Today's shippers are done talking about collaborative freight solutions and are ready to allocate resources to design and implement programs that can scale, says Ben Cubitt, senior vice president for consulting and engineering of Transplace. He describes the role that 3PLs can play in such projects.

Egypt has invited 14 consortia to bid for a chance to say how they would develop the Suez Canal area, aiming to attract more ships and revenue to shore up the country's finances.

Tiger Cool Express LLC, anticipating a scheduled spring 2014 start-up of operations, has acquired an initial order of 200 refrigerated containers.

Saudi Arabia's infrastructure spending continues to surpass expectations. The Kingdom is especially committed to a nationwide transportation infrastructure expansion program which will feature one of the world's most sophisticated rail and metro networks.

Corporate extortion is likely to keep booming in 2014, and we don't mean extortion of corporations, as is practiced by Somali pirates or entrepreneurial Russians. We mean extortion by corporations.