IoT Insider Podcast | Episode 7: The world’s first smart, IoT-powered container fleet

Dan Cunliffe
So today, I’m joined by Shachar Tal and Marshall Frieze who are both considered to be pretty good friends at this stage now, because we’ve been working together on a project involving well smart containers, I suppose as a as a way to put it together. But Marshall Frieze, being the Founder and Managing Director of The One Solution, which is a longtime partner of Pangea, and Shachar Tal, who is the founder of Loginno, and has also held some other interesting roles, I’m sure in his time in the world of container and telematics. Guys, thanks for joining me, I really appreciate it. And for the listeners, on the podcast, we’re doing this, you know, globally as usual, from London to, to Israel to, to Yorkshire, which is the other part of where we are. But if I guess it’s sort of pull a bit of context together, we’ve been working sort of side by side on, particularly some of the projects involving the Loginno side of things, and particularly on supply chain, and improving supply chain when related to containers. Shachar I might ask you to maybe help me out here, but you were involved with a project called Contopia, and particularly a competition, which is about trying to find, I believe the world’s first sort of digital shipping company, or try to create the world’s first digital shipping company, do you want to tell me a little bit about why it’s important to maybe create a digital shipping environment, maybe or even a, you know, a smart container? Why? Why would we want to do this?

Shachar Tal
So Contopia is a term we use to describe a world where every shipping container is real time IoT connected. And that scenario allows us to improve the almost all of logistics processes, I mean, think about a situation that you have today, we have just dumb metal boxes, compared to a situation where each box would have eyes, ears, and the brain could communicate could understand what’s going on with the cargo inside of it, with the environment around it. It’s a whole different game, and the way it changes not only the shipping company, but the actual, you know, the whole end to end supply chain, starting from, and I could give examples about black boxes for insurance. Yeah. And you know, where you don’t have to send investigators that cost a lot of money to understand exactly what’s going on, in green lanes and red lanes at customs and homeland security. And, of course, a much, much better management of the shipping company’s own container fleet. And last, but certainly not least, is 100% visibility for the cargo owners, for the shippers who actually drive this whole world forward. So this is first and foremost for them for the cargo inside the containers. Yeah, but by doing so you unlock benefits for the entire logistics chain. That’s why it’s important.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, exactly. Because I suppose it’s a very good analogy there, you know, what you’re doing is becoming sort of the eyes and the ears of what’s going on inside the containers. And quite often the value what’s inside a container is enormous, but we don’t always know this, do we? We don’t actually know what’s in there. And equally, I suppose you don’t always know if it’s been tampered with real time and that’s what we’re trying to achieve.

Shachar Tal
Exactly, no, perfect. And it’s not just tampering of the cargo. It’s also deviation from route. I mean, all these logistics hiccups not necessarily ruin the cargo but they ruin the flow. And in a very costly environment like that of you know, shipping a container. When you make a mistake or you’re not on time or you know, you’re not where you’re supposed to be that as a lot of implications and these implications are costly. And they’re a heavy, heavy burden on everyone, pretty much. That’s what we’re trying to avoid and solve and improve.

Dan Cunliffe
So one of the things that I thought was probably worth chatting about in our podcast today, because you know, taking any, any old market and making it smart is really what the Internet of Things is about in my world, like I live for that I really, really am quite passionate about that side of it. The winner actually of Contopia had a pretty interesting story about their share price. Maybe you want to tell us a little bit about that.

Shachar Tal
Cool. So let’s say a few words about the competition and the winner. Yeah. So in December 2018, we launched a competition for all mid to small shipping companies, the winner of which gets their entire container fleet converted for free, essentially, becoming the world’s first digital shipping company with a 100% container fleet, this thing was never done before at all. Yeah. And we had 17 applications, 4 shortlisted and one that came out the winner, which is a Brazilian company called Log-In Logística. The nice thing about them, they’re an amazing story, but one nice thing about them is that they’re public, you could actually see what happened with their stock since the announcement. And right now we’re about two, two and a half months away from the announcement, the stock rose by more than 100%. just crazy. I mean, yeah. And I’m gonna let you in another very hot, very hot subject. We just started our marketing campaign a couple of days ago. And I’m now getting escalations for marketing people. They’re not handling the requests. It’s when we had when we started this competition competition. We were unsure whether the market could handle this now, at this point in time, I can tell you definitely the market is ready. Yeah, we need to grab this opportunity. So starting in Brazil, and they will be the number two, the number three, it’s a long competition with lots of lots of pipelines.

Dan Cunliffe
Well, let’s, let’s maybe move this kind of part. I mean, look, look, any any any shipping company out there that wants to increase their stock, we should we should take a call. Let’s um, let’s let’s move this on to a little bit about where Marshall and myself kind of got involved with Pangea and The One Solution. So, I guess first thing to say is obviously with Loginno, your business being based in Israel, Pangea. Pangea loves to kind of work with international opportunities and tries to find other ways around, you know, kind of extending our capability. But one of the things that really appealed to us was the fact that Marshall obviously had relationships in Israel being originally or at least having kind of relatives from there. Marshall, do you want to tell us a little bit about The One Solution?

Marshall Frieze
Okay, so what I’ve been in the industry for, since 1995-96, when mobile phones were very rare. And the IoT M2M was, was nothing but a dream. I came back into the industry, probably about three and a half, four years ago. And when you come from an industry that is specifically divided, so initially, you had a mobile phone decision maker and a fixed line decision maker, what we were seeing is that that individual is that those two individuals are now rolled into one. And people were talking about, well, what the Internet of Things was, what is machine to machine technology. And I was spending quite a time abroad, specifically in Israel. And I spoke to a couple of VCs who we agreed to be their communications partner, if you like. And at that stage, we were introduced to Shachar, and Loginno and the way that we sort of took it forward, we were given, we were given an opportunity. And if I’m completely honest, it was probably out of my depth. So I had to make the decision that I needed to share the knowledge with or would rely on the knowledge from somebody else. And I spoke to a couple of people, including yourselves, obviously Dan and fortunately, I think, from my perspective, was very much a hand holding scenario. And it made the job a lot easier because I realised that it was a massive opportunity for me and for my business. I realised how passionate and knowledgeable Shachar and the team were from their side. But we needed to, we needed to provide that kind of solution and really introducing you guys was probably as important as the initial introduction for me to Shachar because without either either party, we probably wouldn’t be where we are now.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, no, I would, I would tend to agree, I think, you know, we, we spent quite a bit of time, all of us really just just trying to work out how are we going to best do this? I think we had some specific challenges around how you connect a container around the world efficiently, both from a commercial perspective and a kind of, you know, geographic perspective, that was that was our two big challenges. And, you know, well, here we are, you know, looking to do our first decent deployment in Brazil in the next couple of months. So, and, and further, right. Yeah.

Marshall Frieze
And I think just on that, Dan, I think the key working with me was really the flexibility was the fact that you guys had the knowledge and the understanding of creating a solution where To be fair, I did speak to others, as you’re aware, but we didn’t get that kind of excitement, we didn’t get that kind of, well, actually, let’s take this a bit further. Because we think we’re able to, to create a solution that will be tailored for these guys. And I think that’s what it’s all about, and, and Shachar will probably agree that what we’ve been able to provide is something that is, is paramount to the success of the operation.

Shachar Tal
Yeah, definitely. I mean, once when, when you, you know, get down to the bits and bytes. You know, there’s a whole lot of hardware going on. So that’s nice. But the ability to provide effective available, robust communication is key. And I know that we’ve had our share of trials and each seen, you know, other solutions that are using, you know, various forms of communication or that I mean, it’s, it’s a tough nut to crack. Global, you know, being having the availability or let’s say maximum availability globally, at a cellular select scenario. But hopefully, we got that right.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, exactly. No, you know, and that’s, I think one of the things that I’m definitely passionate about Chris as well, you know, the guys that work here with us, we, we like to look for the ways around around some of the tough points to get to, but look, that’s what it’s about, right? Finding really, really difficult scenarios and picking up ways to go, like I said, it was I remember going to Tel Aviv to come and meet you guys. And then particularly saying, Look, I don’t think there’s any other way to do this commercially and geographically. And that was always our challenge. Like, how do we get that right? But now, now, look, we’ve got the other side of it, and we can we’re gonna move forward. If I if if I kind of just take it forward into maybe the kind of important things that smart containers will start to help with. Shachar I don’t know if I’m misquoting you, but you said there was something like 30 million containers in operation every day. Is that is that true?

Shachar Tal
Yeah. A little less than 30 in units. Yeah.

Dan Cunliffe
Which, until until we started launching your services, was just not being looked at as, as properly as it could be, you know, wasn’t being tracked wasn’t being gauged properly. So the opportunity from that is actually pretty incredible. I guess what we want to try and think about is, what about other places, that the products you can actually evolve towards? You know, containers are not the only thing that really need this type of solution. Right. There’s there are other things and Marshall you’ve also said, there’s been a couple of trials on the moment.

Marshall Frieze
Yeah, so emanating from the success that we’ve had, we’ve we’ve got a product that Shachar and I have. Well, Shachar has had the products and we’ve sort of looked at it from a slightly different perspective. And we’ve got a trial going on at the moment with a haulage company Now we all know that haulage companies are using telematics they’re using their own solutions. But that’s generally for the cab and not for the trailer. So we’ve got a really interest interesting trial trial at the moment with a company based in the northwest, who, who were challenged by their insurance company who said to them, Well, we know you’re taking this container this truckload of whiskey to around Europe. And we know that we’ve got telematics in the actual cab. But what about the actual trailer? What if the trailer becomes disengaged what happens there? And the insurers were actually adamant we need to see a solution otherwise we’re not we’re not going to cover you. So we’ve given them access to this portable FlexiTrack device and that’s what it’s called a FlexiTrack is basically a very strong magnetic solution that could be attached and removed very easily. And it provides a complete tracking solution. So they know at any time where that tracker where that trailer is, but it’s not just the trailer market, obviously, when you can look at motorbikes, I’ve got a motorbike company looking at doing it. And we’ve also got a boat, a yacht company looking at doing it and hire cars. So one of the companies I spoke to today, funnily enough, they do very short term hire car lease, and they only keep keep the cars for about three or four months. And traditionally, they’ve been going to the cost of putting in full telematics solutions for tracking, but now they don’t need to now they can look at this kind of solution which is a lot more flexible, a lot more affordable. And it allows them to identify where, where their, their vehicles are at any one time. So coming from the original opportunity, new markets are evolving on a on a day by day basis.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah. That’s also, you know, a European wide, maybe even a global wide opportunity, right?

Marshall Frieze
Yeah, absolutely no limitation. So we know by tracking this particular trailer, it started off in, in the northwest, in the Lake District went through Europe, it’s been in Eastern Europe, its now back in Western Europe. Its doing quite a few jobs over in Holland. It’s in Germany at the moment and heading back to the UK next week. So it really has spanned the continent for them. And it’s given them that, that that extra peace of mind, even if you take away the insurance issue, and the challenge that they had with that its giving them extra peace of mind that they know their trailer’s tracked, as well as the actual truck being tracked as well.

Dan Cunliffe
Perfect. And just in closing, if we kind of take it to the next to the next part is obviously we’ve got a very decent sort of partner channel at the moment of which you guys are involved. But how would you maybe question to you Shachar how would you kind of see the next steps for this? And what what type of people would we want to get involved, like what sort of customers would they have?

Shachar Tal
So it’s like a two part question. The first part is, what use cases that we’re doing right now. And the second is, you know, what’s going to be the future? Now, we are focusing on two use cases. The first is the internal operation of the shipping company itself better managing their fleet. The second is visibility application or tracking application for the shippers for the owners of the cargo. By the way, same data, I mean, if one thing I can say about us, bringing more and more applications, is that we are really using the same data. So as far as the communications provider is concerned, if we’re focusing on that angle, it’s actually making different uses for the same data that has been communicated. The data has been communicated once. And now what are you going to do? Now? What are you going to do with it? So two use cases, as I’ve mentioned, but we have also built, research and industrial. We call Contopia Labs. And that is where we work with really interesting partners on future products and more researchers on use cases that we still don’t have, you know, full understanding of where the value lies, for example, connectivity of a smart container to the port connectivity of a smart container to the vessel. What happens if it’s an autonomous vessel? Yeah. The crew, you know, vessel crew, and more and more and more. So in the end, because this is going to be used for many, many, many applications, it definitely is going to cut they’re going to drive the cost and the prices for each customer down, making this really affordable situation. Not that it’s that like this today. But it’s gonna be an integral part of shipping of the shipping of tomorrow. And I would even dare say that, even the shipper of today needs to look at this very, very closely, because the ROI is phenomenal.

Dan Cunliffe
Yeah, exactly. 100% No, I think that’s, I think that’s a very good way to sum it up. Because, you know, the Internet of Things is all about if I can connect that thing to the internet, I should be able to make it better, or work harder for me. And that’s exactly what we’re doing here. Yeah, we’re working it out. Perfect look guys, appreciate that. Appreciate you joining me for just giving us a real brief insight into our kind of relationship, but also to the people who get to listen to our podcast. We will definitely give everybody the information on how they can get involved. Generally, the way we work in it is obviously either speak to Pangea, or The One Solution at the moment if you’re one of the UK partners for sure that we can you know, anyone who’s got any shipping relationships or anything, anything further than that trailer, track and trace, you know, sort of high end insurance side of things. Definitely do get in touch with us. Perfect. Well, Shachar thanks so much, Marshall much appreciated. I’m sure I’ll see you guys all very, very soon. Yeah. Thanks, guys. Have a good one. Thank you.