This is a story about how a few people inside a nondescript government office building in Cambridge, MA discovered a simple solution to a huge global problem thereby making the oceans and harbors of the world safer. Our story begins in Naples Italy in 2005. The Admiral in charge of the 6th Fleet asked, "how come we know the exact location of every airplane in the world, but don't have a clue about the thousands of ships roaming the seas and entering our ports?" The big defense contractors said they could solve the problem in a decade and it will take tens of millions of dollars. Then somebody called the Volpe Center, a research facility run by the United States Department of Transportation. They said, "Oh, it will take a couple hundred thousand dollars, and is two weeks okay?" This is how they did it.
