STN EXPO Reno attendees once again have the opportunity to vote on their favorite hardware and software products made for the pupil transportation industry.
The STN EXPO Innovation Choice Awards program is open to any individual, organization or authorized agent that exhibits at STN EXPO 2024 in Reno, Nevada, and promotes school transportation products. The four categories are Best Hardware, Best Software, Best Safety Technology, and Best Green Bus Technology. Attendees can vote on site July 14 through July 16.
Attendees can scan QR codes at each participating exhibitor booth to cast votes during the STN EXPO Trade Show “Casino Royale” Extravaganza Reception on July 15 and the Trade Show on July 16. Winners will be announced at a later date.
View the list of exhibitor products, below. Exhibitors submitted their own product descriptions that have been edited for space and clarity.
EO Charging (Booth 138)
Category: Best Software
Product/Solution: EO Cloud
Description: EO Cloud is one of the world’s most advanced fleet charging management systems, setting the industry standard in EV charging. EO Cloud is used by some of the world’s largest EV fleets including Amazon, Tesco, Sainsburys, The CO-OP and DHL. Fully standardized, it integrates seamlessly with most commercial-grade infrastructure worldwide. EO Cloud delivers unmatched reliability, control and cost-efficiency, boasting over 99.5 percent uptime and lowering the total cost of ownership, ensuring optimal performance and dependability for EV fleets. EO Cloud features include Comprehensive Control. EO Cloud serves as a one-stop-shop for all EV depot management needs. It allows for remote control of charging infrastructure via a dashboard accessible from various devices, both globally and locally. This feature provides real-time monitoring of charging station network performance, ensuring users can manage their operations efficiently. Another feature is Robust Reporting. The built-in reporting tools provide invaluable insights into network performance and usage. By analyzing charging session data and integrating seamlessly with operational systems, EO Cloud optimizes energy usage and total ownership costs. The extensive data collection includes historic energy consumption, charger status and network uptime. Intelligent Scheduling is another feature. EO Cloud offers both manual and automatic scheduling for intelligent charging programs tailored to fleet needs. This ensures cost control and a fully charged fleet at all times. Meanwhile, Automatic Fault Detection automatically detects hardware faults and connectivity issues, streamlining support team responses. By monitoring charging station status and alerting the EO support team promptly, EO Cloud minimizes on-site downtime. The Advanced Account Management feature allows sophisticated access management. Admin users can assign and control access profiles effectively. This feature includes the ability to add, deactivate and fine-tune user access levels, ensuring security and efficiency. One benefit includes Fleet Knowledge is Fleet Power; a simple subscription fee with no minimum term means users can optimize their operations without unnecessary hassle. Another benefit, Remote Management, allows management of charging infrastructure from multiple devices, unlocking significant operational savings. Live Monitoring monitors charging sessions, vehicles and energy usage live, accessing comprehensive diagnostics to pre-emptively address faults. Other benefits include Optimized Performance; Optimize charging behavior and energy consumption per vehicle to reduce total cost of ownership. Technological Superiority: Agnostic Compatibility; EO Cloud is compatible with new or existing electric fleet depots running any OCPP chargers. Modular Architecture; Easy integration with various telematics providers or other proprietary APIs ensures flexibility and adaptability. Scalability; Designed to meet the needs of any fleet size, EO Cloud scales with the business as it grows and evolves with charging innovations. Security; Developed and tested as part of Europe’s largest electrification program, covering over 5,700 charging stations across 120 sites in nine countries.
EO Cloud is not just a fleet charging management system, it is a transformative tool that drives fleets into the future. With its unparalleled control, reliability and cost-efficiency, EO Cloud stands as a beacon of innovation and excellence in the electrification of commercial fleets.
EverDriven Technologies (Booth 618)
Category: Best Safety Technology
Product/Solution: EverDriven SafeRide Education Course
Description: Driver and monitor education is a critical component to keeping kids safe while in route to and from school, however, there has never been a course designed specifically with alternative student transportation drivers and monitors (those who drive or supervise the driving of kids to and from school in small capacity vehicles as a supplement to the bus). EverDriven, the nation’s leader in safe, supplemental transportation, recognized this outage and did something about it. By partnering with the School Bus Safety Company, they designed and created a first-of-its-kind comprehensive safety course specific to alternative student transportation drivers and monitors. This course is divided into six learning modules: One) Introduction to EverDriven: Drivers and monitors will learn about the EverDriven Safety Commitment, the EverDriven SafeRide Guidelines, and the importance of their role in the safety of each student. Two) Safety Best Practices: Drivers and monitors will learn safety basics, industry best practices, and how to identify and mitigate hazards to help prevent accidents. Three) Defensive Driving and Additional Safety Practices: Drivers and monitors will learn about The Four Driving Principles of Safety. Four) Understanding the Needs of the Student: Drivers and monitors will learn about the types of students that EverDriven transports, their unique needs and how to address the unique circumstances surrounding these student populations. Five) Safety Equipment: Drivers and monitors will learn about the safety equipment EverSafe Drivers may need to utilize to get students to their destination, safely. Six) Loading and Securing Wheelchairs: Drivers and monitors will learn how to ensure student safety throughout their journey.
The revolutionary program is required for all EverDriven drivers and monitors and is sure to ensure kids are safer than ever before on their journeys to and from school.
GeoTab (Booth 501 with Tyler Technologies)
Category: Best Software
Product/Solution: Geotab Ace
Description: Geotab Ace is a generative AI tool to provide rapid insights into vehicle data in conversational language. Rather than teaching customers how to use spreadsheets and reports to answer their questions, Geotab Ace enables end users to simply ask their questions. For example, “show vehicles that have active engine faults” or “show me places where my vehicles are idling.” The generative AI engine never sees customer data. It is used to provide a query to the database, ensuring that customer data is kept secure and not used in any machine learning activity. The platform is transparent to end customers, exposing the query and reasoning that was generated by the AI model to justify the results and allow the customer to evaluate the efficacy of the results. Geotab has trained the model with certain definitions for things like “efficiency” or “zones” that could be ambiguous to provide clarity in this transparent model. Geotab Ace can even ask clarifying questions for better results.
IEE Sensing Inc. (Booth 352)
Category: Best Safety Technology
Product/Solution: LiDAS – Life Detection Assistance System
Description: LiDAS is a state-of-the-art, turn-key, ACTIVE child detection system that can recognize children (or any living being) inadvertently left behind on school buses or other school transportation vehicles even if they are asleep under a seat. LiDAS is made up of an array of radar sensors that include sophisticated, patented pattern recognition software, a central control unit and wireless communication modem that manages the function of the system and a driver interface to provide feedback on system status and operation. LiDAS is highly customizable (detection escalation, pre-route, post-route and cyclic checks), fully automated independent of human actuation, ambient lighting conditions, mechanical or audible disturbances and independent of temperature (functions in summer or winter). LiDAS provides real-time communication and data retention via a cloud-based network with multiple notification methods possible (text message, alarm, horn honking, flashing lights, etc.).
Safety Vision (Booth 317)
Category: Best Software
Product/Solution: SafetyNet 5
Description: SafetyNet 5 is an all-inclusive video management system for school bus video needs. It bridges the gap between traditional school bus video VMS’s and more recent AI, Driver Scoring solutions. Also, with security being a top priority for agency networks, SN5 provides the highest level of security available in the student transportation market.
Safety Vision (Booth 317)
Category: Best Hardware
Product/Solution: 9100-NVR
Description: The 9100 NVR offers superior high-definition surveillance with recording resolutions up to 4K. Interchangeable from Linux OS (proprietary) to Windows OS (non-proprietary), the 9100 features an open architecture capable of integrating with enterprise level open VMS platforms. With up to 16TB of solid-state storage, the 9100 can support up to 36 IP cameras via 4 M12 PoE ports. Equipped with a built-in wireless module, internal backup battery and power supply, and an EN50155 compliant design, makes the 9100 the perfect recorder for a variety of applications where a compact NVR and an external camera switch is optimal.
TransACT Communications (Booth 721)
Category: Best Software
Product/Solution: EZTransportation
Description: EZTransportation is a modern, integrated transportation management platform designed exclusively for K-12 school districts and powered by real-time intelligence. With EZTransportation, districts can efficiently and effectively manage their complete transportation program, enabling their team to streamline day-to-day operations, prioritize student safety, and enhance driver retention. EZTransportation is easy to implement and use, competitively priced and offers unequalled real-time intelligence capabilities. Planning & Assignments – Efficiently manage student transportation logistics including route planning, student assignments and optimization as well as scenario exploration and evaluation. Routing of students with varying schedules and/or pick-up/drop-off locations during the week. Daily Operations – Easily address daily challenges, such as driver shortages/last-minute callouts, mid-route breakdowns/vehicle inspection failures, fleet maintenance, including integrated vehicle work order tracking, preventive maintenance scheduling and inspection and parts management. Plus, driver information management, time tracking and leave requests. Navigation/Ridership/GPS – Expand your visibility and enhance driver satisfaction and student safety by Knowing exactly where each of your buses are, identifying which students are on the bus and seamlessly communicate changes to drivers. Additionally, easily respond to parent inquiries. Parent Communications – Proactively communicate with parents and provide self-service access to their child’s ridership information. Unparalleled Real-Time Intelligence – Get accurate, up-to-the-minute information about students and buses — even when things don’t go according to plan. Know which students have checked on or off each bus at any given time, regardless of a bus substitution or route consolidation. Accurately predict bus arrival times due to last-minute changes or delays so you can proactively alert parents. Provide schools with accurate arrival information when bell times will be missed. Provide accurate turn-by-turn directions to bus drivers when last-minute route changes or driver substitutions occur. And more!
Transfinder (Booth 201)
Category: Best Hardware
Product/Solution: Studentfinder Kiosk
Description: One tap does it all! Using a card reader and the RFID cards used by transportation throughout the district with a laptop and a tablet, students, faculty and administrators can look up a myriad of information about a student, from student buses and routes, attendance and a variety of reports of importance to transportation. The Studentfinder Kiosk plus into Transfinder’s award-winning Viewfinder solution to make locating student transportation information easy and faster to find. Simply scan an ID card and see a student’s bus information, driver, stop times and more. The Studentfinder Kiosk can be located in strategic locations to allow for scan from anywhere on campus, whether at a school, classroom or bus yard.
How it Works: With a quick scan of a student’s ID card from a computer or mobile device, the power of Transfinder’s Viewfinder solution provides the user access to see authorized information about that student’s transportation information quickly so you can be ready for the next student. Working in conjunction with the Studentfinder Kiosk, Formfinder ID Scanner allows authorized staff can easily scan ID cards to capture data automatically. Applications include logins for timekeeping and attendance for driver training as well as behind-the-wheel events like student behavior, illegal passing events and camera incidents. A driver can scan their ID card and automatically submit a form. Forms capture the user and an exact timestamp and location of the scan. Forms are then associated with the driver or student record for reporting purposes. Automatic form scans can easily replace cumbersome paperwork. The fully integrated Studentfinder Kiosk works seamlessly with the Routefinder PLUS suite of solutions as part of Transfinder’s commitment to making schools and communities safer, informed and more efficient one stop at a time.
Transfinder (Booth 201)
Category: Best Safety Technology
Product/Solution: Patrolfinder for Schools
Description: Patrolfinder is an innovative solution designed to enhance the safety and security of each school environment, including students, staff and security personnel. Patrolfinder utilizes a proprietary Transfinder-built mobile app and strategically placed tags on school campuses to help safety personnel and School Resource Officers (SROs) monitor all necessary areas and adhere to each school’s established safety policies. The Patrolfinder system records a time stamp at each checkpoint visited by the team members, allowing for immediate verification and reporting. Key features of Patrolfinder include: Real-Time Tracking; this feature enables school safety team members to log real-time patrols, ensuring comprehensive coverage and immediate location visibility. Situational Awareness; safety Team members can see other team members’ school layout map so they know where each other is in the event they need help. Policy Compliance and Resource Allocation; verifies that all designated attention points are visited regularly to ensure that safety protocols are strictly followed. Comprehensive Dashboarding & Reporting; generates detailed reports on patrol activities, offering school safety officials the data they need to evaluate performance and enhance safety measures.
Safety Team members can create Attention Points, report incidents or mark locations that need attention. Patrolfinder also allows school emergency plans to be placed on the map. Evacuation Zones, fire hydrants and extinguishers, emergency exits and the location of automated external defibrillators or automatic electronic defibrillators (AED) can be marked on the map, allowing for a shared source of information. By using Patrolfinder’s proprietary whiteboard features, school officials or School Resource Officers can make real-time collaborative edits during an incident that can quickly be shared with all emergency personnel.
Transfinder (Booth 201)
Category: Best Software
Product/Solution: The Transfinder QUAD
Description: The Transfinder Quad is the integration of four, robust, proprietary solutions that work seamlessly together to ensure each district’s school transportation is as safe as possible, building upon the Routefinder PLUS platform. The QUAD ensures that buses are in proper working order, maintenance schedules adhered to and inspections up to date, along with driver certifications (Servicefinder). With the Transfinder QUAD, the best and safest routes are built (PLUS), followed by drivers (Wayfinder) and communicated with parents and guardians (Stopfinder). The QUAD is a holistic, really the wholistic approach to student transportation safety and efficiency.
Routefinder PLUS is a fully customizable user experience that is designed and ready for your organization to build and manage your school’s student data as well as stops, routes, field trips, drivers and vehicles. The PLUS Platform offers unlimited user defined fields, customized views, safe route creation and automatic stop assignments. The Custom Report Writer helps your team quickly access that information. In Routefinder PLUS, your team can have your district policies baked into your routing system, so your routes comply with rules and regulations your district has set, such as preventing students from crossing the street to get on the bus. Woven into PLUS is Transfinder’s proprietary software solution Artificial Intelligence Optimization technology, capturing your staff’s institutional knowledge and “learning” with each stop and route created. PLUS also includes Formfinder for easy form creation, create new forms and digitize existing forms, and Chatfinder for interaction with team members, which is embedded in the platform.
Stopfinder Parent App: Stopfinder Communication – Parents and authorized guardians or family members will have live access to their children’s bus assignments. They will be informed and receive critical updates from transportation. The two-way communication tool allows parents and district personnel to communicate/chat in real time and attach documents and pictures over a secure system. Communication can be 1-to-1 or in groups based on a number of factors, including school building, grade or region. All this is available to an unlimited number of families. Communicate in real-time via chat and message with attachments to 1:1 parents or groups. Stopfinder with ETA and GeoAlerts goes beyond communicating schedules and sending announcements. Stopfinder, integrated with GPS hardware on the bus, can provide alerts when your child’s bus crosses preset zones created by parents or guardians. Users can set up as many zones as they like to be alerted when the bus is nearby. For example, parents and administrators can create “alert zones” around a stop, a school or anywhere along the route. According to the GPS unit, the alert is sent when the bus enters the zone. Parents and students will know when the bus is getting close, which can help make everyone’s life much easier and missed buses a thing of the past. When working in conjunction with the Wayfinder driver app (see below), the district can provide near real-time information to parents and guardians with even greater precision about the location of a child’s school bus.
Wayfinder provides your actual routing maps on screen, with turn-by-turn directions seen and heard by drivers for real-time navigation. Wayfinder is customizable so you can set the screen to go dark while the bus is in motion if required by state law or district policy. Wayfinder was designed for K-12, showing drivers the planned route, driving path and stop approach point. If a driver needs to be rerouted, they’ll have access to their local district maps to learn about and avoid unsafe turns and streets. The same criteria used to build the original route is baked into the alternate route, so the alternative is just as safe. Add an attendance component to click student riders onscreen or with optional RFID card readers. Transfinder offers districts a fully integrated solution by providing the software solutions to manage transportation operations districtwide and the hardware, making it easier than ever for drivers to manage form submissions, review alerts on particular students, see vehicle substitutions, route navigation and student ridership. Transfinder utilizes Samsung Tab Active3 ruggedized tablets that can easily be mounted into the vehicle.
Servicefinder, enhanced and more robust than ever before, is the browser-based fleet maintenance and asset management solution that improves fleet productivity, tracks costs, reduces burdensome paperwork and reduces the potential risk of missing critical repairs. It does all that and much more! The new asset management capabilities in Servicefinder help you manage your facilities, vehicles, assets, equipment and facility. It enables you to maintain facilities, conduct timely maintenance, monitor asset life cycles and analyze reports to make data-driven decisions. Using Servicefinder will help you improve ROI (return on investment), minimize failures and ensure safety, security and compliance. Servicefinder goes beyond focusing on your fleet and takes your maintenance and asset management to all aspects of your organization’s campus. With Servicefinder, managers and technicians can stay connected with real-time data, whether in the office or the field. Access Servicefinder from any location using any web-enabled device. Features include responsive user experience on both desktop and mobile platforms, easy data importing and exporting, preventative maintenance scheduling, comprehensive work order history, parts and inventory management, integrated billing and financial reporting, reporting and dashboards and easy access form Routefinder PLUS interface.
U.S. Energy (Booth 447)
Category: Best Green Technology
Product/Solution: Volt Vault
Description: Volt Vault is a patent-pending EV charging solution. It uses (renewable) natural gas to generate electricity onsite, on demand (without reliance on the electrical grid) and provides either level 2 or 3 charging up to 175kW. Volt Vault helps fleets expedite adoption, ensuring EV deployment the way you need it. While many factors delay adoption, infrastructure constraints no longer have to be one of them. Unlike traditional charging infrastructure that takes on average nine to 24 months to install, Volt Vault can be deployed in four months: from the start of manufacturing through commissioning and permitting. As an off-grid solution, Volt Vault provides resiliency measures to fleets’ charging strategies while offering flexibility as fleets scale or relocate. It is not subject to grid outages, capacity constraints, or demand and time-of-use charges—resulting in reliable electricity supply at a stable price per kilowatt hour. Whether you’re waiting on electrical infrastructure, needing additional charging capacity, operating in a remote location, or seeking charging resilience, you don’t have to wait on the industry or your utility. Rather, you can take back control of defining your EV roadmap by tailoring your Volt Vault configuration to meet your unique environmental, operational and economic goals.
