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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

I've often wondered about what you would discover if you were to send accelerometers through various channels, over various distances, and inside of various packages. A database of carrier/packaging/haul distance/acceleration history tuples would be a valuable B2B product for many manufacturers.

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This sort of thing already exists, albeit in a low-tech method, using ball bearings or coloured gels. For example: https://spotsee.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/tiltwatch-plus...

that's pretty ingenious!

Clever, although with an accelerometer you may also keep track of which stretch of the journey they get handled the roughest.

More importantly, that advertises its presence to the handlers

For very sensitive freight (read NMR magnets) they already fix tiltmeters and accelerometers to the shipping crate, together with instructions to note excursions on the bill of lading when the item arrives. The superconducting wire in a modern magnet is exceedingly brittle. The various postal services do that, too, I remember seeing a documentary about the Royal Mail.

ITER had a lot of specific shipments they did from member nations where they basically put some concrete in a box with the full range of sensor hardware and sent it to the site, explicitly to make sure that they actually could move the components.

The artist Walead Beshty used the hazards of the shipping system to create art. He would ship glass boxes through Fedex and the damaged result would become art.

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/walead-beshty-fedex-large-kraf...

In our increasingly IPed world where every copyright seemingly has to be enforced. Who would own the copyright in this instance? The postman? They 'created' it, they weren't instructed to make the piece. Surely postman 1 could sue postman 2 for damaging their 'art'?

I suppose you could argue the 'artist' is akin to a photographer?

But what if another artist joined fedex specifically to 'create' art. Which artist would take precedence? If one broke a box to create art, and one wanted the same box breaking to create art???

I don’t know if I break your car windows and the unique shape increases the value of the car do I have any claim to the added value?

Good one. And it's not a single shipment. He's doing it for years. :)

https://www.boredpanda.com/shattered-glass-sculptures-fedex-...

Popular Mechanics did something like that back in 2010: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/reviews/a6284/wh...

If they do that, they should definitely send some of the packages via Hermes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gcc9ZUz69c

The only thing I'd send through Hermes is a crash test dummy, it's a cheap way to find out if it'll stand up to a 60mph head on crash with a concrete mass.

If it survives Hermes it's tough enough.

This is a very neat idea. I wonder if transport companies already do this to their own packages as a form of auditing and optimizing their own services. Or if they do it to other companies as a comparison metric.

As a 3rd party, you would need large N data points to have actionable information. It might be that collecting the data points costs more than what they are worth.

If you're a company with multiple locations and you send items between those locations then it shouldn't be too expensive to put some tracking technology inside to collect travel information.

That's basically what http://www.cargosense.com/services.html does. I remember Rich Kilmer presenting a beacon a couple years ago that does GPS/accelerometer/temperature/whatnot to monitor packages.

You would discover business proprietary information that FedEx and UPS certainly must be collecting every day in their supply chains already today.

There are rumours that B&O did this with one of the boxes for their TVs. Supposedly it spiked when the box missing a slide in the Copenhagen sorting facility a feel 4 meter, hitting a concrete floor.

https://spotsee.io/impact

Shipping costs might increase

Who pays the bill when a product arrives damaged? Shipping costs might go up but insurance or returns could go down as well.

What matters is total cost, which decreases. Shipping cost could be 0 at any time if the cost of the bike contains it.

My innovative shipping startup will ship your package for free! The recipient will never see it, but at least we’re cheaper than FedEx.

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