ShipCrunch

The development race for Galileo is open

Technical information on Galileo's open service is now available to developers - go for it!

By Ryan Skinner (email)

A week or so ago, the EU made public Interface Control Documentation for the Galileo's open service global navigation satellite system. Any technology developer who can find a use for satellite positioning information, and there are plenty in the shipping space, can now begin to prepare their technology for the launch of Galileo.

Like GPS, Galileo's open service will allow any technology to access a given signal, rated below the 1260-1300 MHz commercial subscription band. This opens up a world of navigational possibilities, though the free service (and potentially the paying service) may still have issues related to jamming.

One big bonus of Galileo contra GPS will be its better coverage at high latitudes. No more problems getting GNSS signals in Arctic regions...

Jailbreak a top drive!

When so many things get harder to repair and customize, it's comforting to see some things go the other way

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Photo credit: Erik Ruud/Aker Solutions - Aker Solutions MH MDDM 1000 AC 

I recently covered Aker Solutions' development of a new top drive in collaboration with Transocean. Under the moniker, "Top drive of the future", we looked at how the two companies teamed together to design a derrick drilling machine that could be torn down and built back up faster than ever.

This makes me think of the same process applied to consumer electronics, most readily illustrated when people "jailbreak" iPhones. Basically, jailbreaking an iPhone involves opening up doors that have been sealed shut by Apple, in order to make new functionality possible. A jailbroken iPhone, for example, can run applications that have not been approved and sold via Apple's App Store.

This kind of mix and mash approach to technology is liberating. In the Aker Solutions/Transocean top drive development, jailbreaking was not a focus; instead, the latter simply wanted a powerful top drive prepared for sixth-generation drilling needs, and capability for fast repair. When downtime costs almost half a million dollars a day, the time to fix components becomes critical.

Nonetheless, speed to repair and capability to customise need to be seen in the same picture. That which can be quickly disassembled, can be quickly customised. For the industrial operator likes of a Transocean, this is a good thing. For those only investing in a financial play, this is less good.

I wonder how many manufacturers are opening the door to greater modularity and user customisation, and how many are going the other way...

Who's got the most visited web-site in shipping? Answers!

Maritimerankings.com has all the answers. Oddly, one web-site appears near the top in every search.

By Ryan Skinner (email)

To marketers desperate to get the most bang out of their online advertising buck, a simple ranking of the most visited web-sites in the shipping industry would be golden. Well, not surprisingly in the age of Internet entrepreneurship, someone's thought the same thing, and made a site to answer that need.

It's maritimerankings.com, and it proposes to be the compete.com of shipping sites. That is, you can pump in any 5 url's (that is, web addresses) of shipping sites, and it will run an objective algorithm to give you a ranking, both relative to the other four and over an absolute list.

Cool, huh?! According to maritimerankings.com, this blog is the 244th most authoritative web-site in all of shipping. Hot damn! Time to retire!

Strangely, no matter which five sites you enter, you will automatically be given the results of a sixth site: www.marinelink.com. This sixth entry is a US-based shipping news site, owned and run by New Wave Media. Now that alarm bells are ringing in your head, you do a WHOIS search to see who is behind this maritimerankings.com site. Surprise, the owner is hidden behind a proxy site.

DIY Shipping News

In the spirit of auto-tune, you can construct your own shipping newspaper in 1-2-3...

By Ryan Skinner (email)

A few days ago, I challenged either the Maritime Executive and Maritime Network groups in LinkedIn to establish the best shipping news channel anywhere.

How? Each has 7000+ members, and a news feed that can be customised with any number of sub-feeds. In other words, news from all the major shipping magazines, newspapers, blogs and web-sites can be automatically piped into this news channel. So, you have a super-feed - all the shipping news fit to digitize. 

Then this news channel has a very simple, unique feature. It shows how many times an article has been viewed and puts the most-read articles at the top of the pile, until they get too stale. With 7000+ subscribers, each of these groups has a stronger readership than many of today's shipping publications. As a result, you get access to a user-qualified list of the most interesting news available anywhere.

In the course of discussion around this idea, I understood from many people that they did not know how feeds, or RSS, work. And if they don't know RSS, then they don't know how to use a news aggregator to make a customized online reading experience. For more and more people, this is the only way to get news. It's like the perfect newspaper; it has all the news you want, it's free and it's available whenever and wherever you want it.

I will talk anyone interested through the few steps needed to start up your personal shipping news channel.

1. Go to Google and search for "Reader". You'll be proposed "Google Reader". Go there. Here, you'll be asked to login with a Google log-in name. If you don't already have one, make one. It's free, and you can use the same ID for dozens of other Google-powered tools.

2. Now you are in Google Reader. This is the window where you'll get your news, but you need to fill that window up with your favorite news sources. There are different ways to add news sources. You can go to a news site, or blog, and search for RSS, or "Subscribe", or a button that looks like this:

Group shipping: A billion-dollar web trend?

New ways to organize, buy and ship open the door for a whole new kind of charter party

By Ryan Skinner (email)

The title and concept stem from an article by Mashable-founder Pete Cashmore on CNN called "Group buying: A billion-dollar web trend?" His opening line: "Can we all get a better deal by making purchases together?"

I ask: "Can we all get a better deal by shipping purchases together?"

Cashmore's describing how Internet entrepreneurs are creating venues where groups of people can organize themselves into larger buying units, through which they can drive better deals. Groupon, LivingSocial and BuyWithMe are all examples.

They are all built on the idea that the Internet hates a middleman.

In the same breath, one might ask whether Maersk Line is a middleman. Or any other line. It's pretty hard to imagine a post-Panamax ship waiting for John Q. Slimguy to logon to a service and click his mouse, so that his group can make its shipment. But on a container-by-container basis, this has legs.

Imagine a charterer who needs to move 15-25 containers from Banghai to Long Beach every week. Imagine if he could drop all his excess capacity into a crowdsourced portal for anyone wanting that space.

Sure there are challenges related to documentation, even security. But for the impetuous shipping entrepreneur, I'd start by talking to ports, building networks of capacity, grab a cheap copy of a container line planning tool and put a web 2.0 storefront on the thing. Call it ShipWithMe.com.

Big Blue Audit: www.americanshipper.com

A new series of videos explore the ups and downs of maritime web-sites. First off: American Shipper!

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Maritime publications on the web are a diverse breed, ranging from the app-ness of Coracle to the flatness of...well, many others. In the spirit of improving things, I start a series of "audits" of these sites, delving into the users' experience, the advertisers' experience and opportunities lost (and won). This will hopefully be a weekly clip that goes site-by-site through the highs and lows of user interaction, content management and other good things web.

A proviso: I am not a web developer. I am a PR guy who sees a fair number of shipping sites and news sites and has opinions. The Big Blue Audit shares those opinions.

Americanshipper.com gets the honor of kicking this off because they're at the top of the alphabet. This is a site that exudes a sense of rich content, but unfortunately gives the impression that that depth is poorly shared and managed. Most of all, the site gives the impression that the publishers think very magazine, and very little Internet.

Here's the point-by-point analysis:

Finally, here are the grades:

User experience (subscribers): 5/10

User experience (non-subscribers): 3/10

Advertisers experience: 4/10 (bump up to 5 or 6, depending on the SEO nature of outbound links)

Envisioning shipping - Alternative PR thoughts

Shipping's too often linked in the popular imagination with...ships. Think about a new image.

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Shipping's Siamese relationship with world trade means that, at least from a PR perspective, shipping's reputation rises and falls with public perceptions of world trade. And to those who despise world trade for various reasons, shipping's an easy target. Floating steel monoliths lack a certain warm fuzziness.

That the vehicles of shipping, the ships themselves, represent the entire industry in the public imagination is an anachronism, and a damaging one. Both shipping and world trade would benefit from a less materialistic image, and a more humanized one.

What about the entrepreneurs, small businesses, workers and families who see an unparalleled level of opportunity thanks to the fluid movement of goods around the globe? What about the consumers who can tap a world of goods, resources and commodities?

I've written before about the PR value of source. Now, there's a tool for it. A new site called WikiChains is mayhaps humble, but it has tremendous potential for a shipping industry that put its thinking cap on. While the site's founders arguably lean away from the miraculous effects of world trade, this could very well be the upshot of such a site.

What wouldn't shipping gain from a new image and paradigm wrapped up in the stories and relationships of suppliers from across the globe? This is a wiki-based project, so the path is free for anyone to get involved. If I were shipping, I would embrace this thinking - either through this WikiChains platform, or one similar to it.

Let's herald a new, more sophisticated image of the shipping industry! 

New Containership Design a Quantum of Solace

A small step for ship design may not equal a great leap for shipping

By Ryan Skinner (email)

I'm a fan of concepts, and the PR drives that accompany them. So I approach new concepts with one part ardor and another scepticism. DNV's new containership concept inspires me to an extent true to its name: Quantum, or "the smallest amount of a physical quantity that can exist independently".

Imagine that the curve below represents the innovations of a particular activity, with the X-axis representing time and the Y-axis performance.

It's called the business S-curve. After a certain amount of time (near the top of the curve), it takes a tremendous amount of time, money and effort to achieve increasingly marginal improvements. At some point, you've got a Saturn V budget to achieve a miniscule improvement to something that, in fact, may be on the way out altogether. I would argue that Quantum is flirting with this kind of irrelevance.

 I'm not arguing that container shipping is on the way out. Craig Eason's take on Quantum in Lloyd's List said: "DNV itself recognises that this concept is in some ways designed to stir debate about shipping innovation, to help create a stepping stone to some of the more distant concepts being promoted."

Consider this a piece of that debate. My argument is that new hull shapes, new hull materials, new ways to package a container and these shipping 1.0 ideas are no longer the domain of concepts. These are the domain of stepwise shipping innovation. They're not the stuff of hopes and dreams. They're not turning anything on its head.

My concern with this concept is that it falls into the water trap - not far-sighted enough to be on the green, too far-sighted to line up a good approach to the green. In other words, it isn't wild enough to generate inspirational juice, and yet too wild to open the cash sluices of shipowners.

Someone in shipping would probably say I'm wrong. That this hull shape is the circle squared, or something like that. But, as far as concepts go, I'm eager to see one that deals with something more plastic than steel, metaphorically speaking.

I spy your entire fleet

Ship-tracking, monitoring commodity prices and commercial information touch shipping's jugular

By Ryan Skinner (email)

BIMCO recently wrote an alarmingly insightful blurb about an alarmingly innocuous meeting. Reporting on the recent meeting of IALA in South Africa, BIMCO waxes futuristic on the potentials and risks in AIS and other tracking technologies.

"But even more interesting are the possibilities of AIS through satellite surveillance with, not too far down the line, the ability to obtain a global picture of shipping all over the world, in more or less real time."

Lloyd's List Intelligence, for all its packaging faults, has tried to tie the AIS picture into the ship chartering picture. That is, they offer two basic services that make sense seen together: AIS services and ship fixtures data. It is reasonably easy to establish the revenue of a given transit, even if you aren't privy to the commercial details of a charter contract.

Of course, these calculations get more and more valuable the more data that comes in. Once you've analyzed one ship's operating profile over 100 voyages, you have an excellent foundation for assessing its profitability compared to a benchmark. You could even establish a speed profile under given conditions, so that you could assess its load (cargo in tonnes) based on its progress.

For infornographers (information pornographers), the possibilities are tremendous. You could simply query an entire shipping company's fleet and have a pretty strong understanding of its value, its overall operating efficiency and its profit potential given certain market developments.

As such, analysts have access to the throbbing heart of shipping operations. Then, they take their chances. After all, a market is a market.