The last few months have been nothing short of busy. In fact, we’ve been swamped. We partnered with GTX Corp, ParceLive, and a few others that will be announced soon, began working on case studies, aired our first webinar with major industry executives, graduated from the Plug and Play Spring 2019 Food and Beverage Accelerator Program, joined forces with the World Economic Forum to build the Blockchain Toolkit, and a lot more. Read on for a deep dive on our progress and what we have next on the horizon.

Dear Community,

We’re nearing the final stretch of 2019, and we can hardly believe it! We’ve been busy fine-tuning our platform, nailing our pitch, bringing on new customers, demoing for clients, and speaking at and attending different freight and logistics conferences. In case you aren’t up to speed, we wanted to give you a quick rundown of what we’ve been up to since our last update and what’s up next on the agenda.

What We’ve Been Up To

ShipChain airs its first webinar, The State of Technology in Food Supply Chains 2019: Produce

We aired our first webinar about Technology and its impacts on the Food Supply Chain in June. We discussed current bottlenecks associated with fresh produce and grocery supply chains, areas for improvement, and what adding blockchain to the industry could mean. A special thanks to our fantastic panelists and everyone who made it possible. Our panel included:

Lisa Curtis, Founder, and CEO, Kuli Kuli

Chris Kupillas, Regional VP, BlueGrace Logistics

James Osborn, Manager of Logistics and Process Improvement, Hanover Foods

John Monarch, Co-founder, and CEO, ShipChain

For everyone that hasn’t had a chance to tune in yet, we have made the recording public on our blog.

Additionally, if you tuned in to The State of Technology in Food Supply Chains: Produce and have feedback, we would love to hear from you! Drop us a line at marketing@shipchain.io.

ShipChain Graduates from Plug and Play’s 2019 Food and Beverage Accelerator Program

Earlier this year, we officially graduated from Plug and Play’s 2019 Food and Beverage Accelerator Program. We are beyond thankful for the opportunity and hope to share some of that amazing experience with you! Some of our biggest takeaways from the 12-week program were:

Meetings with some of the most prominent players in the Food and Beverage space and getting to speak to decision-makers directly

Attending different workshops in which we were able to fine-tune our timed 3-minute pitch (want to hear the whole thing? Follow this link )

Exposure to media publications and outlets the Plug and Play Spring Expo that took place May 14-16th

Hundreds of amazing contacts that love what we are doing and want to incorporate blockchain into their supply chains

The reason that opportunities like Plug and Play are so important for us is that we can come face to face with large companies with complex supply chains that are looking for a solution. The processes can be slow, tedious, and require a lot of back and forth, but we are excited to share that we are getting further and further along with one of the largest fast-food companies in the United States. More details to come soon!

ShipChain Selected by World Economic Forum to Build the Blockchain Toolkit

We are incredibly grateful to have been selected by the World Economic Forum (WEF) to build a toolkit outlining how to understand the complexities of and manage blockchain integration. We were amongst approximately 100 supply chain organizations and experts that were tapped for the project, and as of May 1st, we are moving full steam ahead. We are confident that this move further solidifies the blockchain revolution, and we are hopeful that it will encourage global adoption.

If you’d like to take a look at some of the whitepapers that we have contributed as part of this initiative, use the following links:

For more information regarding the WEF’s goals, please read the full announcement posted on JOC.

ShipChain Joins Forces with GTX Corporation

We announced a partnership with GTX Corp, a global tech leader offering a suite of GPS and NFC tracking location-based services, earlier this year. Together, we are building an NFC blockchain shipment tracking solution. Additionally, we have begun offering GTX enabled services to all of our customers as part of the expanding partnership. We will be announcing a joint customer in the coming months.

Read the full announcement here.

ShipChain Partners with ParceLive

We also launched a partnership with ParceLive, a real-time supply chain visibility platform, to further increase transparency, efficiency and quality control across the global supply chain. Under the new partnership, we will integrate ParceLive’s state-of-the-art tracking technologies into our platform. This will further increase our clients’ ability to monitor temperature, moisture, light, impact, tilt, and GPS location to ensure quality control and monitor shipment progress.

To read the full announcement, follow this link.

ShipChain Hires New VP of Business Development

Thus far, our biggest focus this year has been business development, and what better way to strengthen our initiatives than to bring on a new VP of Biz Dev. Mark Coady joins the ShipChain team with him over 20 years of experience in high-level technological Sales and Business Development. With his years spent working in logistics and supply chain, he is fully equipped to excel in this new role.

We hope you will join us in welcoming him to the team! To read the full announcement, visit our blog.

Our Sidechain is Now in Phase 3

Our sidechain has entered phase 3 of the test network! After successful alpha and beta tests, the Gamma network has been deployed, marking the third iteration of our test network for us to begin running benchmarks. With over 22 nodes run by community participants, this marks the next step on our journey to a decentralized supply chain revolution.

ShipChain is Selected as a Finalist for Service Innovation Award at the Global Freight Awards 2019

We are pleased to announce that we have been selected as a finalist for the Global Freight Awards 2019 for the Service Innovation Award! As per the Global Freight Awards Categories & Criteria, the Service Innovation finalists “showcase smart new products, services or processes which approach the everyday in new ways, enhance performance, decrease costs, or spearhead that big change that no one even knew they needed until it was made.” We are confident that our Track and Trace Platform will blow the competition away, and look forward to hopefully accepting the award this November.

ShipChain’s Backend Services Now Available for Purchase

By now, you all know how we feel about blockchain. It is poised to transform the world as we know it. We realized that there was a need for people to be able to interact with the Ethereum blockchain quickly and easily, so we created the solution. Enter ShipChain’s backend services.

Now, if you have a developer with REST experience, he or she can use our API to post directly to the Ethereum blockchain. Regardless of whether your team uses PHP, Javascript, C#, Java, Python, or another programming language, you can now directly interact with the blockchain thanks to ShipChain’s backend services.

To learn more about our backend services, visit our website.

ShipChain Attends Different Industry Events

Since our last Dispatch, our team has attended:

Gartner Supply Chain Conference in Phoenix, AZ

Association for Supply Chain Management in Las Vegas, NV

JOC Logistics Technology Conference in Las Vegas, NV

SC Logistics 2019 Fall Talk in Charleston, SC

Trans-Pacific Maritime Conference: TPM in Long Beach, CA

These events are huge opportunities for us to meet our future clients. Thus far, we’ve seen an overwhelming amount of interest in what we’ve built and been able to demo our platform to businesses of all sizes. Let’s just say we will have some big announcements to share soon.

A Look At What’s To Come

Case Studies

First up on the agenda? Case studies. We know just how important it is for you, our Community and future customers, to see our platform in action. And that’s why we are going to be working to put it all on the table. We want to show you just how much money, time, and hassle you can save with ShipChain. Our goal is to get our first case study released in Q1 2020. We will provide more updates as we have them, so stay tuned!

More Webinars

The State of Technology in Food Supply Chains: Produce webinar that aired on June 6th is the first in a series of webinars that we plan to roll out. We hope you had a chance to tune in and learn something about the industry, but if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, you can do so here.

The second webinar we have planned will be a two-part series that focuses on high-value and controlled substances supply chains, with an emphasis on cannabis and pharma. The webinar is titled The State of Technology in Controlled Substances and High-Value Supply Chains and will be moderated by Eric Johnson, Technology Editor at JOC. Our panel is comprised of prominent players in the space, including:

Evren Ozkaya, CEO, and Founder, Supply Chain Wizard

Sherree DeCovny, Co-founder and Research Principal, Chain Business Insights

Mark Coady, VP of Business Development, ShipChain

John Monarch, CEO, and Co-founder, ShipChain

Part 1 will air on October 29th at 11 AM PST/2 PM EST, and Part 2 will go live on November 5th at 11 AM PST/2 PM EST.

You can sign up for the webinar series here!

More to Share Soon…

Thank you again for your continued support, and we look forward to closing out 2019 with a bang!