The idea

The idea of providing a platform to manage boats lifecycle was conceived within the EU funded BOMA (BOat MAnagement project). It aims to increase the international competitiveness of small and medium boat building enterprises, by establishing Intelligent Products and Service Extensions for the leisure marine sector.

The project

Although BOMA will benefit not only boat producers but also boaters, we immediately realized that BOMA, and the “Holonix i-LiKe Boats” software platform, which has been developed there, was a part of something much bigger.

Looking at existing management tools being used by both professionals and boat owners, we understood the need for them to be able to communicate with each other in an environment that we called the ‘leisure marine ecosystem’.

The approach

By putting the virtual boat and not the owner at the center of that ecosystem, secure data and information exchange became much less complicated and consequently, enabled the creation of synergies that will provide benefits and advantages to multiple players in the ecosystem.

This approach allowed us to produce a tool - easy to use but not trivial - feature-rich but not industry oriented, easily accessible from many devices and aimed at ensuring trouble free boat ownership and improving the overall boat ownership experience.

The future

i-Captain was born, a free tool for boaters, born from passion and our know-how on product lifecycle knowledge systems. We are used to work with industry, this is our first consumer app. It will grow step by step with experience and your suggestions.

i-Captain has great potential due to the many features already implemented and also to those which will be soon added, starting with interoperability with other systems including the BOMA system and iPad apps such as Boat-Man.