Open Blog on Digital-Seas

From today on, Rostock, the proud Digital Seas home town, has the pleasure to host the 20th Hanse Sail festival and with it more than 200 sailing ships of all types and sizes from a variety of countries. Many tall ships already arrived and where captured by our automatic AIS Live Cam at the Rostock Port entrance. Follow the event and the tracks of the sailing ships from anywhere in the world when they leave for day trips, for parades or squadron journeys on Fleetmon Hanse Sail, our superior vessel tracker!

Do you know where a vessel is, or do you want to tell us where you saw one? Then use our new feature Live Reports - it’s easy!
Just go to the detail page of the vessel you are interested, scroll down to the Live Reports section (Vessel Status - What’s going on?) and click into the entry box. A drop down list will appear. Now just select Port Report, Position Report or Position Request and type in your information.
This is the best place to put your reports or requests as they are archived on the vessels detail page and you can view your favourite vessel any time you like.
So, please use

• Live Reports for vessel position reports or requests
• the Wiki for enduring information such as vessel build details, ownership, etc
• the Forum for discussion topics

Ship spotters at work in Antwerp! Our esteemed Digital Seas member Stevo kindly organized and hosted a ship spotters’ weekend and Digital Seas user meeting during the Tall Ship Race from July 9th to 10th. 24 people met on board the MONTIS 10 in Terneuzen to pursue their love for ships.

Ship spotters at work.

After a 10-hour trip from Rostock to Terneuzen and a much too warm night at the hotel Lars and I were excited about the things to come. Saturday was a pleasantly warm and sunny day. The ship spotters joining us on board came from Britain, Holland, Belgium and Germany. Cold drinks, sunscreen, good conversation and an incredible close-up view of the large and small vessels passing the MONTIS made for a relaxed and enjoyable trip where new friendships grew. In the evening we had ribs and tasted some Belgian beer specialties with Stevo and Ian. Rob joined us the next day for breakfast and we talked about future plans for Digital Seas. Lars and I returned with many good photos, new friends and a decent sunburn.

Thanks you very much Stevo! It was a great time. See you next year - at the latest!

Some photos and videos from the weekend:

Steven Oppeel
Fred Vloo (YouTube Video)

[+] added new AIS antenna: UK, Strait of Dover
[+] added new AIS antenna: UK, around Ramsgate, (mobile)
[+] added new AIS antenna: NL, Terschelling
[+] added new AIS antenna: SP, Tenerife Island
[+] added new AIS antenna network: DK, North Sea, west of Denmark

[+] added search box for browser integration (get it from the start page)
[+] added color coding and list style for vessel search (cool, we think: got copied by VT in only a week :-) )
[+] added last Tracking, Vessels, Ports, Images list for logged in user, faster changing of section
[+] added thumbs up function, replacing image voting with stars
[+] added master image flag for vessel (available to ImageAdmins, 3min update time), representing image is shown with ’star’
[-] removed pager on VesselDetailPage

[*] cleared up site structure
[*] fixed mobile api, still showing deleted images
[*] started coding on vessel data editor

When started three years ago, we had a couple hundred ships listed, mainly tracked in the Southern Baltic. Our effort to build a good designed vessel list, which could constantly grow, has been a success.
With the great help of our members here at Digital-Seas, we’ve created one of the best free resources on the web, today crossing the mark of 100.000 vessels listed. Thanks for that! (more…)

Check out the tanker BRITISH PRIDE which is sending us signals directly from their journey over the Atlantic.
The vessel sends the signal right to our server, which makes the blue water monitoring possible. It is heading to the port of Sikka in India. We hope this will be an example for many vessels to come in the near future.

http://www.digital-seas.com/vessel_search/vessel_details/on/british%20pride_q45989.html

Live view and the 24h track of the British Pride is available at our SharingPage: http://www.digital-seas.com/sharing

We went to Hamburg this week for exhibiting our Fleetmon software on Europas biggest fair for the Cruise Ship business.  The Seatrade 2009 had 250 companies from around 50 contries showing their services.
Also our iPhone App Fleetmon :mobile had lots of interest. Owners, Agents and suppliers love to have informations available on the road about the journey of a vessel. We had talks to people from all over the world. Seatrade is a nice international fair and meeting place of  people in the Cruise, Ferry, Rivercruise and Superyacht industries.
As a result of our presentation all users of Digital-Seas can look forward to the extensions of new AIS covered destinations in the world.

site: www.seatrade-europe.com

here is a really good article with the story of the journey of ARCTIC SEA. The German Magazine “Telepolis” is a technology related publication with lots of backgrounds to developments.
This article is in German language only.

Einen sehr guten Bericht über die Reise der ARCTIC SEA hat Telepolis heute veröffentlicht. Politische Hintergründe des Seetransports und damit passend zu Digital Seas…

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/31/31151/1.html

the ARCTIC SEA on Digital-Seas