Monday, May 23, 2005

ICL tracker new service in Mauritius


mazda mx
Originally uploaded by baadaal.
Since this month a company called ICL is offering an emergency tracking service for cars.

It works like this, you install the ICL tracker kit in your car.The kit comprises of a GPS and a phone. If you get any kind of problem you just click a button , this sends a priority sms to the ICL tracking department , which in turn is able to localise your car and get in contact with you for assistance.

I think that this is a cool initiative to minimize road crimes which have been very frequent these days in Mauritius particularly amongst taxi drivers.

However i am not very certain whether having ICL responding to emergency calls is a good idea , would they have the necessary skills to perform in critical situations? Well i haven't personnaly tried the service so its difficult to know.

One other question that bugs me is the use of an sms to be sent to ICL tracking service , then having ICL coming to the rescue by calling the police or whatever , doesn't that just adds to the overhead of getting help? Wouldn't it be nicer if we just called the police ,asking them to come to the rescue through a GPS tracking id for example which they could get from ICL or having a GPS console shared commonly with the police and ICL department to track vehicules.

The alarm is really not enough these days , i was thinking if they did send sms , why not install a system that could take photos of the interior of your car at regular intervals and having it sent via mms to a security service of something along with having your alarm ringing in case of danger, that would be cool too.

Well lets just wait and see still its better than nothing.The ICL kit comes at Rs20,000 and a montly fee of Rs400.

Category: ,,,,

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, you could take your cellphone and place the call to the Police directly instead of pushing the button on the box. The OnStar-type service is very helpful in many ways apart from locating your vehicle: giving directions when lost, calling nearest garage...

Unknown said...

Have you tried the ICL tracker service?

By the way nice initiative with technews.

Anonymous said...

Back in 1998, Paging Services introduced a service for tracking delivery vehicles using the same technology. They provided the customer with an electronic map of Mauritius on which the locations of the different vehicles in a fleet could be seen by the touch of a button. I am surprised that it took so long for the service to be extended to consumers.

BTW, OnStar is on another level, isn't it? In UK (and Europe, now) we have the AA, often referred to as the fourth emergency service (see theaa.com).

Anonymous said...

I have a GPS Navigator in my CAr (Mazda Axela). Usually in japan they using to travel thru Japan it include a map.

Am seeking a DVD map for Mauritius
Thanks