Page 16: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (October 2000)

E-Commerce total cost of the effort was astronomical.

Whether any of the developers who have announced online chartering and

S&P have the stomach or deep pockets for even a scaled back effort of this type is not clear.

Perhaps the question to be asked about on-line chartering and S&P is not "how do we do it'?", but rather "why are we trying to do it?" The case for on-line chartering and S&P is not strong; the people involved in day to day chartering and S&P are not struggling to keep up with the work load, nor are they being inundated by more data each day than they can possibly process. While they are certainly being helped by modern communications systems and helpful software to do the job that they do best, it is hard to see how an expensive and time-consuming development process will either help them substantially or, as some have suggested, replace them.

If the people involved in chartering and S&P are not calling for on-line help, who is doing it for them? The answer, of course, is to look to the vendors, the people who sell hardware and software and consulting services. They have solutions to sell and they are very adept at identifying problems, sometimes pre- viously unrecognized, for which they can sell solutions.

There is a long history of high-tech solutions that have been advertised as the ultimate answer, and "on-line" is the latest in the series.

There were innovations, such as lin- ear programming; robotics; artificial intelligence; and many others too numerous to mention. Each of these was hailed at first, and then discarded and finally left to assume its proper place as a useful but not universal tool — so it will be with "online."

The preceding was authored by Sydney

P. Levine, president. Shipping Intelli- gence, Inc., New York, N.Y.

MaritimeDirect Strengthens Its

E-Commerce Team

MaritimeDirect. an online information and e-commerce marketplace for the maritime shipping industry, has added new executives to its e-commerce team and expanded its global presence, sup- plementing its existing New York and

Tokyo offices with a new office in Hong

Kong.

Martin Taylor joins MaitimeDirect as the director of e-commerce with responsibilities for the strategic direc- tion of the company's e-procurement system as well as manager of the new

Hong Kong office. Most recently. Taylor led the global sales and marketing effort to promote Arena's e-commerce marine procurement sys- tem to ship owners, managers and strategic partners.

The company also appointed Doug

Kowalchuk as vice president of e-com- merce and operations, bringing more than 15 years of e-commerce, supply- chain management and logistics experi- ence to MaritimeDirect.

Prior to joining the company,

Kowalchuk was senior vice president, logistics for WorldSpy Corporation, an e-commerce micro-portal, and vice president, logistics for Copera, a provider of warehouse operations man- agement services for e-commerce mar- ketplaces.

Robert Peterson, who has significant e-commerce experience, also joins the

MaritimeDirect team in New York, to work with Kowalchuk, in e-commerce and operations.

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