Ken Smith joins FreightWaves as Chief Technology Officer and will be involved in the architecture and technology strategy for the FreightWaves and the BiTA Community Group.
Ken has over 20 years of experience in IT management, information strategy, data collection and manipulation of unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data and enterprise level architectures. He led the development of one of the trucking industry’s most successful digital recruiting platforms, that combined demographic, social, and SEO data to rapidly identify and accelerate the driver applicant recruiting and on-boarding processes.
“Ken has a track record of building applications that transform raw and unstructured data. Combine this with his deep understanding of SEO and social media in the digital content industry, plus his experience in constructing an industry-leading driver recruitment platform makes him the ideal candidate for the CTO role,” -Craig Fuller, CEO of FreightWaves and Managing Director of BiTA stated.
Ken has been involved in several tech startups and held many leadership, consulting and development positions throughout his career. He has been profiled by business journals and magazines, including the Tennessee Business Journal, Inc. Magazine and Vanity Fair, as well as numerous local and national newspapers and news wires.
While the company has no plans to build recruiting and applicant on-boarding systems, it is imperative that the experience is on the team. Drivers are the most important factor in the success of a commercial fleet and understanding how fleets solicit, engage, recruit, and retain drivers is important in FreightWaves’ goal to “map-out” and interpret the freight markets. Plus, a number of the members of BiTA are working on new applications that improve on these processes.
Ken will be flanked by deepest set of data and freight experts in the freight markets.
This includes:
Dean Croke, a telematics and driver behavioral expert that ran the data teams at Omnitracs and Sperion.
Ibrahim Bayaan, formerly the Senior Economist at UPS, a PhD that has a deep understanding of the freight markets and the transition of e-commerce and technology is happening on the broader economy, freight carriers, and supply-chains.
Ben Murphy, an expert at pricing and yield optimization systems that sold his company to TMW Systems and was an active executive at McLeod Systems.
Daniel Pickett, a CFA, that has been a commercial vehicle buy-side analyst and debt-trader that led data-science teams at USAA and Unum.
FreightWaves is building market-wide economic models using aggregated data-sets to understand and analyze the health of the freight economy. To date, the company has accumulated data-sets that represent hundreds of billions of dollars in freight transactions. The information is then modeled into actionable insights that provide a near-time map of the market.
As the founding sponsor organization behind BiTA (Blockchain in Transport Alliance), FreightWaves building a panel of experts that can work with the most important technology and logistics companies in the space to construct standards and encourage commercial outcomes.
FreightWaves is the number one source to help participants navigate the freight markets, through its news service and SaaS platform; the company is the founding organization and sponsor behind BiTA (Blockchain in Transport Alliance), the transportation industry blockchain forum, think tank, and standards organization; and the creator of the world’s first freight futures contracts that help organizations with exposure to US trucking rates to hedge and trade exposure.