This post is a collection of responses from the weekly 10 ideas email. If you’d like to be more creative every week, you can sign up to receive the email here.