China8 project boxes up grand ad plan

SEATTLE -- Standing on a barge stacked with 40-foot shipping containers dressed up like advertising billboards, John Anderson shouted joyfully to a crowd of advertising executives and trade officials arriving at Seattle's waterfront to hear a decidedly unconventional business plan.

"Big hairy audacious goal!" roared Anderson, CEO of Everett, Wash.-based Erudite, which is developing an advanced system for making shipping containers tamperproof.

These are not words one would expect to hear from the chief of an obscure start-up working on cutting-edge technologies for securing and tracking shipping containers in real time.

What Erudite has set out to accomplish is more out of Alice in Wonderland than any marketing textbook. It has no revenue, and its defining product is still being tested. Yet, it is attempting to pull off a global publicity stunt with a dizzying array of humanitarian and commercial goals on a tight deadline.

"Talk about thinking outside the box," says Anderson, gleefully. "We are denying the box exists!"

How Erudite's outrageous strategy evolved takes some explaining. In 2003, company founder Paul Willms, a serial entrepreneur and successful real estate broker, figured he'd get ahead of demand for a highly secure container-tracking system sure to be driven by rising concerns about terrorist attacks targeting U.S. port cities.

Willms recruited University of Washington electrical engineering professor Les Atlas to develop a system that uses a GPS-activated lock to keep a container shut tight until it reaches its destination. Atlas' invention also uses an acoustical sensor, which continually emits sound waves inside the container. If the door ever cracks open when it shouldn't, the acoustical signature changes, tripping an alert.

Last December, Willms needed to raise $13 million to test the system on a trans-Pacific shipment of several hundred leased containers. Then a light bulb went off. Willms thought: Why not sell advertising on the sides of the containers, tied to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, to pay for the testing?