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June 07, 2007
The Shipping News Meets Web 2.0 And Makes Money
Mashing up its own wireless data network that exploits a ubiquitous radio protocol in ships and Google maps is the business of Vesseltracker.com. This early stage company is based in port city Hamburg (the sentence "Hamburg ist eine Hafenstadt" still echoes from that first German language lesson).
According to Deutschestartups blog, so far 150 companies have acquired a subscription to its shipping news service for €41 a month each. Target customers are logistics, parcel delivery companies, and ports-related businesses.
For people like us that live in a landlocked country in the middle of Europe, eyeballing traffic in places like Riga, Straits of Gibraltar, Gdansk and even the Elbe is tantalizing, as are the photos of laden cargoships and tankers with names like Crystal Emerald, Smaland, and the Dutch Aquamarine, but Vesseltracker isn't for those of us with a yearning for the high seas- or is it?
According to the same source, some 6000 users have signed up for the free version of Vesseltracker and have uploaded photos of 30K ships. That's a thousand more readers than have signed up for the alarm:clock's daily email digest!
View Vesseltracker
Read Deutschestartups
Posted on June 7, 2007 06:09 AM | Posted to Online services | Permalink
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