CHICAGO—It’s fitting that the Samsara Beyond user conference is taking place this week in Chicago—the home of the Oprah Winfrey Show—considering the company had its own Oprah-style giveaway during the keynote event.
“You get an Asset Tag! You get an Asset Tag! Everyone gets an Asset Tag!” David Gal, Samsara VP of product and engineering, exclaimed to a group of about 2,000 attendees from the main stage of the Sheraton Grand Hotel by the Chicago riverwalk.
The Oprah moment wasn’t the company’s only interesting announcement to come from the transportation technology conference. Along with the giveaway of Samsara’s new Asset Tag (which we’ll get into), Samsara shared footage of the earth from one of its dashcams in outer space and the image of a Samsara device after being “slammed with 6,000-lb. of force” by a golf club at the driving range.
But it wasn’t all fun and games at the keynote speech of the conference. Sanjit Biswas, the transportation software company’s cofounder and CEO, shared impressive statistics with the audience. Within just the last year, Samsara:
- Recorded roughly 60 billion miles traveled by its customers’ vehicles and assets;
- Collected more than 9 trillion data points;
- Helped prevent 200,000 potential crashes;
- Digitized more than 230 million workflows on the platform; and
- Helped save roughly 3 billion pounds of CO2 emissions.
With the help of new technology announced at this year’s conference, perhaps next year’s numbers will be significantly higher. Included among those new innovations and new products announced during the keynote speech are the Asset Tag, Connected Training, and Connected Workflows.
The Samsara Asset Tag
Designed to help Samsara customers manage and track smaller, high-valued equipment or items, Gal described the new Samsara Asset Tag as an immensely more powerful version of a traditional Bluetooth tag.
Customers can place this tag on their assets—from pallets in warehouses to toolboxes—and track them using the Samsara Network. If they need to locate an item, they can simply track it on the Samsara app right down to an arm’s length, as Gal proved in a live demo.
The Samsara Asset Tag works through Samsara’s Network, communicating with devices with an IoT Samsara Gateway installed. Samsara-connected devices and vehicles travel hundreds of thousands of miles each day.
“These are the gateways that are in your vehicles, your trailers, your power equipment,” Gal explained. “Collectively, they're recording GPS locations millions of times every single minute. And these are everywhere that you operate.”
In addition to the Asset Tag, Samsara introduced Connected Training and Connected Workflows during its Beyond Conference.
Read more at FleetOwner.com, a Bulk Transporter affiliate.
