Re:Convoy presents itself as “Uber for trucking”
by samstave on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:06PM
(#10465772)
In 2007 or so, a number of us engineers from Lockheed had created a shipping/trucking cargo tracking device... It was a combo rfid tag with gprs, gps, wifi and mesh networking capabilities along with sensors like accelerometers...
Nobody wanted it.
Re:Convoy presents itself as “Uber for trucking”
by Yakimoto on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @02:07PM
(#10466182)
in 2012 we had this in Afghanistan on almost every single container/pallet/load.
Re:Convoy presents itself as “Uber for trucking”
by samstave on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @06:51PM
(#10467974)
Yeah thats what we originally built at Savi... but there was no security, wifi or any other security in those original tags.
This was the impetus behind us trying to make the modular version.
Re:Convoy presents itself as “Uber for trucking”
by pnathan on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @02:59PM
(#10466514)
I chatted with an engineer from Oracle a couple years ago who talked about those existing in Afghanistan, he was involved in that project somehow.
Re:Convoy presents itself as “Uber for trucking”
by sdrothrock on Thursday October 29, 2015 @03:54AM
(#10469728)
Do you know what they were called/who made them? I had no idea they were actually in production.
Re:Convoy presents itself as “Uber for trucking”
by ArkyBeagle on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @01:18PM
(#10465861)
Around 2009 I talked to some people who offer that exact mix and were still at least open.
The trucking industry will absolutely see several new billion-dollar companies emerge in the near future. If I were investing in a startup, though, I'd want it to be run by founders with a background in trucking, shipping, and/or logistics.
If the only experience either founder has is one of them working a summer job at his uncle's company delivering office supplies, I'd be a bit wary. Between Lewis & Goodale, they've run a game studio, a natural-language processing startup, and had various software development roles.
You could argue that Uber broke into a blue-collar market without any experience, but they had the general public as customers, The trucking industry is a very insular place, they're going to need to get a co-founder who comes from the world they're trying to break into.