Boating Innovations to Watch in 2011

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Don’t Rock the Boat
Innovation: Boat-monitoring and theft-notification services

How It Came to Be: Peter Dalton recounts an old story in which he was wintering one of his cabin cruisers on a California lake. Checking on the boat one day, he was horrified to find a foot of water sitting in the salon. “The worst nightmare of any boater,” groans Dalton, CEO of Globalstar Inc., parent company of Spot LLC. Dalton is hopeful his new Spot Hug product will help prevent such mishaps — and possibly save boaters money on insurance. While the original Spot was designed as a personal handheld emergency beacon for boaters, the Hug system does this and more. Designed primarily for the boat, it uses wired or wireless sensors that, when triggered, notify an owner that something — whether potential theft or water where it’s not supposed to be — has gone awry.

Why It’s Unique: The Spot system has gained a solid reputation thanks to its integration with GPS satellite networks and the Globalstar network.