IT Mag

Vol. 8, No. 3

Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal

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FromtheDeskofScott Scott Moscrip, CEO I remember back in high school taking a typing class on a manual typewriter. It took a lot of work to get the letters on the pages — and a lot of liquid paper and correcting tape to make them right. en about half way through the class we got new typewriters, electric ones, with automatic correcting tape built into them. My first thought was, "it doesn't get any better than this." en I started working on a computer: It was small but I could hit the back key and the previous letter would disappear without correcting tape or liquid paper. Jump forward 30 years and those concepts are ancient history. When was the last time you bought carbon paper, liquid paper, or correction tape? Why don't you do that anymore? e answer is simple: technology! ere has been a lot of technology created in the last 10 years. If you were to pin me down and ask what the biggest technological change of the last 10 years, I would say communications. When I lecture to college students about how I used to take phones off their mounts or unplug them from their jacks so that I could plug in a laptop into the jack, dial an 800 number to connect to the Internet, and then slowly having the information go into my 4-pound laptop which took three minutes to boot up, they look at me like I am crazy because that concept is completely foreign to them. For them, the Internet has always been there and for the most part, it has always been on their smart phones. Equally foreign to them is the concept of the telephone call and speaking to someone on the phone. ey seem to think that texting has existed forever. In fact, I am pretty certain most of them think that God sent Moses the 10 commandments via text messages because each law was less than 140 characters! e world has changed because of the ease in communications and we are just now finding ways to take advantage of those new communications lines to send information back and forth to each other. All these changes in technology are supposed to make our lives better — better being defined by each person individually. For example, the technology that has created cell phones has saved me countless hours of searching for a payphone, digging for quarters, and getting important messages in a timely fashion. However, it has also tethered the entire planet to my hip so that I can be constantly interrupted during work, leisure time, or even when I am trying to sleep. Almost universally, technology is designed to free up our time so that we can use that free time for a different purpose, whether that be to do more work or to have more time to spend with our families and friends. At Internet Truckstop, our goal is to create technology for the transportation industry and to bring that technology to everyone in the industry. In the late 1990s I read an article that said that Schneider National was spending $100 million a year on technology and innovation — that was more money than 99 percent of trucking companies made annually in revenues! How could all the other trucking companies be able to keep up with that? As we have built our products here at Internet Truckstop, we have designed many of them to help provide many of the same technologies as the larger companies use. For example, a small trucking company could not hire enough sales people to find freight all over the country because it was too expensive. Truckstop.com becomes the technology that mimics the function of those sales people all over the country. By simply searching Truckstop.com everyone can find freight to haul to keep them moving and making money without having to hire sales people all over the country for the same purpose. Internet Truckstop's credit, fuel optimization, rate tools, dispute handling, factoring, bonding, insurance, on-boarding, ELD, POD, RFP, and TMS systems are all technologies designed to help free up your time so that you can spend it doing something else. Technology never stops moving forward. Just as typewriters became word processors and payphones became cell phones, we here at Internet Truckstop keep pushing our products and technology forward. Our customer advisory board has given us many great suggestions to improve our products and technology this year and we are busy implementing them. You have already started to see them show up on our website with changes and improvements to our home page. Many more will start showing up as the teams work hard to make sure that we are delivering the best products and technology that we can to help us deliver to you all the information you need more quickly than it has ever been delivered before. T E C H N O L O G Y : WHAT IS IT ALL FOR? T H E I N T E R N E T C E L E B R AT E S I T S 4 5 T H A N N I V E R S A R Y I N O C T O B E R O F T H I S Y E A R , W H I L E T H E W O R L D W I D E W E B T U R N E D 2 5 I N M A R C H . 4 IT MAGAZINE Vo l . 8 , N o . 3

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