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News

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.

Commute Calendar iPhone App

Our partners at Genentech recently announced the launch of the new gRide iPhone App. Now, Genentech employees can manage and submit their commute calendars on the fly, and create favorites for unique trip combinations, all directly from the iPhone.

Along with commute reporting, Genentech employees will soon be able to view employee shuttle schedules from the gRide iPhone App, and see when the next shuttle is coming with a  “Where’s my Bus?” feature. 

The gRide iPhone App was developed by Genentech in-house, and is a great example of how an organization can leverage Goose's host of API's to consume and interact with data from the Goose Commuter Management Platform.

                                           

Posted by Zac Corker on January 26, 2010.

Platform Updates & Enhancements

The Sunday deployment of the Goose Commuter Management Platform (v3.6) included the following updates & enhancements to our platform:

Introducing Google Maps

We've updated the Goose ride finder to use Google Maps. In addition to Google's sleek visuals, the Google Maps API offers superior geocoding, meaning faster & more accurate results when searching for public transit options to your worksite. We're sure you'll find both the look & performance of the ride finder much enhanced by the switch to Google Maps.

     

Ride Finder Enhancements

In addition to the switch to Google Maps, we've made a number of updates to the ride finder to optimize for trips on public transit. 

When planning a trip, we now ask users to set departure time using a single slider. We've also removed the 'walking distance' slider; now we'll simply look for the closest options to your point of origin. If there are no transit options near to your starting point, we'll suggest nearby stops that offer service to your desired destination. 

We've also made a number of visual and under-the-hood changes to how we return search results. On the front-end we've made a few changes to the search results display, both within the trip details box and on the map itself. Each leg of your trip -- including walking and transfers -- is color-coded, both within the search results info box and directly on the map itself. On the back-end, we've made a number of updates to the ride planner's search algorithms to greatly improve the speed & quality of suggested trips on public transit.

Ride Finder Widget

Customers with existing transportation services websites will be excited to learn that the ride finder is now available as a fully customizable widget. Developers can now choose embedd the ride finder directly into any existing web page using just a few lines of JavaScript, and control configurations ranging from the size of the ride finder to search options settings.

Posted by Zac Corker on January 25, 2010.

Congratulations Genentech - gRide reduces over 25M VMT!

Genentech's employee commuting program, known popularly as gRide, is broadly recognized as one of the best and most comprehensive programs of its kind. The gRide program offers Genentech employees a range of flexible services and incentives to steer them toward more environmentally friendly commute modes such as carpooling, public transit, and bicycling. (Read about gRide in Genentech's 2007 Corporate Sustainability Report.)

In addition to being a beloved employee benefit, the gRide program recently passed a major milestone -- eliminating over 25 million vehicle miles traveled! 

Congratulations to our gRide partners, and to Genentech employees for their committment to the use of drive-alone alternatives.

 

Posted by Zac Corker on December 9, 2009.

Support Services enhancements

Today we're pleased to introduce the Goose Networks Admin Support web portal. Whether you're reporting a problem, have a question, or are submitting a customization or feature request, you'll now be able to more easily submit requests and track their status.

Beginning today, Admin Users will see an additional link in the Action Bar of their service's Admin Control Panel. Clicking this link will take users directly to the Admin Support Panel. From here, it's easy to either submit new requests or to check the status of any existing issue.

In addition to the web portal, users can also submit requests via email. Simply email support@goosenetworks.com and we'll automatically open a ticket on your behalf.

And, of course, our customers are always more than welcome to pick up the phone and call their account representative directly.

Here at Goose, we have always taken great pride in the support services we offer our customers. We believe our new Admin Support web portal is a major step forward, and will help us to improve the speed and effectiveness with which we can respond to our customers needs.

We look forward to hearing what you think!

Posted by Zac Corker on November 15, 2009.

Goose Turns 3!

Three years ago this week I said goodbye to my job at Microsoft to launch Goose Networks on nothing more than an interesting idea and a few dozen cans of Red Bull.  Zac joined me out in Seattle soon after, and we hunkered down that summer to explore just how (and if) we could build a business around using technology to alter everyday transportation patterns.

We focused our first six months on building a ground-breaking, SMS-based service to enable real-time ridesharing.  The technology worked, but we never quite discovered how to recruit enough users on to the service to take advantage of the network effect.  What we did discover, however, was that more and more companies and organizations were growing their own internal commuter management programs, and many of them had similar technology needs that weren't being met.  Starting in late 2006, we began to re-imagine Goose as a technology platform that could power all types of commuter management services -- commute reporting, shuttle management, and, of course, rideshare matching.  By the end of the year, we had snagged our first two big contracts, and have been powering some of the country's most effective commuter management programs ever since.

We've certainly re-adjusted our focus a number of times since April 2006, but our core mission has remained remarkably consistent all along.  Here's to another three years!

Posted by Nick Shiftan on April 24, 2009.

Clean Tech Open coming to the Pacific Northwest

The Pacific Northwest is one of two new regions added in 2009 to the enormously successful Clean Tech Open which launched in California in 2006. Goose was the transportation category runner-up in 2008. As a part of the kick off event for the new Pacific Northwest Clean Tech Open, Goose spoke to a packed house last night at Seattle's recently renovated Arctic hotel. 

The size and enthusiasm of the crowd are good indications of the future of the Clean Tech Open outside of California. We are excited to have such a valuable program happening in our backyard and look forward to supporting the entrepreneurs who will represent the Northwest in what is now a national competition.

Posted by Charlie Crissman on April 16, 2009.

Welcome to the flock Patagonia!

We're proud to welcome our newest customer, Patagonia, to the Goose Networks flock. Ventura, CA based Patagonia is a great company known for not only making the highest quality outdoor clothing & gear, but creating these goods with processes that cause the least harm to the environment.

Patagonia launched their Goose CMP powered commuter resourcese program earlier this month, in time for the company's annual Bike to Work Week initiative. Patagonia has been using our commute calendar to track and measure the company-wide effort to reduce their footprint and the results have been astounding! Since launching their program, Patagonia has stepped up their efforts to use alternative transportation to and from work, resulting in the reduction of over 107,000 lbs. of carbon from being released into the atmosphere, reduced 23,000 trips, and saved over 5,500 gallons of gas. 

For a complete wrap of of Patagonia's Bike to Work week, visit Patagonia's employee weblog.

Here at Goose we're always excited to see the efforts of our customers accrue on a daily basis, and it's numbers like these that inspire us to do even more to support our customers.

Posted by Zac Corker on March 15, 2009.

Faster service delivery, without lifting a finger

Over the last month, we have quietly begun enabling a new feature for all of our clients that should dramatically improve their page load times and overall site performance.

There are two primary factors that affect the rate at which web sites load: the speed at which our servers can generate a response, and the time required for that response to get back to the user.  The first factor is fairly easy to optimize; we run high quality code, on high quality servers, in a high quality datacenter.  The second factor, however, has traditionally been tougher to 'tune' -- after all, our clients may be spread out all over the country, but our servers are all still located in Dallas.

That's where our new Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes in.  Here's the basic idea: instead of serving all of our clients sites from our Dallas-based datacenter, we distribute the content to 'virtual' datacenters across the world.  We have CDN servers located in Seattle, San Francisco, LA, St. Louis, Newark, Virginia, and Miami.  For international users, we also are distributing content from data centers throughout Europe and Asia.  When a user sends a request to an application running on our platform, it is automatically routed to the nearest server for processing.  For example: if you're accessing a Goose-powered service from New York City, most of the content delivered to you will be coming from Newark, instead of all the way from Texas.

The best part?  As a program administrator, you don't have to do anything - your CDN is automatically enabled.  Happy surfing!

Posted by Nick Shiftan on February 15, 2009.
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