ShipCrunch

Marine Tech & Innovation Chat: Joachim Bakke of BW Future

They've got money to spend on marine innovation, and they're not afraid to use it.

By Ryan Skinner (email)

59° 56' N kicks off a new feature: The Marine Tech & Innovation Chat. Basically, I go one-on-one with a leading figure in the marine tech and innovation community to talk about what's going on, what's hot, what's not and so on.

Here you get the words straight out of the investors' and the technologists' mouths, via direct publishing of the Skype'd chat. If you're into marine and technology, it's worth it to follow these chats. If you've got a lot of ideas and opinions on the subject, let me know; maybe you'll be the next interview object.

This first chat, with BW Future's Joachim Bakke, is a premier. Next time, I will announce the interviewee ahead of time via my twitter and LinkedIn feeds, and anyone can submit questions that I will pose to the interviewee (as long as they're on topic).

With that, here's the first marine tech & innovation chat. Enjoy!

Marine Innovation Briefs - Week 33

A weekly glance at technology news in the marine sector, and comments to such

Air casters ease 2000 ton launch: Derecktor Shipyards in the US used 42 air casters, basically air bearings, to move a 2000 ton yacht from build facility to dry-dock, with a turn. Notably, the company says that the system can be used to move large ship parts and barges. Yards are always needing to move big things around. Perhaps air bearings are the safest and quickest way to do it.

Ultrasonic anti-fouling for UK, Aussie navy: Basically, a number of transducers placed all over the inside of a hull create enough ultrasonic vibration to keep surfaces clean. Though the technology seems a peach for smaller, high maintenance craft, it would seem improbable for this one to make it over to larger ships - too much space to cover.

Wartsila with extensive service tie-up with Eidesvik: Wartsila has won a novel new service agreement with Eidesvik Offshore, whereby "supplier, owner and operator work together to minimize non-operational periods." To some owners, this is golden; get it all from one outfit: Wartsila. Soon they'll buy the ships out from under them. Wartsila's unique approach to maintenance and condition-based maintenance have been covered previously, here and here.

Wiring up reefers and locking in data: Fairplay brings news from Johnson Controls in Denmark, which offers enhanced monitoring of reefer containers en route, including real-time monitoring on land and at sea and remote operations like starting defrost and changing set point. All of the data, though, is apparently locked in to Johnson Controls' "Global Monitoring Server". For a pound of flesh more, they'll probably let you integrate that in your own ERP. In any event, just another drop in the river of data flowing ship to shore and back.

Digital Design and Manufacturing Technology Explains the Ins and Outs of CAD/CAM Technologies: Research and Markets, a global research company, will publish a book from a conference it held on CAD/CAM and manufacturing technology in China in April. Clearly, this was a topic that was hot for Chinese industry, as undoubtedly more and more people and companies are clamoring for ways to speed manufacturing and design processes.

General Dynamics to deliver new antennas for NOAA's GOES-R satellite: General Dynamics will design, manufacture and install a number of antennas to better track global weather patterns and other meteorological events. Basically, I would loosely categorize this under the "improved response to Katarina II" folder.

The Future of Propulsion: It seemed as if the future of everything else was already decided by one company or another. Now Voith has seized on the future of propulsion before Wartsila, MAN B&W or any of the others could grab it. It seems that the Voith Radial Propellors have finally found their ideal use, and it's on offshore maintenance vessels, a la cable-layers and wind power installation ships. They're going to present the future of propulsion at SMM (the future is now, apparently).

Anyone providing a useful piece of insight to these tech briefs (in other words, a decent comment) will be added to the 5956N leader-board. Whomever climbs to the top of this list is the king of maritime technology insight!

Think your news belongs in this weekly update? Send me your news, plus (vitally) a note explaining why your news is actually significant, and I may just include it.

Shipping PR & Marketing all mixed up

If your products are so special, why do you describe them just like everyone else?

By Ryan Skinner (email)

It's a fact: Most companies in the shipping/marine sector don't have the kind of wherewithal to hire separate managers for PR things and for marketing things. Generally, the marketing person is going to get the PR responsibilities.

The results aren't pretty. An editor of a major maritime publication wrote me recently:

from my experience, a lot of the PR people that I deal with are still sending me things layered with 'leading' this and 'innovative' that, which leaves me spending an unnecessary amount of time getting the useful information out. It's not everyone, but some seem to think it's part of their job to get as many superlatives into the press as they can.

Hands up, the marketer/PR managers who he's nailed. (Don't lie now - admit to that "100th mother-of-god awesome marine pump sold to extremely delighted customer" press release last month).

The problem is this: The marketer/PR guy's marketing language bleeds into his PR work. Sure, when you're flirting with the big customer, you're telling her you're the biggest and the best. That's just marketing. Imagine that the press is her father-in-law. He's not interested in why you think you're great. He wants to know what you stand for, what you're really all about.

Here's a fact: Most suppliers/products aren't a whole lot different from one another. They can't be, as you spend much of the time copying the best aspects of your competitors. The difference between success and failure in too many instances boils down to the success of a sales guy. So stop trying to convince the journalist you're "the leading" or "the most innovative."

What you can achieve with PR are these incredible things called authority, credibility and tangibility. Most people will say "PR?!" and roll their eyes. PR's about telling your story in terms that make sense economically, socially and environmentally. You tell a journalist what it means that you do things the way you do them. The more authentic you speak, the more successful your endeavor.

This whole dialogue with the editor resonated from an intention to republish this blog in his magazine, and from an article I recently shared on twitter. Basically, it's saying that the lines between PR and journalism are blurring. Read it. It's worth it. It's the same thing I talked about half-a-year ago with my post about every company a publisher.

Marine Innovation Briefs - Week 32

A weekly glance at technology news in the marine sector, and comments to such

Veson expands offerings: A not-so-spicy Fairplay story brings news from US-based Veson Nautical, which has basically added onboard ship software systems that complement its back-office ship management software offering. Undoubtedly, this is now the it-thing; after finally convincing many shipping companies to automate their business processes, ship management software outfits now spy the opportunity to export their systems to the ships themselves. I'm betting any half-decent ship management software outfit has something like this. Am I wrong?

Hutton's agrees partnership with INOV8 Science LTD: The UK ship supplier aims to put an end to those vicious outbreaks of norovirus on cruise ships with a solution used in UK hospitals. The INOV8 Science system uses olefin to create hydroxyl radicals, which renders viruses and bacteria useless. Apparently, cruise ship owners would need to install one for every cabin. Is it worth it, if the flip-side is a ship full of vomiting clients?

Inmarsat announces $1.2 billion investment in next-generation Ka-Band Satellite Network: By around 2015, Inmarsat plans to be earning $500 million a year in revenue from a mobile broadband offering that can, among other things, bring 50MB per second data transfer speeds to ships. Clearly, they're betting on increasing demand for large data flows from ship to shore and vice-versa.

Severn Trent de Nora's BALPURE Ballast Water Management System Authorized to Discharge Treated Ballast Water into the Waters of California: Despite the clunky headline, the significance of this news is real. California, as in so many other green things, has been leading the charge in terms of what's allowable in ballast water. And, with permission to release ballast water in Cali, they've got an inside track on those big trade routes from Asia to US west coast. As far as I know, it's only OceanSaver that can do the same (they've been Cali-legal for a year or so now).

Autoship Systems Corporation to Release Automated Tool for Generating Autoload Databases: Basically, ship designers will now be able to generate realistic 3D models of ship designs earlier in the design process. In essence, this doesn't seem to cut down on the overall design and engineering time, but gives design buyers a broader palette of realistic designs to make their decision. It may also unleash greater creativity in design departments. See this as a move by Autoship to coup its 3D design rivals.

Air Supported Monohull with Pod Propulsion: This is a light marine piece of tech news, which hints at the heavy marine efforts of the likes of Stena AirMax. In other words, you use a cushion of pressurized air to cut down significantly on hull-water friction. The performance stats on the light marine boat might be illustrative of big ship performance, however: 2 x 1200 HP conventional = 2 x 435 HP + 100 HP air-supported hull. Fuel consumption: 12 liters per nautical mile conventional vs. around 6 on the air cushion hull. There's nothing on price or maintenance costs, though. Much the pity.

KVH Boosts mini-VSAT Broadband Capacity More than 500% in North American Waters: Is this a ploy from providers of at-sea voice services to make a killing off of the next Deepwater Horizon incident? The company itself makes light of this in its press release. Nonetheless, this looks like a play off of an incremental tech innovation from partner ViaSat, which KVH can use to inch up its performance in the VSAT niche.

Anyone providing a useful piece of insight to these tech briefs (in other words, a decent comment) will be added to the 5956N leader-board. Whomever climbs to the top of this list is the king of maritime technology insight!

Think your news belongs in this weekly update? Send me your news, plus (vitally) a note explaining why your news is actually significant, and I may just include it.

Dude, you can get YouTube on the ECDIS!

High-speed Internet connectivity on merchant ships and unintended consequences

By Ryan Skinner (email)

"That's right, I can totally get Pandora.com on this bad boy. Let's rock!" 

Since early this year, ships running at least one make of ECDIS can download navigational charts and chart updates at sea, via Internet download. OK, last year's wreck won't show up on ENC updates from hydrographic offices for another two or three years yet anyway, but this is progress, damnit. Don't question it.

DNV's OK'd it, as well. They will type-approve an ECDIS that uses Internet connections for updates, provided a) there is a firewall, b) there is an anti-virus strategy, and c) there is an electrical Internet kill switch. Of course, all of this assumes that the greatest threat is from outside.

I've heard from more than one source that this is not the case. One major shipping company had an ECDIS crash because the officers were using it to surf the Internet while en route (perhaps they were studying the company's HSE policy online). The fuming manager said that they would fix this by allowing the machine to access only one url, that of the chart update provider.

Is it a shock to imagine an officer bored out of his mind jimmying the ECDIS to serve him YouTube videos? To me it wouldn't even be a shock to hear that the flight crew of an airliner overflew their destination because they were tweeting about Justin Bieber. Better that than arguing about airline policy.

There's a fear of technology at work here. It's the same kind of thing that led employers ten years ago to hesitate to give their office workers Internet access. It's alive today when they cut off access to YouTube, Facebook or Skype (I was told by one executive that his company wouldn't let him use the last one because "it's free and it works, unlike our enterprise solution.")

Hell, give seafarers Internet connections broader than the New Jersey turnpike, if they want. If they can't pull it up on the ECDIS, you can be sure they're going to pipe it into their iPhones or Androids. The fact is this: They might be looking at porn and strike a bridge. They might also access countless tools to make them even better and more accountable officers. The Internet doesn't kill people (OK, sometimes it does).

The fellow running the IMO's e-Navigation working groups told me they're putting the focus on what they call a "single window". Let's not split hairs here; that's the ECDIS. This window's going to be full of good stuff, and soon. And it'll be up to every mariner to use it as he likes. In fact, I hope that seafarers come equipped with their own system in the future (like Norwegian pilots).

Imagine when a master can just show up with her ECDIS under her arm, plug into any ship and she has everything in the digital and physical world she needs, right there. A reality, you think?

The marine industry's chasing plants

The rush for cheap ships may just get a whole lot funkier

By Ryan Skinner (email)

In talking to an engineer whose company supplies both the land-based process industry and the marine process industry, he held up what he saw as a basic truism: "Shipping's chased down costs by chasing cheaper markets; land plants long ago had to find different ways to drive down costs."

The ship that could be built cheaply by the lads in Ireland, then the guys in Finland, then Japan, Korea and now China, has few places to go to get cheaper. Sourcing cheap third-world labour's going to fade as a competitive advantage at some point. What then?

The shipping industry's very insular and productified approach to the main asset (the ship) has made this migration to cheap markets the path of choice. Combine that with lesser-developed governments' long-held view of shipbuilding as a lever for industrial development. All you need to take that show on the road are decent contracts - and you can probably see the march of shipbuilding to new markets as an expression of each country's willingness to enforce contracts.

Then the road came to an end. OK, there's always Sri Lanka, Mozambique and Laos. But when the path to efficient ship production stops leap-frogging to steadily cheaper markets, perhaps the shipping industry's view of its main asset will change too.

What does that mean? Instead of seeing the ship as a discreet legal entity, a product, to be delivered and maintained as cheaply as possible, the ship will be seen more as a process, and a service.

What I'm envisioning here is a transition: From a fragmented shipping industry of relatively disinterested, technically ambivalent investor of industrial groups, to a consolidated industry of large-scale shipping service providers who treat the ships as floating plants.

Such service providers would inherently professionalize the management of the ships. This would probably involve ownership of a network of yards around the world to service the ships economically. The huge forest of sub-suppliers would be pared down to a manageable handful of supplier partners forced to follow open network protocols (read: replaceable). Shipboard personnel would be treated more like plant managers than romantic (albeit poorly paid) heroes.

This is probably the kind of heady future some of the more high-end technical ship management outfits (hello V-Ships, Wilhelmsen and Wallem) already envision, or see themselves living. After all, they are, per definition, not terribly interested in the product. It's all the service.

Those who are able to add this kind of value to shipping will then inevitably inherit the assets themselves from their customers, who'll just want stuff shipped.

Ship with extreme prejudice

"Have you ever been to sea?" - the last question you should ask of a professional

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Alternate universe in which Henry Ford is pooh-pooh'd out of the auto industry 

Yesterday I spoke with the kind of guy Seth Godin would call a linchpin - in other word, very smart in a way that creates new value in businesses. He's an IT guy with a major shipping company, practically two decades in the business and built up new and better ways of doing things across the business.

And, yet, even he doesn't get respect. "Most often, when I see waste or inefficiency, I will ask why we can't do things differently. Or, I'll propose we consider how terrestrial industry meets this need. Then I'll get the question: Have you ever been a chief officer? Chief engineer? What do you know really?"

If you want to be charitable, you could suggest that professionals with experience from sea have a better understanding of what can go wrong, of life and death stakes, of the limitations of technology, of the effects of constant battering by wind and waves.

I'm not going to be charitable.

It is plain ignorance to say that people without experience at sea have little to bring in terms of improving ship operations. What would the aviation or space industries be if only former pilots and astronauts were responsible for the innovations? What would Formula 1 be if Michael Schumacher designed the cars himself?

There's a point to be made for co-creation. Users provide some of the best kind of input when you're looking to innovate. But Henry Ford famously said: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

An industry that turns its back to subject area experts because they haven't been to sea is going to spend its time fruitlessly whipping horses.

Is this rant sparked by my own experiences of discrimination? You bet. But this kind of prejudice spills over in many directions. Why does it seem like women in this industry are often given the second-class treatment? It's not just sexism, even if that's there too. Smart young things get ridiculed in every industry, but more so in this one, in my experience.

I know many people in shipping like to call the business a happy fraternity. Fair enough. But every time someone responds to a critical question by saying "have you ever served at sea?" the industry gets poorer.