Page 47: of Marine Technology Magazine (November 2021)

“We’re building standardization to enable a rapid expansion of sensing in the ocean. (Traditionally) every sensor, every piece of hardware is dif erent, with a dif erent protocol, and a dif erent connector. If you try to put them together, things get ugly quick, and everything turns into an engineering project. Engineering projects are great for engineers, (but) they’re bad for almost everybody else (because) they cost a lot of time and money.”

Tim Janssen, CEO

Sofar Ocean Technologies for maritime shipping, we deliver better options for routing owned, to networks of lower cost nodes. Together all of those their vessels for both safety, ef? ciency, and reducing emis- lower cost nodes can provide much more information, much sions. more synoptic insight as to what’s actually going on. Basical- ly, we are taking that same idea and bringing it to the ocean,

I know you’ve already given me a couple of key where we’ve been mostly pretty bad at doing that; stuck to statistics, but I’d if you would to put a little more building large platforms that require large operational sup- meat on the bones. port; needing a PhD in oceanography operate the instrument.

First off, I think an important difference between what we As a result, (that type of network) does not scale.

do and what we have been doing in our oceans is that we are switching to a distributed paradigm. This is fundamentally not Why is scale important?

that different from what has been done in space over the last Scale is fundamental to what we do. Everything has to be two decades, where you see a shift from single exquisite plat- global scale, thousands of sensors, lots of data. The platform forms that are incredibly expensive and mostly government- that we use is the Spotter platform, which is a solar powered, www.marinetechnologynews.com 47

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