Trucking Technology Report - March 9
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Both the online report and e-mail are sponsored by @Track Communications, a supplier of wireless communications and dispatch services.
Today's Technology Headlines:
- Iridium Gains 13 Partners to Resell Its Phone Service
- ABF Freight Gets E-Comm Innovator Award
- Produce Industry Leading in E-Commerce
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Iridium Gains 13 Partners to Resell Its Phone Service
Iridium Satellite, which purchased the holdings of the bankrupt Iridium, recently announced that it had formed partnerships with 13 service providers that will resell Iridium's satellite voice
Iridium, which has 66 satellites that were initially intended to offer voice service anywhere on Earth, intends to launch its new commercial service on April 1.
The company intends to target customers that will use the service for emergency communication and communication in isolated regions that do not have the infrastructure for other kinds of wireless phone service.
For now, however, the company has only one customer. The U.S. Department of Defense has signed a two-year, $72 million contract with Iridium. The resellers of Iridium's service generally consist of overseas operations, including GloCall Satellite Communications, Incomserv, and O'Gara Satellite Networks. Washington Post (03/09/01; Noguchi, Yuki)
ABF Freight Gets E-Comm Innovator Award
Network World magazine's 2001 E-Comm Innovator of the Year award goes to trucking company ABF Freight System, which provides its customers with feature-packed front ends on various platforms that all interface with the company's IBM S/390 mainframe computer.Customers can get prices, review freight bills, track shipments, and handle other business with the company's Web site, intranet, WAP devices and other systems that tie into ABF's mainframe applications.
ABF went on the Web in Jan. 1996, simply offering downloads of custom rate software that it had earlier offered on disk, but by the summer of that year customers could already use shipment tracing and route mapping features.
The site's offerings have only grown since then, as the company demonstrated its openness toward e-commerce by adding email alerts that can notify customers when shipments were going to be late--a concept that at first was troubling to ABF executives.
By allowing customers to do more tasks for themselves, company's e-commerce site, dubbed eCenter, has already saved the company much more money than it cost to build. Network World (02/26/01); Bort, Julie
Produce Industry Leading in E-Commerce
he produce industry is fast becoming a leader in e-commerce. A number of initiatives, including ProduceSupply.org, Tradingproduce.com, Agribuys, ProduceOnline, and Buyproduce.com, are all striving in their own ways to bring the benefits of e-commerce to the industry.
Last year, the Produce Marketing Association committed itself to e-commerce, creating a Technology Advisory Council and establishing an e-commerce task force, a retail-scanning task force, and a group examining "international harmonization of coding."
Tradingproduce.com's Rob Bonavito says the produce-related e-commerce companies will likely grow fast because of their user-friendly tools, seamless workflow, and the arriving critical mass of buyers and suppliers.
Agribuys' Marina Kotsianas says the trend in business is toward supply-chain management, which plays into the produce market's global aspect and takes advantage of efficient information flow. Progressive Grocer (02/01); Hennessey, Terry
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