Despite accounting
for about 90% of global trade – and therefore being at the core of worldwide economy– the shipping sector is far behind other industries in matters such as adopting new technologies. Still devoted to pre-digital, obsolete procedures, it has a reputation of being slow and inefficient.
Nonetheless, more and more tech companies are coming to its rescue. As of the past few years, new tech companies – ranging from British logistics company Zencargo to Israeli business and technology accelerator for start-ups theDOCK – have been popping up in every corner of the world in a bid to positively disrupt the industry with creative ideas.
The latest one is a platform called Signal Ocean, which, having just received the Lloyd’s List Intelligence Big Data Award at the 2018 Greek Shipping Awards in December 2018, is already enjoying worldwide success in its first year of existence.
The brainchild of Ioannis Martinos, a Greek shipping tycoon with a background in robotics and engineering, Signal Ocean is a digital platform that employs machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to make ship management more proficient and easier to handle.
Having officially launched in summer last year, Signal Ocean assists brokers, charters and ship owners in looking for data on available tonnage in several loading areas around the world.
As the new year kicks off, the platform has already managed to capture 50% of the companies representing the spot market in the crude tanker space. With plans to expand to other markets and trading areas on the horizon, Martinos says some of his clients already call his platform a “breakthrough in the spot market software for tankers.”