ShipCrunch

Shippers will get all the data on carriers. Then what?

Soon ships' emissions data will be open to everybody. What will they, what can they do with it?

By Ryan Skinner (email)

OOCL is the latest in a string of big container lines to offer a carbon calculator, which is meant to give customers a means of calculating a shipment's emissions and comparing them with other transport options and providers. It's the latest result of two colliding trends: Increased harvesting and manipulation of data, and increased end-user interest in bottom-line environmental impact.

Like many, I'm a bit jaundiced regarding environmental claims, so I followed the strings of OOCL's press release back to those behind the carbon calculator. I wanted to know what this calculator could do, what it couldn't, how OOCL would use it, how shippers would use it and what it all meant?

The carbon calculator is the product of the Clean Cargo Working Group (CCWG), which was set up by an outfit called BSR seven or eight years ago. CCWG was set up to give shippers and carriers a place where shippers could drive improvements collectively and carriers could build common standards. I talked to Raj Supra and Marshall Chase who work on the CCWG for BSR.

Supra confirmed that CCWG surveys its members (which include over 60% of the global market for container carriers) for a quantitative set of metrics, including carbon-dioxide and sulphur- and nitrogen-oxides. Specific emission factors per ship per voyage are built based on formulas that stem from the IMO, but include a mish-mash of specifics updated as IT capabilities increase.

The idea of businesses driving other businesses to improve based on quantitative performance is comforting. But why should we trust industry to police itself? There's a Switzerland-sized oil slick in the Gulf arguing against industry's self-regulation.

The CCWG is on this issue in three ways: 1) This May, the group resolved to make its emission factors public (and the formulas that create them). 2) They are piloting a verification system that provides some layer of auditing of the figures. 3) Work has begun aligning their work with work in the US EPA and the World Economic Forum's logistics group.

Is the data having any effect, I asked? Are people choosing away suppliers for filling the troposphere with carbon-dioxide? Only anecdotally. "Some shippers are plugging the data in supply chain scorecards, rating and ranking suppliers. If it's not already grounds for choosing suppliers, it will be soon."

Basically, BSR and CCWG are trying to help shippers and carriers find their way through the data maze; in this instance, the lofty goal is emissions. The challenge is on industry to use the data wisely, and drive improvement so quickly that regulators don't force the issue. Will they succeed? The jury's still out.

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:

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)

Helsinki, we have a problem....

Wärtsilä introduces new mission control-like remote diagnostics centre in Finland

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Later this month, Wärtsilä will take the wraps off of its brand-new condition-based maintenance (CBM) centre in Finland. The idea of such a centre is to create a Houston Mission Control-style nerve central for monitoring Wärtsilä engine and generator plants operating worldwide.

I understand that, given that a ship has the necessary bandwidth, Wärtsilä will be able to analyze a ship's engine performance, provide troubleshooting, optimization and the like. Even if it looks like the technicians below are dinking around on Google Earth and Delicious, I gotta say that the Mission Control idea is cool.

 

Lloyd's List to bl-bl-bl-bl-bl-blog from the Barents Sea

The latest in shipping blogs sees a Lloyd's List journalist on a shuttle tanker in the Barents Sea

By Ryan Skinner (email)

It was during conversation with Sovcomflot about their shuttle tanker operations to the Varandey field in the Barents Sea that Lloyd's List's Craig Eason was asked "Well, why don't you go up there on board and see for yourself?"

Swallowing shipping's climate story

Some of shipping's climate arguments are wobbly; and some of its champions, wobblier 

By Ryan Skinner (email)  

Michael Grey recently wrote a column in Lloyd's List to counter those who "marched about with placards, stormed the fences surrounding coal-fired power stations and punched the odd policeman", who "chained [themselves] to the rudder of a coal carrier or painted all over the side of an old ship that may have been going for scrap."

He argues that these people have done very little to save the world; instead, it is the marine engineers and naval architects who are the real heroes for devising "the sheer amazing leap in productivity provided by marine transport over the last 40 years."

Lloyd's List: The newspaper I hate to love

Insightful and powerful reporting at Lloyd's List let down again by feeble publicity. Why oh why?

By Ryan Skinner (email)  

Referring to COP15, he said: "This is huge! This is going to impact our entire future! Everything we do will be impacted by this meeting!" Who said it? A frothing environmental crusader? Maybe a left-wing politician? Some Brazilian biofuel executive? No. It was the Finnish CEO of a major global marine supplier I met last week.

He's right, of course. Rarely has a single meeting seemingly had such wide-ranging and long-term ramifications.

And Lloyd's List is all over it, with two reporters on-site delivering the copy fast and furious both to the daily newspaper and a "live" blog. Their journalistic instincts are fantastic. But why don't more people know about the blog? Lloyd's List seems determined to keep this thing some kind of side-show, almost a secret.

New energy means tilting at jurisdictional windmills, in America

"The United States is the most regulated environment in the world," said a project manager for an   LNG upstream company

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Port Dolphin off of Tampa finally got the green light, this time from federal authorities. The floating offshore LNG regasification project will be able to bring as much as 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas to a fuel-hungry Florida, starting in 2013.

I'd interviewed the guy responsible for getting all of the necessary permits (and there are a lot), and felt satisfied that he had, at last, succeeded. Here are extracts from the interview last year:

How long is the schedule for Port Dolphin's deepwater port license?

"Port Dolphin filed the deepwater port license application with the US Coast Guard in April 2007, and we are aiming to get it approved in summer 2009, after just over two years."

So who at the federal level approves this, and why?

"The federal government has exclusive jurisdiction offshore, where the buoy and pipeline begin. Here the US Coast Guard, the US Maritime Administration, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Mineral Management Service, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanographic Administration's National Marine Fisheries Service all need to review the application and study the project's impact on their area of jurisdiction."

What is Fairplay doing?!

From straight shipping mag to trade/commerce/logistics/shipping mag...why? And will it work?

By Ryan Skinner (email)

Fairplay surprised me last week by announcing that it was changing its focus. In a leader that seemed to meander around the point, Fairplay revealed that it's going to be covering more than its usual true-blue shipping beat. It is expanding scope to go into more depth on legislation, logistics, technology and "commerce".

 What's driving the change? A good guess is necessity. The timing of the change seems a bit odd: too hasty to seem planned, and too late for many making 2010 advertising calendars. And the editorial said little about how this impacts advertisers, readership or distribution.

So now Fairplay's trying to metamorphose into a hybrid between Journal of Commerce and the Economist. The new mag's initial editorial certainly aimed high, arcing from the Oracle of Omaha, to Obama, taking a right turn at APEC and quoting both the PRC's Hu and COSCO's Wei, before landing like a plop with DHL's CEO (who offered this revelation: Asia is rich in natural resources, has a large, youthful and increasingly well-educated workforce and a growing middle class. Wow. Stop the presses.)  

What does this mean? To advertisers, it means you're less likely to nail readers whose interests begin and end within sight of a shipyard. But you're perhaps more likely to get the eye of charterers, logistics firms, forwarders and the like. It's a broader audience - take it or leave it.

Even if I sound critical, I think the move's an exciting one. After all, I already love reading the Economist. Now I get an Economist with a greater shipping bent, kind-of, if you squint a little.

Future of shipping news not what you thought

Subscribe to MarineBizTV's twitter feed today, and see the future of shipping news

By Ryan Skinner (email)

The future of (shipping) news is misspelled, grammatically incorrect and ripped off. Why do I say that? Because it's right and good. Because, to be frank, the real world has poor syntax and the real world proceeds without regards to copyrights. It's evolution's guiding principle: Whatever works.

MarineBizTV's twitter feed gives the perfect illustration of this future. Even twitterati accustomed to  seeing words and grammar rules sacrificed to the 140-character limit commandment would gag on some of MarineBizTV's 4th grade errors. Some examples:

"Japan to grow more stronger: "Hamburg Sud container vessel..."

"Skate, the first marine fish to face extinction: France:" (how many fish aren't marine?)

"French yacht ceased at Kochi Port: The CISF ceased a French yacht..." (seizure means trouble; getting ceased must be fatal)

When you consider that it's a news service, the errors seem even more egregious. But, to most readers around the world, the response is this: Who cares? Even those who notice the errors are more likely to say "just give me the news. Quick. Dirty. I don't care. I just want to know."

And you know what? They're right. "But it may lead to misunderstandings!" whine the crowd who worry through books like Eats, Shoots and Leaves (panda or hit-man?). H*ll, no, I say. Anyone who can't tell the difference between a panda and a hit-man through context is an idiot. In the examples cited above, the errors are no hindrance to get the meaning. And grade-school teachers can stuff it. The future is mispeled.

The second futuristic aspect of this feed is its absolute disregard for source. These stories come from all over the place, and the twitter feed gives no indication of source. Click-through and you'll be linked on to the source or led to MarineBizTV's own page (with source accreditation).

"But," shouts the editor of a big, musty flagship publication, "they won't know whether to believe what they're reading if there's no accreditation. How do they know the source is reliable?" That's dead wrong, and backwards-thinking. People are pretty savvy readers. Savvier than most publishers would like to think.

Readers want information and news, and they want it all, from every direction. Then they digest it all themselves. This is one future of (shipping) news: Rich, loud and scratchy.