Page 30: of Marine Technology Magazine (November 2012)

Innovator The growing ß eet of robotic ocean sensors coupled with the emergence of new and affordable moni- toring technology has increased exponentially the amount of data collected from the worldÕs oceans. This puts decision-makers and researchers who work with these data in a completely fresh situation. The challenge is: How to beneÞ t from the abundance of the ocean data while keeping data acquisition, its management and processing budgets within reasonable limits? It was early 2011, when Rainer Sternfeld worked on manu- facturing proÞ ling data buoys. Sternfeld, who has experiences on enterprise software, remote sensing and product develop- ment, had built with his team in 2009 a prototype data buoy. The buoy collected data properly, but processing and analyz- ing the data was a long and time-consuming process. ÒI realized then that the bottleneck of the ocean data market was not in collecting the data, but in processing the data,Ó said Sternfeld. Then, he conceived the idea for Marinexplore. As Sternfeld discovered, most public ocean data is discon- nected, often archived, and sometimes never used again. He Marinexplore Cutting Ocean Data Processing Time Fivefold ?I realized then that the bottleneck of the ocean data market was not in collecting the data, but in pro-cessing the data,? Rainer Sternfeld, founder and CEO, Marinexplore.30 MTRNovember/December 2012MTR #9 (18-33).indd 30MTR #9 (18-33).indd 3011/29/2012 11:15:41 AM11/29/2012 11:15:41 AM