GPS vehicle tracking technology is having a greater influencing upon more and more aspects of our lives. It’s the festive season and various types of tracking technology are being used to follow online purchases since Black Friday, and wiser companies have adopted it in time to streamline the peak of work predicted immediately before Christmas—but there is still time for you to contact us for a demo as well if you wish to do so.
What happens with vehicle tracking lately (and we have often focused on this), is that this technology is so incredibly useful and adaptable to different sectors and requirements that it is used for the most diverse of activities (check out how we used it for this running event!). Christmas is no exception—the technological evolution over the last years has had a profound impact on our culture. While in the past, excited children and their parents used to leave biscuits and milk for Santa and a carrot for Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer before going to bed on Christmas Eve, the tradition for this has changed somewhat, and children all over the world now track Santa’s journey around the globe in real time thanks to the multiple apps that have been created for the purpose.
Despite Christmas being supposedly the time of the year when everyone puts aside their differences, a bit of rivalry has grown out of the dedicated Santa Tracker apps and websites between two main ‘providers’—if we can call them that—of the service: one is Google’s Santa Tracker while the other is NORAD Tracks Santa.
Google Santa Tracker allows users to track Santa during Christmas Eve and also allows users to play, watch, and learn through little activities that are added daily from the start of December. Most of the year, Google Santa Tracker gets an average of 30,000–45,000 views, but around the holiday season starting early October, it increases to around 150,000 (but actually fewer than NORAD Tracks Santa).
Legend has it that in 2004, Google saw the NORAD Tracks Santa service and they said they "felt like it could be better for users to ‘visualize’ where Santa is currently at". Starting at about midnight in the furthest Eastern Time zone, the map shows Santa alternating between traveling and handing out presents in cities. While he spends one minute in each city, the time it takes to travel depends on distance between cities. There are counters showing how far Santa has travelled, how long until he reaches the viewer's city, the distance from the viewer's city and the total number of presents delivered. Santa has helpers with him, including the standard reindeer and elves, along with penguins and a snowman; and for all the cities visited, the gadget shows its Wikipedia article as well as accurate temperature data provided by The Weather Channel.
And what does the counterpart, NORAD Tracks Santa, actually offer? NORAD Tracks Santa is an annual Christmas-themed entertainment program, which has existed since 1955, produced under the auspices of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Every year on Christmas Eve, "NORAD Tracks Santa" purports to track Santa Claus as he leaves the North Pole and delivers presents to children around the world.
The NORAD Tracks Santa program has been described as "one of the few modern additions to the centuries-old Santa Claus story that have stuck." Gerry Bowler, a history professor at the University of Manitoba who wrote a book on Santa Clause, stated that the program "takes an essential element of the Santa Claus story—his travels on Christmas Eve—and looks at it through a technological lens," therefore bringing the Santa Claus mythology into the modern era.
And what about SynX and Transpoco? We surely play our part as a provider of tracking software and fleet manager applications, and we even considered how we could make Santa’s life easier in the past with the help of our technology. In this video you can actually see how this would play out! So if you have any vehicle tracking needs or wish to streamline your fleet because your job can feel every bit as challenging as Santa’s at times—you know just whom to call!
