Tag "Database"

In the age of ultrafast communication and GPS, it is hard to imagine that sailors once relied on the sky (i.e. constellations) to navigate their vessels in the high seas. However, not every sailor was a Viking, and this led to high chances of the ship landing somewhere it is not supposed to be (read: Christopher Columbus).

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we can do nothing but look back in awe at all the challenges sailors used to face back in the days. Since the 1990s, navigation in itself and shipping at large have undergone sea changes, thanks to the rampant evolution in AIS tech.

Now, humans have the rightful luxury of tracking their fleets on the seven seas with the help of a single click in real-time.

What was initially developed to function as a simple collision avoidance tool has now spiraled to form the heartbeat of global ship navigation? Yes, it is the Automatic Identification System (AIS) that we are talking about.

Currently, over half a million vessels actively use AIS for transmitting vessel data (mainly their location), which then gets collected by a receiver network deployed across the globe. FleetMon alone has a humongous database of over half a million vessels with users across 164 countries using FleetMon.com to track vessel movement.

Gone are the days when AIS used to be a tool for accident prevention. It is now a proven source of information for a wide variety of individuals ranging from maritime businesses that leverage its data to predict their growth, to researchers and analysts monitoring the supply chain.

As such, it is ever more important to know about AIS, at least the basics of it. The blog has been engineered for the same purpose, covering the 10 most important points about AIS and how you could benefit from it.

We show you three activities on FleetMon made for real ship lovers to get Coronavirus pandemic out of your head.

Global Coronavirus led to minimizing public life and impacts our habits as well. Many people are not only forced to stay in quarantine at home but also voluntarily hide themselves away with their families. We show you three activities on FleetMon made for real ship lovers. To all the pilots, navigators, seafarers, long-term crew members, and ship spotters: Now is the perfect time to become involved in our community-based platform to forget the Coronavirus madness for a while.

Late last week we put the finishing touches to a very special project we’ve been wanting to share with you for a while now. After many weeks of burning the midnight oil at JAKOTAs ofice in an effort to squeeze into it every drop of spotting goodness, we’ve finally completed work on the Fleetmon mobile app for the iPhone and sent it over to the nice people at Apple.
And now guess what, we are talking about this not as a rumour, but an approved application in the Apple Store. So get your iPhone connected, or fire up iTunes and take a look yourself…

We thought it might be nice to show you a video of what we’ve built so far for you (still in the works, as of my writing…).

There is a dedicated new area here at Digital-Seas website: www.fleetmon.com/products/fleetmon_mobile
and of course a support space in our Forum section: fleetmon.com/community/forum/

We would love to hear your comments, if this is of any use for your daily work or spotting experience.