BOW WAVE 52

news and views on trade, insurance and risk

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Wavy Line	sam@wavyline.com
(c)2000 WavyLine.com	Issue No 52 13 Nov 00
Published free of charge to Readers
Editor: Sam Ignarski
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In this issue:

1. Welcome
2. William Cawley of SRT
3. John Richardson and Waybills
4. We are not Spammers
5. The Erika Report
6. And Finally...

1. Welcome

A good part of this week saw the editor chairing the annual Lloyd's List Events Seminar on Bills of Lading in front of an audience of traders, shipowners and mutual Club people at a hotel near Euston in London.

The seminar sets out each year to examine the subject from the angles of law, commerce and technology over three days. The final day of the proceedings is nowadays mostly given over to the prospects of the electronic bill of lading and this issue of Bow Wave also incorporates references to a number of the
speakers.

This issue also marks the lapse of the first year of Bow Wave. It started as an experiment to see if people in the trade and transport industries would be interested in receiving and contributing to an e-zine which followed events and ideas as they arose. The circulation has grown at a steady rate ever since.

Thank you dear readers for your support and forbearance during what has been an eventful 12 months in the life of the editor. We have marked the day with an extract from Issue No 1 which is pasted in Item 6 and which appears to stand up well to re-examination.

2. William Cawley of SRT

One of the members of the strong IT team over at
Sinclair Roche & Temperley, William Crawley spoke on the need to incorporate electronic bills of lading within the Carriage of Goods by Sea Act of 1992. He argued that the role of the bill of lading as a document of title had outlived its usefulness for the purposes of e-commerce. In the end custom and usage would determine what uses would be made of electronic bills. He put the remarkably low rate of use of electronic bills by the trading world down to three factors:

the continuing use of the b/l as a document of title problems of authenticity
the fear and risks of the unknown

Cawley and his colleague Scott Singer are doing a good job of examining the strengths and weaknesses of e-commerce in shipping.

See their firm's website at:

http://www.srtlaw.com/

3. John Richardson and Waybills

One of the speakers at the Bills of Lading Conference was John Richardson. He spoke on the one hand about his long held belief in the use of sea way bills in preference to the bill of lading in the containerised trades. He also introduced the audience to a new venture which has captured his imagination and support. This is a kind of e-commerce system for traders using e-waybills involving the close cooperation of banks and also allowing for the settlement of accounts for traders, insurers and those concerned in carriage. The partners include leading container shipping lines banks and the Visa organisation. The market of the SMEs seems very clearly the target.

See an explanation of the venture at:

http://www.cceweb.com

4. We are not Spammers

We started with the e-mail addresses of friends and colleagues in relevant industries. Each day since a few people have subscribed by writing in. We also receive lists which are volunteered by readers and gratefully received. Each week approximately 80 to 100 names are added to the list and 10 to 20 names ask to unsubscribe and are removed from the mailing list. This somewhat haphazard progress ensures that we have to search for and remove duplicate listings from time to time. Also the frequent churning in the markets we cover seems to result in people changing jobs and e-mail addresses very often.

Sometimes we are asked quite forcefully to remove listings. We do so as soon as we can. We do not buy lists from vendors or engage in the practice known as spamming.

To those people who have stayed inside a single organisation for the duration of their e-mail careers we have a word of advice: take out a private subscription to another internet service provider and migrate all your personal filing onto that account lest you find yourself saying a fond farewell not only to your employers but also your accumulated electronic files.

5. The Erika Report

RINA, the Italian ship's classification society has been handing out cd-roms of its not universally admired explanation of the reasons why.

One of our readers has lodged a copy at the following site:

http://www.keskom.co.uk/

6. And Finally...

With this issue Bow Wave has completed a full year of weekly appearances. Our first issue went out to less than 200 readers. It covered the subjects of marine insurance, e-mutuals and also reviewed the book by Steward Brand called the Clock of the Long Now which is a meditation on long term planning. An extract from that review seems to us to be as fitting a birthday message as any:

"Brand cites two technological drivers:

Moore's Law which in 1965 predicted that the number of components on microchips would double every eighteen months. This exponential growth has set the pace for technological change for 50 years.

Metcalfe's Law on the value of networks which held that the value of a network of people and machines was dynamic. 10 people networked together gives a value of 90
(each person has a network of 9). Double the network to 20 and each individual has access to 380 others on the network. Multiply by 10 and the network has 100 times the people. A thousand times 10 and the each person has a network of 1 million. The 50 million plus on the Internet Network in 1998 have access to a vast network on a scale unimagined.

Most of us working in the marine industries are only really beginning to glean the potential values and the disturbing effect of having easy access to such an enormous resource. Most people in the years before the 1980s had an address book which might have as many as a thousand addresses in it, though many of them were obsolete. Now, as Brand says, the world which many people saw as changing arithmetically (1,2,3,4,5...1000) may change exponentially
(1,2,4,8,16,32...one billion) and the later doublings in exponential sequence are absolutely ferocious. Each new doubling introduces a new range of possibilities and life becomes a series of perpetual transitions.

This is at least partially the reason why we have a strong sense of change in this industry."

http://www.longnow.org/

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