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Calgary company’s high-tech device helps police and clients “see” stolen vehicles and equipment
By Marzena Czarnecka, Alberta Venture Magazine, June 2005

That scenario, according to Don Douglas, the president and chief executive officer of Longview Advantage Inc., is the genesis of the vShepherd, the company’s flagship product. It integrates Global Position System, Internet and cellular phone technologies to help clients keep track of cars, skid steers, backhoes and, in the case of one theft-prone show home firm, refrigerators and stoves.

Founded in 1999 under the name ATS Asset Tracking Services by Richard Patterson and Richard Cardst, two Calgary entrepreneurs with a thirst for vengeance, Longview launched its first generation product in 2001. The name change, says Douglas, better reflects what the company offers: the ability to “see” a client’s valuable assets wherever they are. Longview partnered with Calgary-based CSI Wireless to manufacture a more sophisticated second-generation product. The device – a sleek black box about the size of a thin paperback or oversized cigarette case – is installed in the engine of a vehicle. Designed to look like it belongs – “as if it’s part of the engine,” says Douglas – the vShepherd functions as an ultrasophisticated alarm-and-tracking system that, in the event of a successful theft, leads you, and the police, to the vehicle’s location.

Neither the technology behind the vShepherd nor its application is new. “It’s the same satellites the U.S. has used in its Iraq invasions over the years,” says Douglas, “and the commercial applications have been around for the last 10 or 12 years.” Longview’s innovation was to combine the pre-existing technology and the software that powers it, and to provide delivery, service and support.

Ease-of-use is a big selling point, too. With a vShepherd onboard, you can track the location and movements of your car (or, for commercial customers, skid steers, backhoes and trucks) from any Internet connection. Bells and whistles include being able to see how fast the vehicle is going – which is particularly useful if your teenage son (or a newly hired driver) is behind the wheel. Anti-theft features include the vFence, a virtual fence or security perimeter you set up around your vehicle when it’s parked. If the vehicle leaves the “fence,” the vShepherd immediately calls Longview’s Alarm and Recovery Centre. The Recovery Centre notifies the police, and most “assets,” says Douglas, are recovered within an hour.

Despite the fervent desire of Longview’s founders to punish car thieves, the vShepherd’s core market today is Bobcat, not Lexus, owners. The company chose to focus on what Douglas characterizes as an under-serviced industry sector plagued by equipment theft – equipment dealers and commercial contractors who need to keep track of their skid steers, excavators and backhoes.

“Every contractor in the world has one of these,” says Douglas, fingering a scale model of a skid steer. “They have wheels, but they also seem to have feet, because they walk away. People steal them all the time.” Many contractors lose two to three of these smaller machines a year; without a vShepherd or similar device, they rarely get them back. Thefts of larger equipment – full-size backhoes or bulldozers – are less common, but at $200,000 a machine, they’re also an issue no matter how rare. (You may be  wondering how anybody can steal a full-size digger or backhoe. One Longview customer who recently experienced such a theft, and asked to remain anonymous, explains: “The thieves pulled up to a construction site on the weekend with a lowboy and loaded it up with all the attachments. They had all the time in the world. There were people around, but no one thought twice about it.”

The construction industry niche market has been good to Longview, allowing it to quickly expand from a focus on theft protection and recovery to fleet management and more sophisticated asset tracking measures. “We went in there for theft, and the customers said to us, ‘Well, we have our one or two thefts a year, but what’s really exciting for us is that you give me the ability to monitor and service all my equipment,’” says Douglas. “We give them reports on how many hours equipment is used, when a machine needs an oil change – they love it for that. It saves them time and money and it makes the operation more efficient.”

But the theft side, Douglas concedes, is more “glitzy.” It’s the reason many customers come to Longview, or one of its distributors, in the first place. “They all lose these things and their insurance companies sometimes get fed up and say, ‘Get something that Longview or an equivalent provides or we’re cutting you off.... We’ve had customers come to us and say, ‘Insurance is going to abandon us unless I get your device.’” Police services like it, too. When Waco, Texas-based dealer Brazos Valley Equipment had three vShepherd-equipped machines stolen, the high-tech trail led the police not just to the machines, but to a major gang-related theft operation.

With an exclusive endorsement from the North American Equipment Dealers Association, which represents 6,000 equipment dealers in Canada and the United States, and about 80% of its sales south of the border, Longview sees itself as one of the top two security players in the heavy equipment industry, alongside San Diego-based powerhouse QUALCOMM. But its current niche, which has now taken the company to “the early stages of profitability,” with a four-fold increase in sales between 2003 and 2004, is just the jumping off point for bigger things, believes Douglas. “We focused on that industry to start with,” he says. “You have to be recognized as an expert in an industry to be successful.” As the technology behind the vShepherd evolves – in other words, as it gets smaller and less expensive – Longview plans to target the consumer market. It wants to put vShepherds into cars across North America.

“We see the consumer side really expanding in 2006,” says Douglas. He’s already seeing a shift from “the early-adopter marketplace, where people were really kicking tires to see what we were about,” to widespread consumer interest in the product. The company is also seeing some applications they never really considered: one Mississauga, Ontario customer who was losing appliances out of his show homes installed  vShepherds on his fridges and stoves, successfully recovering the appliances after tracking them to the show home of a competitor. Another customer put a vShepherd on a fireplace to flush out a thieving employee. “The application is really limited by your imagination,” Douglas enthuses.

Of course, at $699 plus a monthly service plan for the lower-end version, you’re not going to see vShepherd on the shelves of Canadian Tire, or in your Honda Civic, anytime soon. But that’s $300 less than its suggested retail price in Canada last year, and its still dropping. Longview expects to quadruple its sales again this year, and, says Douglas, is poised for “huge growth” after 2006. And its investors see the story ending not with cars, but with people.

“The philosophy of one of the principal investors is sociological, looking to personal tracking of, for example, the elderly with Alzheimer’s, or children,” says Douglas. The current size and weight of the device makes it “a little cumbersome to put on a child, the elderly or pets,” he continues. “But that’s the marketplace of the future. You get it down to where you can put it on the lapel, where it’s unobtrusive. That’s where the technology is going.”

Longview already has a number of customers who have plopped down $699-plus to keep track of grandma’s car (and, indirectly, grandma). One commercial customer, who wishes to remain anonymous, is interesting in installing a device in the car her children drive. But, as she notes, “It does all sound a bit Big Brotherish, doesn’t it?”

And that’s one of the dark clouds on Longview’s horizon – how privacy legislation, provincial, federal and international, will impact tracking technologies. Tracking your car or assets is one thing. Tracking the habits of your drivers – something Douglas says  customers periodically express interest in – is different. And tracking the movements of grandma or Billy... well, it’s unclear how governments will deal with this. (Your teenager, however, is guaranteed to hate it.)

A more immediate concern is that right now stealth is one of the vShepherd’s major strengths and selling points. “No one knows it’s on there, and it didn’t even occur to the thief to look for it,” says a Longview customer who recently had a theft recovery, but also wishes to remain anonymous to “not advertise to thieves” that his fleet is vShepherd equipped. “We don’t tell anyone we have it on our machines. Even at the company, the only people who know about them are the owner,  the senior mechanic who services the machines, and me. As soon as it becomes more common, we’re going to breed a smarter type of thief.” One who knows, for instance, that he has to get the car, skid steer or backhoe out of cellular range ASAP. Or a thief who invests in a cellular signal jammer.

In the meantime, Longview still feels it has a winner. And, as thieves get smarter, so do the good guys, says Douglas. The vShepherd records the last known position of a vehicle, and the supporting software continues searching for it even when it disappears off the cellular map. One customer whose skid steer "disappeared” when a thief escaped into the bush recovered the machine when it rejoined civilization six months later. “The customer was thrilled,” says Douglas. “He kept on saying, ‘I knew I would get that guy!’” Revenge is a dish best served cold.

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