Local company aims to keep ports, children safe with new GPS device
By Dale Neal, STAFF WRITER
SKYLAND — A device developed for homeland security may help keep the members of your household safer as well.
An Asheville-based company has created a new global positioning system device that could help guard sensitive seaports and military bases, or closer to home, track your child on a school bus or monitor your teenager driving the family car.
This fall, Homeland Integrated Security Systems will roll out a retail version of its Cyber Tracker, priced about $500.
“If my daughter is driving in South Asheville, it will call my cell phone or send me an e-mail alert. If she’s speeding or leaving South Asheville,” said Frank Moody, CEO of the company quietly headquartered in Biltmore Park.
Most GPS devices can bounce a signal up to a satellite every 15 to 25 seconds, but that can seem like an eternity in tracking a moving vehicle. Seconds matter when it comes to protecting homeland security or ensuring your child’s safety.
“The problem is tracking things in real time,” Moody said. “If you’re traveling at 60 mph, think how far you can go in that time.”
Moody’s company has developed and tested the Cyber Tracker at the Garden City Terminal at the Savannah, Ga., one of the nation’s largest ports. The small device could be issued to each of the 7,500 drivers entering the port daily, allowing each truck’s movements to be tracked on a secure network.
The Cyber Tracker has shaved the 12- to 25-second feedback of other GPS devices down to about a 3-second relay, said Ian Riley, the company’s chief technology officer. Software inside the device can alert security if a driver veers off course, is speeding or lingers too long inside a secure area.
Working on a Nextel cell phone network, the device has walkie-talkie features to allow communication with the driver.
Employers also could put the Cyber Tracker into their fleet of cars to see where workers are actually driving.
While privacy may be a concern to some, security is paramount to others, Moody said, especially since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and news of child abductions.
“We live in a scary world. People want to protect their assets and their children,” he said.
Marketing to that sense of security, HISS anticipates sales of $7 million by the end of the year, and $125 million in annual sales in the next three years, Moody said.
With the federal government expected to spend billions for homeland security, area businesses with new technology are likely to find success with good solutions, said Robert Goodale, head of the Western North Carolina Center for Technology Commercialization.
“We’ve all read about the gap in port security,” Goodale said. “Companies that have innovative solutions to closing that gap in port security will have a leg up.”
Contact Neal at 232-5970 or dneal@CITIZEN-TIMES.com.
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