MAX RANCHI
Super Series
A perfect fit
Once a software engineer always a software engineer. It was appro- priate that Hasso Plattner and the home Phoenix team did so well at the first, and so far only, 52 Super Series event of the season, the Odzala Discovery Camps Super Series V & A Waterfront Cape Town Regatta... Local knowledge, smart, confident sailing and the benefit of a good couple of weeks of two-boat training and testing all played a role in Plattner’s well-deserved second overall. The build-up to Cape Town also saw the next step forward for
Njord Analytic’s newest suite of advanced performance analysis tools. The German-based company, led by Jonas Witt, grew from SAP co-founder Plattner’s own dissatisfaction for what he saw available when he and his daughter Tina started working up the two Phoenix TP52s in 2018. In Cape Town Quantum Racing and Platoon as well as Plattner’s
Phoenix teams all utilised Njord’s new live analytics product. This now allows two boats to line up and the coaches in the coach boats to see all of the live boat data in real time. Previously, according to Njord’s Witt the old system would reproduce only one boat’s data. Now they can run tests when boats line up together to see real-time averages of all the key variables, highlight differences and get live updating VMG gain/loss analysis. Njord was originally seeded by Plattner and driven by the Phoenix
36 SEAHORSE
teams. Witt is a highly talented, approachable and pragmatic young software engineer and entrepreneur who trained at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, near Berlin. ‘When the Phoenix team came looking I flew straight to Puerto Portals in 2018 to see what they were doing… Straightaway I said, “Hey, I can see why this sucks, let me see how I can do it better,”’ grins the young German. ‘First of all we did a video player targeted at visual debriefing.
You load all the separate media streams that you have, drone footage, onboard GoPros and video, plus photos from the coach boat – then it is all about lining it up on a common timeline so you can get it all synced nicely, also with the log file for the day. ‘The core of this app initially was to get it all done quickly, so
the coach would not have to do too much work before being able to debrief. From hitting the dock to walking to the hotel to debrief at, say, seven. That was what we did first. ‘Team Phoenix used and liked the first prototypes. But there was
much more to do with the data, overlaying numbers and reports. Plus many other improvements were possible with regard to the existing systems, mostly in terms of speed. PDF files from log reports had an awful lot of good info but it took a long time to get it all into a usable report.’ So after the video player app Njord built the current web-based
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