MacroPoint, a vendor of freight-tracking software for shippers, brokers and third-party logistics providers, has integrated with project44, a provider of Web-service automated programming interface (API) connectivity technology to the freight industry.

The outsourcing of logistics is supposed to save businesses big money. They pay only for the services they need; they turn over complex operations to a pro, and they get expensive assets off their books. It all makes eminent sense - unless your name is Amazon.com Inc.

Two measures commonly used by the government to measure manufacturing's overall impact on society are badly underestimating the impact of that critical sector. One is the proportion of gross domestic product for which manufacturing accounts. The other is the "multiplier effect," which measures the impact on other industries from an increase in economic activity by a specific industry.

Winning $1m on Jeopardy! wasn't good enough for IBM's Watson. Now it wants to predict your buying behavior.

For many major B2B enterprises, logistics networks have never been more complex. The increasing prevalence of operations that are global - with growing numbers of production sites and clients that could be anywhere on earth - has introduced challenges that didn't exist to the same degree at an earlier time. The good news is that there has also never before been a moment when there were more tools and more opportunities to optimize logistics costs than now.

Can we predict the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) by examining the track record of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta)? Well, maybe.

Hapag-Lloyd AG has added 3,000 refrigerated containers to its fleet.