Eletson Corporation offers news service for crew

Eletson Corporation as one of the industry’s pioneers in shipping IT and crew welfare, is always looking for new innovative services for its seafarers. Having deployed and operating a successful and well planned crew internet service, the need for a very low cost service that could be provided to the crew completely free was something that was still missing . Almost a year ago they came across Marpoint’s newest crew welfare service – Evo News.

Further to a successful presentation to the company’s Information & Communication Technology department we agreed to make a 3-month trial in ten (10) demo vessels. Originally the service was configured with only a few RSS links from a mixture of Greek and Philippine sources.

However, after a very successful trial, deployment of the service expanded to the entire Eletson fleet of 30+ vessels. RSS links of many different countries and nationalities was added regularly along with custom crew requests.

In more detail, the demo Evo News service offered the following capabilities:

• 1. Sending daily a vast number of compressed articles and news from different countries and languages from a combination of sources
• 2. Both management and crew can offer input in the list of RSS feeds send to each vessel, thus allowing customized and live news to be send daily
• 3. The option to select the articles, rss-links, frequency, country, category and even size (articles with or without pictures) was provided, thus allowing for control of the bandwidth consumption of each vessel
• 4. To view articles on the vessel’s crew internal network through Marpoint’s responsive user interface, also allowing the seafarers to use their own devices (BYOD, laptop, smartphone, crew’s pc etc.)
• 5. A completely free and live news services, with the option to open the actual article by using the crew internet cards offered to Eletson seafarers

The feedback and results received so far have been overwhelming. Comments from different vessels and seafarers from all nationalities can be seen below:

• Vessel Nisyros: It’s music to my ears your actions hereunder.
  First of all we want to praise the initiative. Me personally and the rest of the crew are extending their gratitude for the scheme in consideration of times economic hardships considering that many of us spend their MB mostly for this service. If this is not a step towards crew welfare then what is it!!!

  ---

• Vessel Polyaigos: The “Evo News” service is very useful and it happened to be wide accepted from all crew on board the vessel. I wrote “very useful” and I believe that, I minimize it. It is invaluable. As seaman I welcome any kind of news from home.

  ---

• Vessel Othoni: First of all congratulations!
  Every attempt to improve the seaman’s life onboard a vessel is welcome! The first impression from all crew was more than positive and all were excited. During the last safety meeting, we found the opportunity to discuss regarding yours and it was a common opinion that the RSS news are much more practical and interesting than the previous news.
  Most of the crew said that they check the news daily and I include myself

  ---

• Vessel Fourni: We found the idea and the usefulness of this program successful. Crew’s usage of the service is in total adequate and we believe that electronic newspaper is the next generation of news reading.

  ---

• Vessel Tilos: Very useful! You have the sensation that you read a newspaper and this cause a relax feeling. This action is very kind of you and is making our journey more easy, more pleasant and help us have some peace of soul! Thank you all and God bless you.

  ---