I find it humbling to hear about how much goes on behind the scenes in different industries that we so often take for granted, I'd bet the average person probably hasn't thought much about the shipping industry until the whole Suez situation over the past week (including myself coming from a family of three generations of sailors haha). Correct me if I'm wrong but given the real-time nature of your data I'm assuming your software is meant to be accessed on board vessels in transit, so are outages/connectivity issues at sea an issue you've encountered? If so, do you have systems/protocols for handling prolonged outages (e.g. due to inclement weather or network interference) and reconciling your operational algorithms with potentially stale data?
I think the data side of this question is for Hrishi. From a platform perspective we primarily serve the Crew and Vessel Managers ashore right now, but in time we expect to push this out to personnel onboard vessels to give them more autonomy over their travel as well as to minimise additional work done by shore side personnel. In the old days a Captain would manage all aspects of a vessels operation, and I think as technology augments their ability to execute that will become true again with less execution shore side.
Nick's right here - as we operate shoreside (we're beginning to work on helping operations onboard vessels), connectivity is less of an issue.
That said, maintaining realtime information for decision making does have to deal with spotty data (AIS for example, may drop out), so all of our sources have fallback and catch safeties that will (depending on the source and the action context) fall back to a best value, or prevent the action entirely if there is not enough confidence.
