effiTRAQ Installation

The installation instructions for effiTRAQ Enterprise GPS Tracking Server application can be obtained from the following link:

http://www.effikc.com/pdf/Installation_Guide_Win.pdf

effiTRAQ is now FREE!

effiTRAQ, is a powerful, web-based vehicle tracking solution from effiKC, offering comprehensive tracking and fleet management features. The user can not only track movement of his vehicles and fleet on Google Maps but also set up rules for automatic surveillance, manage notification (email/ sms) options, generate detailed MIS reports in various data formats including graphical format, remotely issue commands to vehicles, get access to sensor data from sensors connected to the Vehicle Tracking Unit and manage sub-users and their levels of access.

effiKC is offering this truly enterprise grade Vehicle Tracking Software  for FREE to its customers for up to 100 vehicles. License fees for additional vehicles are as low as Rs 250 per vehicle, one-time.

With this offer, effiKC hopes to reach out to the small and medium transport operators and owners who constitute the major bulk of the Vehicle Tracking Services market.

The details of this offer are available at: http://www.effikc.com/offers.html

The detailed features of effiTRAQ are available at: http://www.effikc.com/effitraqbasic.html

effiTRAQ Vehicle Tracking now with Graphical Reports

We at effiKC believe in the power of information. We also understand the need for analyzing the information to draw useful inferences.

In keeping with our quest for providing the best tools to our clients for analyzing the overwhelming volumes of real time data that is generated through our effiTRAQ Vehicle Tracking System, we have introduced powerful graphical reports.

Optimizing the fleet performance is now as simple as clicking on a button with the new version of the effiTRAQ GPS Tracking Application.

So go ahead and test it out today!

effiTRAQ Enterprise- Platform Independent

I am delighted to inform all our clients and readers that effiTRAQ is now Windows compatible!

effiTRAQ Enterprise Vehicle Tracking Server software has been designed and tested to run on both Linux/ Unix servers as well as Windows Servers. effiTRAQ would thus be able to power your company’s real time asset tracking and supply chain requirements  irrespective of the OS your company’s IT infrastructure supports.

To know more about the system requirements to run effiTRAQ Enterprise Server, please get in touch with our support team.

effiTRAQ- The Vehicle Tracking system for Service Providers

Real Time Asset Tracking is the buzzword today in the domain of Supply Chain Management.  The market is growing rapidly and the analysts expect it to grow to several billion dollars in the near future.

Every player in this segment is trying to come up with new features that would provide additional benefits to the end clients with the hope of differentiating itself from competitors. But in this mad race to add new features for the end clients, not all of which are actually useful, one forgets the need for building tools that would help the provider of such tracking services to manage the ever growing number of clients and assets under its portfolio.

We, at effiKC, understand that a successful product is not one which has the most number of features but one that has features that are actually useful and that can be managed easily to help scale the business as demand grows.

Our product, effiTRAQ, is a comprehensive feature rich asset tracking and fleet management application that is efficient, scalable and easy to use. It has been built keeping in mind the needs of not only the end customers (for supply chain management) but also the service providers offering the asset tracking services. It comes with an administrative portal for managing clients, vehicles, marketing campaigns, tariff plans, billing and payments- not just in one country but in several countries and with different languages.

We would be discussing about the various features of the effiTRAQ Enterprise Application in our upcoming blogs. So don’t forget to add our feeds if you want to know about the latest developments in the field of Location Based Services.

Write files using javascript

The following piece of javascript when run from Internet Explorer will write a file on to your desktop.

<script>
function WriteToFile(fileName,text)
{
var fso = new ActiveXObject(”Scripting.FileSystemObject”);
try{
//Open a file for writing. It will generate an error if it exists
var s = fso.CreateTextFile(fileName, false);
s.WriteLine(text);
s.Close();
} catch(err)
{
//If a file exisits, append to it
var s = fso.OpenTextFile(fileName, 8);
s.WriteLine(text);
s.Close();
}
}
</script>

This won’t work if:
1. You’re using a non-IE browser (which doesn’t support activex objects)
2. You’re using an IE browser on an XP machine with SP2 installed and the activex object is being blocked

Office Tools

As an entrepreneur who is using his savings to start up his dream company, it is important to cut down on one’s expenses without compromising on productivity.  The OS (operating system) for office PCs and the business software like word processors, spreadsheets and slides that one takes for granted while working in a large corporate house, can actually burn a deep hole in one’s pocket.

Given the popularity of Mr. Bill Gates and his company’s ubiquitous presence, I’ve always been a religious user (if not a fan) of Windows and all Microsoft Office products. It was only when I started effiKC and wanted to setup my own office did I realize how expensive they were.

It cost me around Rs 20,000 to get an assembled PC with a high end configuration. However, to equip it with MS Windows and MS Office, I found out that I would need to spend around Rs 7,000 for each (including taxes). Using simple Mathematics, the cost of using a day to day software was coming out to 70% of the hardware cost.

These software which would go down my accounts books as long term assets (that too I doubt because Microsoft licenses are valid only for 3 years) were turning out to be liabilities for me.

The decision was obvious and instantaneous. I had always read about it and discussed about it with Microsoft haters. I now tried it for myself.

I decided to go ahead with the Linux OS and was pleasantly surprised with how it had progressed since my college days 5 years back. I tried out two flavors – Open Suse and Ubuntu. Both have UI based software installation and update features that I found to be a major relief given my short term memory in remembering commands. Moreover, I found out that mounting and un-mounting memory sticks, CD and DVD ROMs were as easy as that in Windows. Moreover the crisp and easy to use graphical user interface with Windows like file and directory structure further helped in easing the transition process.

The best feature was yet to be realized. The Linux machines were practically indifferent to the innumerable Viruses that have been specifically designed for their Windows counterparts.  Usually one learns about the benefits of using an anti virus only when one’s valuable data gets seriously affected.  Sooner or later every Windows user realizes that an annual purchase of anti virus software license is like getting an annual dose of flu shot.

The day when I found a file called ‘jim.carry’ that carries the seeds of the famous Jim Carry virus lying as an incapacitated creature on one of the USB memory sticks that had come in dangerous contact with several Windows machines, I could not thank my lucky stars for having saved me another Rs 3,000 a year.

Now, that the purpose of a cheap and efficient OS had been served, I needed to find out similar office processing software. The Linux distributions usually come loaded with Open Office products that resemble MS Office in look and functionality and provides a good transition. Moreover, it comes with a free (yes absolutely free) pdf maker to make any number of pdfs that your heart desires.

In spite of all the benefits of the Open Office suite, it is not Open Office that I selected. I happen to be a regular user of GMail. One day when I was checking my emails for the umpteenth time and wondering what else I could do that I had not already done, I happened to chance upon the link called ‘Documents’ on the top left hand corner of the GMail screen. Once I started exploring the link, I found that Google Docs is actually a far superior substitute. Firstly, it provides for easy sharing of documents across networks and continents. Secondly it does not consume any hard disk space as everything is stored remotely on Google’s servers. Third, it maintains history of all revisions to it along with the names of the editors and the timing of editing, making it even more effective for collaborative work.

With Google Docs now offering a folder structure that makes it easier to store and manage documents online, there is no turning back to Microsoft.

In addition to the office productivity suite from Google, it also provides a wonderful calendar facility that can be used to plan daily agenda, setup meetings and also generate reminders that would be directly deliverd to your cell phone when you are on the move. This is something that I would not even expect from Outlook.

It is not that I am a big fan of the Google founders (although they happen to be alums from the same university that I went to ), but there is no doubt that it is difficult to find an alternative to Google’s office products.  Today it is only small organizations like ours who are adopting Google as the official business software provider. The day when large organizations would take it up as another way of ‘cost-cutting’ when the economy is hit by another downward surge, is not too far to visualize.

My Status

Human beings are social animals. Personality, mood, body language etc of a person determine the way one socializes in a group setting. However, when in person one-on-one interactions are replaced by telephonic meetings,  there is hardly any scope of finding out the other person’s mood or body language.

Caller tunes address this social void to some extent. The song or music that a user chooses to greet one’s callers, demonstrates one’s mood and personality. As a result this concept gained instant popularity among the most socially active segment of population- the youth. Once the technology had made its inroads into the market and everyone else became aware of it, it spread like wild fire across the telecom subscriber circle. Today a significant percentage of mobile phone users across the country use caller tunes.

However, a caller tune can only partially meet our needs of depicting our moods and personality. Caller tunes are static. Once selected, they remain unless again changed by the user. Moreover songs can not depict the multitude of feelings that constitute human emotions.

What if we had a tool that would automatically pick up signals from the body (ECG, EEG, Body Temperature, Hormone Levels from sweat etc.) and determine one’s mood and then update the greeting status of one’s cell phone?

And what if it also allowed users to set custom ‘availability’ status based on one’s schedule as available in instant messengers? For example one could have status like ‘busy in a meeting’, ‘with family’, ‘at home’ etc that would be available to the caller even before the call is placed. This would not only save time (and sometimes embarassment) for the caller but also for the recipient.

I don’t know when such things would be practically possible. But one thing is for sure- when it happens, I’d be one of the first to use it…

The big bang

It was a Sunday morning when the hour hand of my bedside alarm clock was just about to finish one complete revolution around the white dial.  The sun light from outside was streaming in through the partially raised Venetian blinds covering my bedroom window.

I was still lying on my bed. I could feel a severe pain pounding inside my head. Partying all weekend had its own after effects.

As I peeped out of the sides of my barely opened eyelids to catch a glimpse of the time, my heart just skipped a beat. Another day had just slipped away from my life.

I worked for a global oil and gas giant in the energy capital of the United States, Houston. I enjoyed the benefits of a fat pay package and a laid back work atmosphere that limited my work hours to a 9-80 schedule. It was apparently a scheme invented by the Houston traffic board to control traffic congestion along its freeways. However, its impacts on my life was completely different. When the rest of the world would begin its weekend celebrations with a TGIF, I started celebrating my TGI Thursdays. This particular day just happened to be on one such long weekend.

As I sat up on my bed, still rubbing my eyes, trying to gauge the impact of the hangover, I could not help but think about what I was doing with my life.  My lifestyle was the envy of my friends who still worked in India or those who were still toiling over their PhDs in the US. It pumped my heart with a feeling that could best be described as pompousness.

But not now. My head was playing tricks with me. It started spewing out questions like a freshly opened soda bottle. And all the questions boiled down to only one thing- was I happy?

Once I realized what was bothering me, I set out on my quest to find its answers hidden in the unfathomable depths of my mind. I fumbled through half forgotten memories, unfulfilled wishes and long lost prayers.

I remembered how as a teenager I would admire my dad as a man who created his own destiny. A self-made man who built a business out of nothing but sheer determination, foresight and hard work.

I remembered how I would pray in every religious function to become a successful entrepreneur, who would  make even his entrepreneur father proud for scaling heights in business that even he had never been able to reach himself.

I remembered how as a college student, I would kindle the fire of entrepreneurship among my friends when they seemed disoriented and confused- lost in the turbulent sea called career.

And I realized how I was leading my life now- choosing the option that comes easy, completely addicted to short term pleasures, completely unmindful of what I always wanted to do.

And I woke up….

Where are you?

Is it not difficult to remember every time to set vacation reply messages for your email or update your current location information on various social networking sites whenever you are traveling?

Well..how about if this information was automatically updated so that your friends always knew where you were without having to inform them about it personally?

One way to do it would be to have a web-application maintaining every user’s personal profile and login information for each of his/her email and social networking profiles at one end. At the other end, one could synchronize the user’s mobile phone (that needs to have GPS) to update the location info onto the web-application.

For people who might not want to invest in an expensive GPS phone, the web-application could just note the last ip address from where the user last logged in to the world wide web  and use it to know his/her latest location on the globe.

Once the web-application has the user’s location co-ordinates, it can automatically update the info on all social networking sites as well as setup vacation replies if the user is not detected in his hometown.