Company History

Founded in 1991, GeoFocus originated in the University of Florida’s R&D division and provided Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for IBM, the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) and Disney. In 1996, GeoFocus, Inc. was acquired by Williams Controls, Inc. and expanded to develop and integrate its GIS, GPS and communication technologies to produce TIMSTAR^™.

The first generation of the TIMSTAR^™ Transportation Information Management System (TIMS) was introduced in 1997. This premier product was the first of its kind to integrate the use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to determine vehicle location while wirelessly transmitting data to a control center where the information is processed and used for reporting train status and automatically controlling on-train and station platform audio/visual announcements.