In 1847, American naval officer Matthew Maury published a chart of the North Atlantic built from old ships’ logs and gave it away free to any captain who agreed to send his own logs back. As a result, the run from New York to Rio fell from 55 days to 40, and within six years ten nations had adopted his system. It survives today as the Voluntary Observing Ship scheme but has shrunk to about two thousand vessels on a handful of routes with the emergence of satellites and buoys. However, those systems only report the weather. They can tell you what a stretch of what is usually like at a certain time, but not what’s out there right now.
That gap has a cost every operator knows: sea state taken on faith, a port you can’t assess until you’re in it, no picture of what’s around the vessel beyond radar and whoever has the watch, and, when something goes wrong, nothing but a logbook entry and someone’s word. Quartermaster CEO Neil Sobin will make the case for a new approach: Sensors on the working boats already out there, sharing what they see in real time.
In this session, Sobin will share what the network has learned so far, where the gaps remain, and what changes when it grows from hundreds of vessels to thousands, creating an ocean that works like a stock exchange instead of a pawn shop. Maury’s idea was simple: you give us what you see, and we give you something worth having. Sobin will argue it’s time to make that trade again.
