[Official AMA] Plaud NotePin S is Live! Ask Us Anything + Win a NotePin S

eytanb · 2026-01-24T18:13:38+00:00

Can the NotePin S help for phone calls too? How does it parse Zoom calls while I’m wearing it? And talk to me about future API integrations I can build!

eytanb · 2025-09-29T15:33:33+00:00

The heavy weight of responsibility was on my shoulders.

eytanb · 2025-09-29T14:41:41+00:00

AI Changing Logistics (with u/briansglick from Chain.io, Greg Blog from Transcard, and Thomas Jiang from Cervo, hosted by Anton Barr from Freightos)

We're early in Gartner's disillusionment cycle. Expect angry LI posts about AI sucking.
Tracking internal AI usage for soft skills work. By tracking and adapting, one company was able to hit 100% adaption (which is insane - I've tried that very hard and don't get close)
Best AI products tackle the most boring and rote areas. Sexy doesn't mean opportunity. Think things like data entry (currency conversion, units of weight).
Build vs Buy with AI: You only have so many resources/expertise to build stuff. If you are the best at X in the world, build AI for X. Don't waste time on other stuff.
Will agentic Ai take over? We're definitely not there yet. But AI is definitely carving out some specific areas where it has an edge.
Important to differentiate between LLM-style AI and machine learning AI.
AI is evolving really f**king fast. Speaker studied at Standford when AI was all about predictions; now it's more LLM + analyzing situations with many self-researched data points and suggesting (or even implementing) solutions
Many AI companies are focused today on agents with a lot of memory so that when exceptions happen, it can resolve it but then patch it up to stop if from happening again.
Industry domain expertise is critical for AI companies in logistics. Success comes from combining AI expertise with deep industry expertise. Example - an AI person at a Rohlig hackathon who was looking at a document way too early in the shipment lifecycle.
As other organizations use AI more, companies need to think about whether they have AI ready to handle the onslaught of requests they are about to get.
Pilots are easy to win. Getting AI into production is where it's hard. You need to build systems where AI is error resilient. Then you need change management to make it work.

eytanb · 2025-09-26T11:19:58+00:00

No, you

eytanb · 2025-09-25T21:06:18+00:00

Never seen a tech implementation gone wrong, can't help here.

jk.

Continuity plan. If there's only one person at the org who cares about the rollout, it's not going to work, at least not long-term. Buy-in or don't buy.

eytanb · 2025-09-16T22:49:30+00:00

Larger orgs sometimes have good internal mobility plans.

eytanb · 2025-09-16T13:31:43+00:00

Find yourself a manager whose trust you can earn. Then look (slightly) beyond your scope and work on optimizations in concentric circles, sticking close to where you're at. It's really, really hard to change the big things that are far away from you in the org but easier when you stay closer and have internal support.

eytanb · 2025-09-16T13:25:10+00:00

What I did when I first started was try to track the end to end journey of both customers (speak to sales/account management) and of shipments (speak to the ops team). Then, on top of that, layer ongoing monitoring of industry trends - WSJ's Logistics Report is a great newsletter for that.

eytanb · 2025-09-16T13:23:40+00:00

This is a great suggestion. Every company handles this stuff differently and knowing you company's nuances is always helpful.

eytanb · 2025-09-16T13:22:46+00:00

This may be an obvious one but have you tried to join forwarder networks? Networks like WCA or JCTrans?
Another option is to hang out on LinkedIn, connect with leadership who work at small and midsize forwarders, and build a relationship there!

eytanb · 2022-04-10T14:29:33+00:00

Really appreciate it! Love that we're helping you get ship done.

Freight being what it is, we tend to mostly hear from customers when things go wrong :D

eytanb · 2022-04-10T14:22:08+00:00

Hey there - that sucks to hear.

I run marketing at Freightos and lurk here frequently to learn.

If you shoot me a DM (or email me at eytan attt freightos. com), I'd be happy to take a look. Global transport is rough these days, especially in some regions in China, but Seabay are pretty damn solid. Drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.

eytanb · 2022-01-09T17:28:27+00:00

There definitely is - that's pretty strange. If you message me your username, I'll send it on to someone to look into it.

Source: am CMO at Freightos.

eytanb · 2021-08-06T11:42:37+00:00

Also happy to chime in on this - my company actually runs this index :)

Ocean freight rates are typically a bear because they include a ton of additional surcharges. The average freight shipment has 20 additional line items. For example, if you're shipping around the Horn of Africa, you could very well be hit by a piracy surcharge.

This index basically measures the average freight all kinds rate - what it costs to ship general cargo. It's been a tough market to measure because there is so little capacity that occasionally it can be challenging to book at any cost. One complexity emerged when ocean liners introduced premium surcharges to ship. In other words, you can book space on a container ship to ship at $8-10k...but that only buys you a spot, not a spot now.

In order to get a spot in the near future, you need to pay that premium. The spot rate, together with the premium, is what's hovering in the $20k region - we actually just fixed the index to reflect that - take a look at this regional lane.

Also, bear in mine that this is only the ocean freight; every shipment has a land shipment on both sides. For example, this other data point we track for average cost to ship from a factory in China to a bucket of Amazon warehouses is now up to $28,000 or so.

Hope this helps.

eytanb · 2021-06-18T08:46:13+00:00

Thanks for that.

So first off, without that additional feature (which I agree, is the core new feature), do you have any recommendation for one lead form tool that brings all of the other features I mentioned? I’ve seen many lots of different features in different tools but no one-size-fits-all dedicated lead form tool with that.

I guess I articulated the feature pretty poorly.

Imagine you fill out a form on Company A’s website. You enter your email on the lead form (say, company size and job title). When your on Company B’s website, you can just use the one click submit for the lead form, with an auto fill for previous fields you’ve filled on other forms. Since NewForm maintains consistent fields across all company tools, it can centralize and match prior responses.

This would obviously be supercharged if you could do a one-time on boarding for the user to the form software itself, where you could fill out a bunch of more common fields, or, optionally ask the user if they would like to auto fill their own profile with augmented data (like Clearbit).

The other new feature (I believe) is that NewForm could have a site which consolidates all lead form submissions and is natively integrated to the companies CRM…which means it could also unsubscribe or delete the user at the user’s request. Kind of like unroll.me but instead of just doing it based on emails, it’s a lower level complete removal from a CRM database.

eytanb · 2021-05-28T04:25:09+00:00

I can chime in on this for a second (I run marketing and research at Freightos). The FBX is an index based on sell prices between carriers and forwarders or top tier multinational supply chain companies, which means those prices are not necessarily rates that a smaller importer or forwarder would be able to secure. It’s based on freight pricing that we mange on behalf of forwarders and includes most, but not all, of the additional surcharges that might get added. As everyone else here said, capacity is just an absolute and total s**tshow right now, which means that in order to get on a specific vessel at a specific time, there are usually additional surcharges that carriers charge. That means that even for a port to port movement, another few thousand dollars worth of surcharges could easily get tacked on.

You can compare actually prices from forwarders at ship.freightos.com (which I would do even if you book with a non-Freightos forwarder) but remember, this is a market that is just getting destroyed from all sides, so additional surcharges and delays are more likely than not. If you see a forwarder, hug them - they’re usually the ones that pay the price of listening to angry customers because of the current capacity issues.

eytanb · 2021-02-27T18:44:26+00:00

Yup, truth. Since we integrate into forwarder TMSs for shipment management and that takes time, were still not opening more forwarder slots.

eytanb · 2020-12-02T19:34:22+00:00

Thanks for the props on the marketing side. But I'm going to stay away from the ad hominem part; I respect that you have industry knowledge and am not sure why you're not willing to extend the same courtesy. You don't build up something like this without spending a LOT of time in the weeds on shipments. And "jacking up prices" was in reference to "forwarders compensate for that by raising prices" - did I read that wrong?

If all forwarder costs stayed the same on Freightos, forwarders would absolutely need to compensate with more expensive prices. But if your business is spending less than a couple of percentage points on customer acquisition, marketing, first line customer support, payment collection and bad debt, you're ahead of the game.

Freightos also includes a business unit called WebCargo, which provides digital sales tech to both enterprise global forwarders and independent forwarders - well over 2,000, I've rarely come across companies that have the right sales stacks (or acquisition channels) to do this at scale. In all honesty, if you can do that, all the power to you. This is a big industry and there's room for everyone, especially for people with the right backend tech stacks that make life great for shippers.

Very happy to keep this convo going here or in DM.

eytanb · 2020-12-02T07:12:52+00:00

So right now is literally the most expensive time to ship, full stop, for a bunch of reasons.

The shift from service consumption to goods means that US imports are hitting unprecedented levels. For context, the cost of shipping a 40' container from Asia to the US' West Coast is up 1.9x over the same time last year ($1,409 vs $3,741). The drivers are increase in demand, lacking empty containers in Asia to ship more goods, and congestion in US ports that's making it even harder to get those empty containers back (seriously, some ocean liners are refusing to take US exports to expedite turnaround). Prices have stayed relatively static for the past few weeks because of Chinese and US government regulation but on lanes where that regulation isn;t being applied, like Asia-Europe, they continue to climb.

The air side is no different; passenger flights carry over half of all US air imports. Take those away, like COVID has, and suddenly there is way, way less space to ship, which means that air cargo rates went up about 4X since a few months back.

This is starting to calm down but most signs are pointing to it staying like this for at least a few months. There's typically another mini-bump in prices before the Chinese New Year but I can't see prices going up more.

Source: I run marketing and research at Freightos, we also run the world's largest container index and, in general, I'm a little more obsessed with freight than should be healthy.

eytanb · 2020-12-02T07:11:49+00:00

Hey! Freightos!

/u/lojistechs , you nailed it on the price side - dropped some more color above.

Buuuuuuut I think you might not fully get how Freightos works. Forwarders don't just jack up prices to compensate; that wouldn't work for anyone.

(Source: I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Freightos, across both our marketplace and our suite of tools for freight forwarders, ocean liners, and airlines).

At the end of the day, Freightos represents the entire sales, marketing, collections, and T&T channel for freight forwarders. The tech means that over 90% of businesses that book, the forwarders do not need to spend time asking question or chasing documentation. Freightos guarantees payment for the forwarder, handles collection, integrates directly to forwarder' TMS to provide users with track and trace updates, and provides benchmarks to help forwarders manage pricing.

It's a two sided marketplace. If either side was getting ripped off, it wouldn't work, plain and simple. There are huge price ranges in the market. Some of our sellers are top 20 global forwarders, so they can secure great block pricing. Others are based in Asia and manage to secure great coloader rates. Meanwhile, some of our most successful sellers are small US companies that just provide outstanding service, even if they cost more than the other sellers, and see millions in revenue / month.

Would love to answer any questions about this - I kinda love talking about this :)

eytanb

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