At the beginning of January and after delaying several times the final results of the Perfect Brainstorm contest, we finally knew who were the winners of this contest that brought together 210 projects from all over the world.
The first place winners were Leif Arne Strømmen and Erik Aadland with the Vessel Demurrage & Dispatch project. A couple of days ago we had the opportunity of interviewing one of them, take a few minutes to know what Leif Arne Strømmen told us about their interesting project.
Gabriela Jara
Contest Coordinator & Writer
IOTA Hispano
At the end of November 2018 the IOTA Foundation launched a contest: The Perfect Brainstorm, a community contest designed to bring together the brightest thinkers, visionaries and business-oriented people to develop concrete ideas for use cases facilitated by IOTA. The big winner of this contest would have their idea put into practice in real life.
This contest was born to give a space to the huge part of the Reddit community and the IOTA Discord server that is always discussing possible cases of use of IOTA and DLT’s in general and that could have the possibility of bringing their projects to real life.
By the end of the contest, 210 projects from all over the world had been submitted. Only 5 of those 210 were selected winners by a jury composed by David Sønstebø (Co-Founder of IOTA), Regine Hashka-Helmer (IOTA Advisor and Founder & CEO of Seedlab) and Dominik Schiener (Co-Founder of IOTA).
Nice to meet you Leif Arne, can you tell us about you? What’s your background and what do you do currently?
My current role in G2 Ocean is head of Innovation. This is a new role in G2 Ocean, and was established from August 1st 2018 when I joined the company. My background is from Logistics and Freight Forwarding, and before joining G2 Ocean, I was 11 years in Kuehne-Nagel, whereas the last 7 ½ years as global head of their Projects, Oil & Gas and Marine Division based in Hamburg, Germany. It has so far been a great experience working for G2 Ocean, and in particular have time to focus on various Innovation opportunties and initiatives.
Tell us briefly about your first experience with cryptos or DLT’s. How did you discover IOTA?
The first time I heard about IOTA was first half of 2018, reading various articles about IOTA, as well looking into your web page. After that, Erik Aadland from one sister company Grieg Connect made me aware of the contest “The perfect Brainstorm”. In fact, it was his idea that G2 Ocean / Grieg Connect should participate in this competition, and he shall have the honor for our participation.
How did you lived the selection time process at the contest The Perfect Brainstorm? What are your next steps?
To be very honest, we had very low expectations. We off course belived our project and concept is very interesting and can add a lot of value, but we were very surprised when we dicovered we had won the contest. At the same time, we also talked to other parties solving our «issues» using blockchain technology. Next steps are to establish a project group between Grieg Connect and G2 Ocean together with IOTA, to build a project plan, and basically kick off the process/development. Our project groups are established, so we are ready to start.
The Project: Vessel Demurrage & Dispatch
The shipping industry carries over 90% of all global trade each year. Despite being a key industry, it has not been fully digitized. Many processes are still based on paper and rely on human intervention. One such example is the process for vessel demurrage & dispatch. If a charterer needs longer to dispatch the cargo, a demurrage fee has to be paid to the ship owner; or if the cargo is offloaded faster, the ship owner may pay the charterer a dispatch fee. These contractual terms are largely paper based or stored in proprietary databases — making it incredibly difficult to share key data. The process behind the demurrage & dispatch is also very manual, requiring the involvement and coordination of several parties.
What problem do you intend to solve with this project?
The problem we want to solve it can be split into two parts: First part is related to the contract between G2 Ocean and our clients, that we want to sign electronically and store on the blockchain using electronic signatures from the involved parties in the contract (That is the easy part). Second part is to use the key information in these digital contracts related to arrival times / transit times / loading & discharging time / productivity and demurrage / detention rates and potentially also incentive / penalty, and feed this information into smart contracts together with AIS data, geofencing and digital statement of facts and create automatic invoicing / settlement between us and our clients, and storing all these data and milestones on a distributed ledger.
Why did you choose IOTA/Tangle for your PoC over another technologies?
We decided to participate in the competition because IOTA represents a different solution in the DLT jungle. We are also having other ongoing / running Blochchain projects / pilotes into other ereas, where we are working with other start up companies. Working with IOTA will give us very valuable experience with DLT, and we sincelry hope we together can develop what we want to achieve.
What are your expectations regarding the implementation of your project in the real world?
Since we are running a global business with many international clients, we expect the implementation to take time, and something we need to do is implement this client by client. In particular Smart Contracts will for sure take time to deploy with the individual client, and we also need to change the working processes involving our clients, ships agents and ourselves off course.
What were your first thoughts about IOTA?
It is impressive to see how large the IOTA community has become in a very short period of time. So far we have not had too much direct interaction with IOTA so it is too early to have any strong opintions or thoughts about it, but the first impression is very good, and we look forward to the kick off next weeks and the next steps in our co-operation
