Blog
March 2010

Welcome to our blog. Through it, we hope to offer insight into or products and technology, as well as some general news that we hope may affect your transportation habits.

Under the hood of SMS Alerts

We've been playing with text messaging (SMS) technology at Goose Networks since our early experiments with real-time ridesharing back in 2006. With SMS in our ‘Corporate DNA,’ we were all the more excited to roll out our 'SMS Alerts' feature to clients in late 2009.

With SMS alerts, clients can set up distribution lists (d-lists) for specific shuttle/transit routes (i.e. 'Red Line Alerts') or other groups (i.e. 'General Commuter Alerts'). Users register their mobile phones to receive alerts from one or more list, and program administrators can send out alerts at their convenience via the Admin Control Panel's 'SMS Campaigns' tool.

            

We like to think that we've kept the feature simple from end-to-end. This was important to us, since things are actually fairly complicated under the hood. What could be complicated about sending text messages? For starters, imagine that you're offering an SMS alerts program for the Red Bus line, and one of your subscribers decides to cancel his cell phone plan and switch to a different operator (with a different phone number). When he does so, his old number will eventually get recycled and given to a new cell phone customer. That person doesn't expect to receive SMS alerts about the Red Line, and will probably consider any such alerts unwanted SPAM. Luckily for you, we've put systems in place to make such an outcome impossible. By working diligently with each of the major US mobile phone operators (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc.), we can track when phone numbers get taken offline or recycled, and automatically unsubscribe them from any our of d-lists before they receive unwanted campaign messages.

While SMS is considerably more complex than email, we've done to our best to hide that complexity behind an extremely simple, intuitive tool; it is our hope that we've been able to make sending an SMS alert as simple as sending an email campaign via the Goose Mailing List manager.

If you're interested in offering SMS Alerts to your riders, please contact us to set up a live demo -- we'd love to show you this tool in action.

Posted by Nick Shiftan on March 23, 2010.

Seattle Chidren's Hospital case study

The Northwest’s largest pediatric medical and research center, Seattle Children’s Hospital needed creative solutions to manage employee commuting and parking and capture lost revenue.

With the help of a dynamic commuter management system designed by Goose, the hospital has improved its bottom line while encouraging and rewarding the use of alternative transportation.

To learn more about how we helped Seattle Children's to increase parking revenue, reduce demand for on-site parking, and track shuttle ridership, dowload our case study, or read a summary online on our website.

Posted by Zac Corker on March 18, 2010.

Biking directions added to Google Maps

Today, our friends at the Seattle Google office announced the addition of biking directions and extensivee bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S.

With a nod to all the public support for adding biking directions, and the help of the Rails-toTrails Conservancy in collecting much of the necessary trail data, Google flipped the switch to allow users to receive directions by car, public transit, walking, or biking when planning trips on Google Maps.

The route planner considers bicycle facilities, topography, intersection quality, and traffic to plan directions. Detailed bicycle infrastructure information (bike lanes, boulevards, etc.) is available for about 150 cities in the U.S.

You can learn all about the many factors and variables taken into account on Google's Lat Long Blog. Or, for a quick 2-minute overview of using biking directions, watch this helpful video.

                        

 

Posted by Zac Corker on March 10, 2010.
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