Technology

International shipping has changed little in the last century & itslow and opaque, with many processes carried out manually and on paper. Most supply chain teams still rely on phone calls and emails to do their job. The whole things stuck in the 20th Century. Itestimated that the average shipper spends over 40 hours per month & the equivalent of 7 working days & manually chasing the various parties along their supply chain for action.

We&ve seen many startups try to tackle shipping and freight in the last few years but very few got anywhere because the industry is very resistant to change. The key to winning in this market would be to leap-frog legacy operating systems and improve customer-facing supply chain visibility and analytics.

Zencargo, the digital freight forwarder, thinks it may have the answer, and so do its investors. Today it announces its ‘seed plus& round, led by LondonLocalGlobe, with participation from Samos Investments (founded by the Marquess of Salisbury) and Picus Capital, bringing total funds raised to over $4m.

The company works & which works with businesses ranging from high-growth scaleups to FTSE-listed businesses & will use the new funding to accelerate its product development process and build a presence in China.

The idea is simple and disruptive.

Zencargo makes it completely free for companies to digitise their supply chain. Its platform includes end-to-end visibility for shipments from purchase order to delivery, addressing the issue of fragmented suppliers and manual processes.

Instead of real offices, Zencargocustomers utilise its &Virtual Local Offices& to gain visibility during production around the world.

Customers include wearable technology giant Catapult and mattress-in-a-box brand Simba. Catapult says it has used ZenCargo to expand its supply chain to over 50 countries, with 98% of all shipments arriving on time.

Tom Hook, supply chain and operations manager at Catapult, says Zencargoplatform &helped us digitise our complete shipping operation overnight. Their technology acts like an extension of our team; helping to increase visibility into our supply chain, minimising the amount of admin and communication required and allowing us to focus on developing and improving the way we operate rather than continually chasing it.&

Richard Fattal, cofounder of Zencargo, says: &We&ve attracted a lot of fast-growing digital companies led by a new generation of business leaders. These are the kind of companies that are driving productivity growth in the UK and elsewhere and we are enjoying helping them operate with greater efficiency.&

The company was founded by Alex Hersham, ZencargoCEO, and Fattal, with CTO Jan Reithmeyer. Hersham worked for Cerberus Capital Management, a US Private Equity with $40bn under management, running the shipping business, buying and leasing ships back to the shipping lines. Richard is the third generation in his family to make a career in international trade; his grandfather owned a freight forwarding business and his father was a commodities trader.

Apple and Salesforceare both highly successful, iconic brands, who like to put on a big show when they make product announcements. Today, the two companies announced they were forming a strategic partnership with an emphasis on mobile strategy ahead of Salesforce enormous customer conference, Dreamforce, which starts tomorrow in San Francisco.

For Apple, which is has been establishing partnerships with key enterprise brands for the last several years, todaynews is a another big step toward solidifying its enterprise strategyby involving the largest enterprise SaaS vendor in the world.

&We&re forming a strategic partnership with Salesforce to change the way people work and to empower developers of all abilities to build world-class mobile apps,& Susan Prescott, vice president of markets, apps and services at Apple told TechCrunch.

Tim Cook at Apple event on September 12, 2018 Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Bret Taylor, president and chief product officer at Salesforce, who came over in the Quip deal a couple of years ago, says working together, the two companies can streamline mobile development for customers. &Every single one of our customers is on mobile. They all want world-class mobile experiences, and this enables us when we&re talking to a customer about their mobile strategy, that we can be in that conversation together,& he explained.

For starters, the partnership is going to involve three main components: The two companies are going to work together to bring in some key iOS features such Siri Shortcuts and integration with AppleBusiness Chat into the Salesforce mobile app. Much like the partnership between Apple and IBM, Apple and Salesforce will also work together to build industry-specific iOS apps on the Salesforce platform.

The companies are also working together on a new mobile SDK built specifically for Swift, Applepopular programming language. The plan is to provide a way to build Swift apps for iOS and deploy them natively on SalesforceLightning platform.

The final component involves deeper integration with Trailhead, Salesforceeducation platform. That will involve a new Trailhead Mobile app on IOS as well as adding Swift education courses to the Trailhead catalogue to help drive adoption of the mobile SDK.

While Apple has largely been perceived as a consumer-focused organization, as we saw a shift to companies encouraging employees to bring their own devices to work over the last six or seven years, Apple has benefited. As that has happened, it has been able to take advantage to sell more products and services and haspartnered with a number of other well-known enterprise brands includingIBM,Cisco,SAP and GE along with systems integrators AccentureandDeloitte.

The move gives Salesforce a formidable partner to continue their incredible growth trajectory. Just last year the company passed the $10 billion run rate putting it in rarified company with some of the most successful software companies in the world. In their most recent earnings call at the end of August, they reported $3.28 billion for the quarter, placing them on a run rate of over $13 billion. Connecting with Apple could help keep that momentum growing.

The two companies will show off the partnership at Dreamforce this week. Ita deal that has the potential to work out well for both companies, giving Salesforce a more integrated iOS experience and helping Apple increase its reach into the enterprise.

During last SeptemberIgnite conference, Microsoft heavily emphasized its quantum computing effortsand launched both its Q# programming language and development kits.

This year, the focus is on other things, and the announcements about quantum are far and in between (and our understanding is that Microsoft, unlike some of its competitors, doesn&t have a working quantum computing prototype yet). It did, however, announce an addition to its Quantum Development Kit that brings a new chemical simulation library to tools for getting started with quantum computing.

While there are plenty of applications for quantum computing once it becomes a reality, quite a few experts are betting on chemical simulations as one of the first areas where developers will be able to reap the fruits of this new computing paradigm. Itmaybe no surprise then that Microsoft is also betting on this.

The new library was developed in collaboration with Pacific Northwest National Labs. &The library will enable developers and organizations to create quantum-inspired solutions that can be simulated on classical computers today and quantum computers in the future & helping them tackle big chemistry challenges in such fields as agriculture and climate,& Microsoft explained ahead of todayannouncement.

While Microsoft is still working on making quantum hardware available to developers, competitors like IBM and Rigetti already offer working machines that may be limited in their capabilities — as all quantum computers currently are — but that offer developers the ability to test their algorithms on real machines. We&re still a while away from reaching the point where quantum computers will be able to live up to their potential, but as both IBMDario Gil and RigettiCEO Chad Rigetti told me at our Disrupt conference earlier this year, now is the time to get started with learning the basics.