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CTRL+ALT+COMPETE is a feature-length documentary that takes a revealing look at the startup and emerging business scene through the eyes of five founders and their teams. You can learn more about the film and watch other clips on Microsoft’s Channel 9 blog.
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Guardly works with many non-profit organizations that seek to increase the awareness of domestic violence. Washington D.C. based Becky’s Fund is a Guardly partner that understand the potential of technology to aid in the fight against violence and abuse. The Fund’s founder Becky Lee, recently blogged for The Huffington Post on “The Role of Mobile Apps in the Fight Against Intimate Partner Violence.” It’s an excellent piece and we’ve reprinted it in its entirety.
Becky Lee
As new technologies transform and revolutionize how we process and retrieve information, experts in the field of intimate partner violence (IPV) explore the use of technology as a means for improving survivor protection and for the advancement of IPV education. Becky’s Fund is a national non-profit organization, based in D.C., seeking to increase public awareness about IPV. Because one out of every four women will experience violence from an intimate partner in her lifetime, Becky’s Fund understands the importance of developing safe and effective methods for using various forms of technology in the fight against IPV. For instance, new smartphone apps like Guardly use the latest technologies and offer premium safety to users. Although technologies certainly come with dangers and limitations, they can also be used to empower survivors of IPV and to educate students vulnerable to dating violence about this prevalent and critical issue.
Dating violence on college campuses continues to reach staggering levels. One in three college students admits to either experiencing or perpetrating dating violence in their relationship, and at least one fifth of undergraduates in the United States report being physically abused by their partner. This statistic does not include incidences of psychological abuse between college dating partners which, according to several studies, accounts for the majority of IPV cases involving young people. Most post-secondary institutions fail to address dating violence and for those that do, research done on the effectiveness of college IPV prevention programs found that existing approaches have a limited impact on youth.
Information about IPV must be made available to young people in forms they can easily access. With books becoming antiquated relics of the past, many of today’s youth rely on their smartphones and new forms of media such as infographics, twitter streams and blogs to acquire new sources of information to meet their everyday needs. For this reason, we need to use technological resources to educate young people about IPV, especially as dating violence continues to be a big problem among college students.
It’s rare for today’s youth not to have access to an iPhone, Android or Blackberry device. Becky’s Fund, along with several other organizations, sees the benefits of making use of expanding technologies to reach young people today. The Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence has already developed a phone app meant to educate teens about healthy relationships, and organizations like SAFE Ireland, a group protecting women and children in the UK, have developed apps offering information for survivors and for their support networks.
Becky’s Fund understands and recognizes the dangers associated with using technology when trying to leave an abuser. There have been a number of privacy concerns raised about certain online websites and applications. For example, cookies and images from certain websites will remain on computers for extended periods of time, which can make traces of your internet browsing history available to hackers. Mobile phones can be used by abusers to harass their partners and can allow them to easily monitor the location of a partner. While there can be potential dangers associated with technology, there are also a number of benefits. Making use of these tools is vital in order to reach large audiences, particularly technology-savvy college students and other young people in desperate need of IPV education and resources. Still, it is important to know how to make use of these quickly expanding technologies in safe ways. For this reason, organizations like the Safety Net Project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence offer a number of technology safety tips for survivors and for organizations providing IPV related services. It is vital to remember that IPV smart phone apps are not life-saving tools, but rather educational resources for individuals facing dangerous and potentially life-threatening situations.
Guardly is a mobile app for smartphones that can help students and others faced with dating violence, abusive relationships or a simple desire to feel safe when walking alone at night. Guardly empowers its users by providing one-touch access to their safety network. Simply launching Guardly on a smartphone will instantly identify a user’s location and alert family, friends, campus security (at schools that have joined its Safe Campus Program) and 9-1-1 that they are having an emergency. Beyond simple notifications, Guardly instantly connects users to their contacts through conference call, instant messaging and real-time location tracking. Built-in security features include the ability to snap and share pictures of an assailant and sounding a loud whistle. Privacy is extremely important to Guardly and its mobile app will only track location data during an emergency incident. Because of the widespread reach of dating violence at post-secondary institutions, students should have tools at their disposal to easily access security services on their campus. Guardly’s service is available on iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices (coming soon to Android) and provides students with the necessary tools to more adequately protect themselves.
In a study conducted in collaboration with the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence (WSCADV), researchers identified technological resources as possibly vital additions to domestic violence services and recommended further research in this area. Researchers evaluated the WSCADV’s “Technology Safety Project” with favorable results, and suggested that when accompanied with education about technology safety, technology services for IPV can be both safe and valuable.
Today’s youth depend on technology for information. Reaching them requires using tools like smartphones and social media sites. However, because of the dangers associated with using certain technologies, students and other users, need to understand how to use these resources safely. Becky’s Fund understands the importance of having easily accessible resources for all and hopes that with the safe use of these new technologies, we can prevent future incidents of intimate partner violence from occurring.
Authored by Becky Lee, Executive Director of Becky’s Fund and Valerie Martin, Research and Development Intern for Becky’s Fund.
Follow her on twitter at www.twitter.com/enddv and on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/BeckysFund#!/BeckysFund
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Personal safety service reduces response time in an emergency with 1-tap access to trusted safety networks
TORONTO – August 24, 2011 – Guardly is now available for download from BlackBerry App World andfrom the Windows Phone Marketplace in the United States and Canada. Today, Guardly becomes the first mobile personal safety service in North America to offer cross-platform support and availability on Apple iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices. Guardly enables smartphones users in an emergency to instantly alert, connect and collaborate with their trusted personal safety network and authorities with only a single tap on their device.
Available for iPhone since April 2011, Guardly has been widely adopted by students, real estate agents, social workers, travelers, those afraid to walk alone at night or concerned about dating or domestic violence. “Domestic violence can happen to anyone, regardless of age, background, or socioeconomic status,” said Becky Lee the Founder of Washington D.C.-based Becky’s Fund. “We’re excited to work with Guardly to positively impact and prevent domestic violence in our communities and college campuses through the power of technology.”
“Not every emergency or situation requires 9-1-1 and sometimes friends, family members or neighbors who are nearby can respond to a call for assistance even faster,” says Josh Sookman, Guardly Founder and CEO. “We’ve created a mobile alarm and monitoring service that accompanies you at home or on-the-go and that’s designed to be quickly accessible in an emergency, when seconds really matter.”
Price Reduction for Guardly Connect Subscriptions
Guardly has worked closely with its partners to reduce the costs of delivering its subscription service. We’re proud to announce that we are transferring those savings to our subscribers. Guardly Connect is now available for $1.99/month or $19.99/year, reduced from $9.99/month or $99.99/year.
Guardly is a free download and includes Guardly Alerts – a free service – that provides the ability to send location-based emergency alerts to up to 15 emergency contacts by voice call, SMS and email. Guardly Connect is an upgrade that delivers a stronger sense of security by connecting you to these same people through voice conference, instant messaging and real-time location data with a single tap on your BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 or iOS device.
Guardly is highly configurable and makes it easy to create groups of contacts that will receive emergency alerts or participate in real-time emergency response efforts. Guardly also provides a simple way to run simulations of the system, so that users and their safety networks can get acquainted with how Guardly works during an emergency incident.
Who’s using Guardly?
- Megan is a student at St. Philip’s College where she’s training to be an ultrasound technician. She gets nervous walking home late at night, and never takes classes that end after sunset. Megan loves that Guardly on her smartphone is like having the campus blue light security system in her back pocket.
- Jennifer is a twenty-something PR professional in Vancouver who likes to hike and jog the trails near Whistler, B.C. Often alone, she wants to be protected in case she runs into danger in a remote area. Guardly gives Jennifer peace of mind and has become her trusted safety companion.
- Michael is a 59 year-old BlackBerry-toting sales executive from San Francisco with chronic heart disease. He lives each day knowing that, at any moment, he may need immediate medical attention. Mike lives alone, but has confidence that Guardly can instantly call the authorities as well as neighbors who can often arrive before paramedics to provide life-saving assistance.
Availability on other Smartphone Platforms
Guardly for iPhone and iPod Touch was released in April 2011 and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store. Guardly for Android is in development and will be announced shortly.
About Guardly
Guardly is a venture-backed company based in Toronto, Canada. Guardly’s platform for emergency communication facilitates rapid social, mobile and location-aware responses to calls for assistance. Smartphone users that find themselves in an emergency situation can alert, connect and collaborate with local authorities as well as their own personal safety networks in a single tap. Guardly is committed to dramatically decreasing the amount of time it takes responders to arrive at an emergency. The company is a member of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) and is based in Toronto, Canada. For more information visit: http://guardly.com.
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August 12, 2011
By Krista Swanson – Yummy Mummy Club Tech Blogger
Connect to Those You Love in Case of Emergency
Imagine yourself in one of these situations: you’re running alone in the wee hours of the morning, and you fall and break your ankle. Or, you’re walking alone through campus and you can’t help but feel the person behind you has been following you a bit too long. Or, maybe your teenager has a severe peanut allergy and you need to know where they are in case of an emergency.
I’m a runner, and a working Mom with severe allergies, and I was also a college student. When I was in college, the frosh week kit included rape whistles for all of the new girls on campus. The whistle went right onto my keychain, but it wasn’t ‘cool’ so I hardly carried it with me, and I always wondered how my friends and family would know where I was if an emergency happened anyway. Now that I’m a mother I worry about where I am and where my family is even more.
Canadian company Guardly has created an app that is “a mobile personal safety system designed to help you connect to your trusted safety network during an emergency.” It’s an app that I’ve had running for a while on my iPhone and BlackBerry (currently in beta) that has given me a sense of security unlike anything I’ve had in an app before.
How it works
When you install Guardly on your smartphone, the first thing you do is enter in your personal profile. Think of this profile like those cards that come with new wallets. You can include your height, weight, blood type, hair colour as well as contact information for yourself and medical professionals that you deal with. My advice is to be as detailed as possible here, you’ll soon see why.
After your profile is set up you add contacts (either from your existing device address book, or you can setup new contacts), and add those contacts to groups like Family, Friends, Campus Friends etc. Finally, you add locations that you frequent (Home, work, school etc.)
Once configured, in the case of an emergency, you simply have to tap the Guardly icon on your phone and your groups are notified by telephone, email & text message that you have an emergency situation. (Don’t worry, the phone vibrates like crazy and gives you time to cancel the request if you’ve hit it accidentally).
Your emergency contacts can join a conference call or connect to an emergency response website that shows your current location as well as your profile information. Within this website, they can see photos that you are taking, and track your location if you’re moving. This means, your emergency contacts know where you are, what you see, and can keep in touch.
And remember that whistle they gave me at Frosh? At any time during an emergency alert, you can use Guardly to play a loud repeating whistle sound to deter would-be attackers or signal for help. Much cooler than carrying my fluorescent green Fox 40.
The free version of Guardly includes the location pin pointing feature and is available for iPhone, and coming soon for Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry devices. The premium edition is $9.99/ month, or $99 / year and provides the conference call, website, real time tracking, and other features.
I won’t be uninstalling this one, and I think I’ll be buying a year subscription for a certain relative heading to university this year.
Guardly is giving away 5 lifetime subscriptions to Guardly’s Premium personal safety service. Each winner can then pick 5 other friends or family members who will also receive a lifetime subscription. You can access the contest page here.
You can read the review on Yummy Mummy Club here.
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The following content is an interview that Guardly CEO Josh Sookman did with Yotpo a few days ago.
Josh Sookman is the CEO and founder of Guardly. Guardly is a venture-backed technology startup based in Toronto, Canada. Guardly is a platform for emergency communication that changes the way mobile personal safety is delivered. Smartphone users that find themselves in an emergency situation can alert, connect and collaborate with local authorities as well as their own personal safety networks in a single tap. Guardly is committed to dramatically decreasing the amount of time it takes responders to arrive at an emergency.
What made you want to start Guardly?
It was actually a lack of innovation that led me to start Guardly. I thought about how I could apply two key concepts of “location” and “saving time” to disrupt a market ripe for innovation. Improving personal safety seemed to be an obvious conclusion. Over a decade ago, my parents insisted that I get a cell phone so that I could easily reach them in case of emergency. These days, parents are still paranoid, but mobile phones are transitioning from “dumb phones” to location-aware smartphones at ever-increasing numbers. We also have low-cost, high-speed mobile networks that support data-rich features for over 150 million users in North America. Guardly has essentially created a next-generation home alarm system and placed it in your pocket.
Describe the beginning stages of Guardly: Did you face obstacles? Early successes?
Launching a technology startup is no easy feat. Since ideas are pretty meaningless, I knew that I needed to really develop a proof-of-concept to generate any meaningful awareness. So, I got my hands dirty and wrote a server-side application, architected a database and super-simple API and then wrote another simple iPhone client that could demonstrate my vision for Guardly. That prototype allowed me to attract a fantastic first employee, who had great technical chops, to take a risk and join the team. Two more joined Guardly within 10 days. We actually had a lot of help from the community, friends and other supporters in our early days. See “The First 300 Days’ for more at: http://blog.guardly.com/guardblog/2011/06/28/the-first-300-days/
How did you choose employees at the beginning? Were there any particular characteristics you looked for?
Picking great [early] employees is one of the most difficult things you can do at a startup, since they are going to help dictate much of the culture. I wanted to find others that were smart, resourceful, cost-conscious and friendly, and also have a similar love for solving real-world problems. Of course, their skill-sets needed to be complimentary to my own and help fill voids in the business so we could operate efficiently and as lean as possible.
Looking back, would you have chosen differently? What advice would you give to new startups (particularly in the mobile space) on how to choose new team members?
If I had to go back and pick a new team, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. The team at Guardly is tightly knit. We have a great culture and I enjoy coming to work each day knowing that I’d be happy to spend the entire day with anyone on the team – they all pass the elevator test with flying colors. If I were giving advice on hiring for a mobile company, I’d recommend bringing on technical employees that have wide and distributed networks so that they can leverage their connections to help test any new products or services being developed and also help to generate buzz for new products launches.
What tips/advice would you give founders/CEOs on how to keep a team motivated/focused?
Work is where you spend the majority of your working hours, so I’d make sure to have a great company culture. How you pick your team is important, but that also means making sure you get rid of any “bad apples” before they change the culture in a negative way. Communication is important and I think everyone on the team wants to know how their work falls into the larger purpose of the company. I do my best to let everyone know why their role is important and why their contributions are paramount to Guardly’s success. I’ve read “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Hsieh and “Drive” by Dan Pink and would recommend those books for Founder/CEOs who want to develop a stronger culture at the office and motivate employees. Our boardroom table is a ping-pong table and we have FedEx Days where employees have the chance to work on other “interest projects” associated with some aspect of the company.
Why is founding a mobile application startup different than more traditional startups? Pros/cons?
Developing for mobile is much more expensive than web startups, but Guardly is actually much more than a mobile application startup. We have built a many-to-many communication infrastructure for emergency situations that aims to decrease response time to emergency events. Guardly has a SaaS backbone that powers our service delivered through mobile apps that are in constant contact with our servers in the cloud. We have developed a mobile client for iPhone and are developing clients for BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Android. There is a huge contrast in complexity as you move across platforms. Our strategy was to launch on iPhone first, which is now the most common strategy undertaken by mobile app developers. We are planning a launch for Windows Phone and BlackBerry in 2 weeks, after a significant development effort. Although Android has a big footprint in terms of distribution in the US, the propensity for consumers to pay for apps is much lower than on iOS. Also, developers are now finding that the Android OS is becoming increasingly fragmented, a problem that has now been plaguing BlackBerry for some time.
What is the most important lesson you have learned about entrepreneurship /business thus far?
Customer development is absolutely crucial in developing an application that is used, trusted and helpful to people experiencing the market pain you are trying to solve. As an entrepreneur, your mission is to go out and speak to as many customers and potential customers as you can. Always bring your latest beta or mockups with you and continue to validate assumptions – even when you are sure you’ve nailed down the final feature set. There are merits to the “Lean Startup” methodology, but in our case we had to tread cautiously since we are developing personal safety applications, which must work flawlessly and have a feature set that would be considered valuable in case of emergency.
How would you describe Guardly’s industry advantages?
Guardly has a great team, strong advisors and supporting investors. Guardly has developed a best-in-class service that sits upon a standard RESTful API, which allows us to easily work with partners who want to take advantage of our infrastructure to power their own alerting and collaborative services. We are also in a market vertical that is dominated by large home alarm and monitoring companies that are generally slow to make decisions and innovate. Comparably, we are a startup that is agile and able to pivot quickly when we recognize opportunities in the market.
Why do you think Guardly has been so successful?
At the end of the day, a company’s success is driven by the quality of the people that make up the organization and the quality of the code written to power the technology services. Beyond our team, our success has largely come through designing a great service that we hope will continue to keep people feeling safe and saving time during emergency response events. Last, we have had many news outlets and bloggers cover our story and our journey because we are working tirelessly to create a service that helps people in times of need.
If Guardly had a mantra or an internal mission statement, what would it be?
We do have a mission statement: “To build a technology platform that will help save lives and positively affect millions of people around the world.”
What marketing channels have you seen to be most effective?
Guardly was designed to be inherently viral, and we are constantly optimizing the way our users and responders interact with our systems to make sure they are getting the best experience and that we are educating them about how Guardly works effectively. We’ve also found mobile advertising networks to be effective in driving downloads. We’ve worked to build a strong content network on our blog, which increases in traffic on a weekly basis. Otherwise, we have been busy working on developing a number of relationships with other organizations that share similar visions and we hope that they will help us increase discovery and ultimately net downloads.
Yotpo’s goal is revolutionizing the way companies integrate product reviews into their site. In your opinion, how influential are app reviews to a customer’s purchasing decision?
App reviews are a very important component to most customers’ decision-making process. Several bad ratings can drastically decrease the number of downloads from potential customers who reach the landing page on the application store. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to track potential customers that reach the app store and understand how many times they don’t click the download button – that would be a very valuable piece of analytics for app stores to provide developers. We have not yet incorporated app review on our website, but agree that positive reviews may have provide social proof and influence toward driving a download and potential conversion to a paying customer.
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Josh Sookman (pictured) was able to build Guardly, a Toronto firm that created a personal safety app for smart phone users, largely as a result of angel investment. He brings a serial entrepreneur’s eye to the all-important task of fundraising. Here is tip sheet:
- Build a network of contacts that extends beyond casual encounters industry functions and the contacts on your Linkedin page. Well before they go to market, entrepreneurs should be strategic about building strong relationships with angels, venture capitalists and fellow entrepreneurs. As one of Sookman’s colleagues once told him, “It’s not whom you know, but who knows you.”
- Look for parallel funding from sources such as various government small business start-up programs, accelerator funds and online exchange venues such as AngelList.
- Do your homework on the angel group you’re approaching. If they focus exclusively on the mobile space, don’t expect to wow them with a bio-tech pitch, no matter how compelling it may be.
- Prepare a concise “investor deck” consisting of about 15 slides that include all the high-level information you think you’ll need to secure a meeting with an angel group. Include descriptions of the business opportunity, financing model, partners, executive team, scaling strategy and a timetable for revenue growth. This document, Sookman adds, is the appetizer. “The deck has got to get you a meeting, but it shouldn’t contain all your deep, dark secrets.”
- Don’t over-reach in your descriptions. The angel community is tight-knit and your over-the-top projections will do the rounds…quickly. “Don’t put anything in there that you know will materially change because you don’t want that to bite you in the ass,” counsels Sookman.
- Pitch your business to several angel networks simultaneously to maximize your profile as well as your chances of securing funding. Also, if there’s a buzz around your company, multiple pitches may improve your bargaining position. But Sookman cautions against any kind of sneakiness. “Entrepreneurs shouldn’t think they could outsmart the VCs because they talk. My advice is, be honest and transparent.”
- Take care not to be fundraising for extended periods. Just as a home that sits on the market for months begins to give off a bit of a stench to potential buyers, angels will ask what’s wrong if the principals of an upstart business spend too much time scrounging up capital.
Keep a lid on paranoia. While the angel world thrives on information, entrepreneurs shouldn’t become obsessed with losing the recipe to the secret sauce. “People,” he says, “will generally not steal your ideas.”
John Lorinc is a freelance journalist based in Toronto.
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We are taught early in life to call 911 (substitute your country’s emergency contact number) during an emergency. It’s simple and easy to remember. But with the advent of sophisticated mobile devices that support multitasking and location-tracking, is this emergency response system in need of a technology makeover?
Newly launched startup Guardly and its CEO Josh Sookman believe so. Guardly is a mobile personal safety service that works on the iPhone, and soon Android and BlackBerry, to give the mobile user a one-tap way to contact 911 and friends and family, as well as transmit the user’s location, simultaneously.
“It takes eight taps to dial 911 on the iPhone,” Sookman says. Should the Guardly user place the app in the device’s dock, that process is reduced to three taps, he says.
Here’s how Guardly’s more intricate response system works: When a user clicks “Send Alert” in the app, he or she puts Guardly’s personal safety service into motion. First comes a five-second countdown timer that vibrates with every second that passes. When the countdown hits zero, the user’s default group is notified and, depending on the user’s preferences, a call is placed to 911.
Everyone in the user’s selected safety network is then sent a link to an Emergency Response Page — accessible via web or mobile — which serves as a home base and a group collaboration hub that supports location updates for all participants, photos and messages. There’s also an option for safety network members to join a conference call and connect through voice.
Guardly’s emergency alert system includes one more key additive. Normally, an individual unable to make an outgoing call on a mobile device would need to retry the call until he or she finds an adequate signal. Once the user initiates an alert via Guardly, however, the service continues to check the device’s connection and automatically dials 911 or the user’s contacts upon locating a signal.
Reducing Response Time & Group Response
Sookman, since getting his first cellphone more than 10 years ago because his parents were concerned about his safety, has been thinking about the way in the which mobile and location technologies could be coupled and applied to personal safety.
His early thoughts took shape during his tenure with BlackBerry Partners Fund where he worked as an investment analyst for the mobile sector. “The notion [for Guardly] arose when I was thinking about how to apply the evolution of mobile phones to reducing the response time in emergencies,” he says.
Sookman found there to be a huge gap in the personal safety market. There are applications that allow the user to notify people, he says, but they’re all one dimensional. He felt there was an opportunity to engineer a group response experience to facilitate communication after the notification.
Platform for Emergency Response
Guardly’s bigger picture vision extends beyond mobile. The startup aims to be the emergency alert and real-time collaboration platform integrated into other hardware devices. Think glucose monitors, heart rate monitors and any other piece of equipment that has the capacity to detect and measure, but not alert.
It’s a vision that will first need to find support from users. Guardly’s iPhone app [iTunes link] has been live for just under three weeks. In its first week, the app saw roughly 5,000 downloads and continues to see significant traction, Sookman says, though he admits that the startup needs to introduce new ways to engage users during non-emergencies. We can expect application updates in the weeks and months ahead that address these shortcomings, he says.
Still, Guardly has its work out for it. Convincing users to adopt the startup’s more complex, albeit more modern, emergency alert system will not be an easy task. After all, what’s simpler than dialing 911?
Read this article on Mashable.
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Mia Pearson – April 14, 2011
We sometimes forget how powerful the emotional connection to brands can be.
A great example is a company with a product designed to keep people safe, which is something everyone can relate in its most simple form.
On the surface, Guardly is a location-based mobile application. It allows users to alert, connect, and then collaborate with family, friends and authorities with one tap. In case of an emergency, users and first responders can communicate through voice, SMS, e-mail, and web conferencing. But the emotional connection, and the ultimate selling point, has nothing to do with the technology or the innovation, but the benefit to a potential loved one.
Add the viral loop. Viral loop companies such as Guardly spread their message in a number of unique ways. The first is organic and occurs when a Guardly user, without much prompting, shares the app with friends and family. Guardly even helps by pre-writing a suggested message for each delivery channel.
Viral loops have been around since the early days of Tupperware and its infamous home parties that my mother loved to attend. Perhaps the earliest example of viral loops in the tech space was during the 1996 launch of Windows Live Hotmail. The company’s webmail service had explosive growth on the back of one simple message at the bottom of every e-mail sent: “P.S. I love you get your free e-mail at Hotmail.”
Hotmail’s approach is often described as an invitation or referral loop. Guardly uses a similar tact by encouraging users to create networks of trusted friends and family that are contacted during an emergency. In addition to receiving an e-mail confirming their willingness to be an emergency contact, Guardly invites you to become a user of the service and so the viral loop grows.
Like most great apps, Guardly is initially available for iPhone but it will soon be coming to BlackBerry, Android and Windows smart phones. As companies like this one expand across multiple platforms, the power of viral marketing explodes. The test will be their ability to keep their messages simple and relevant to their many audiences.
At the end of the day, as small-business owners, we can never underestimate the power of word-of-mouth marketing. Keep the message simple and highly emotional. I have always made a strong differentiation between branding and reputation. Branding is what you say about yourself, and reputation is what others say about you.
The most powerful message to prospects will always come from your customer base. In the social media and mobile world we live in, viral marketing should move from a tactic to an important strategy for your business.
Read this on The Globe and Mail.
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Darrel Etherington – April 7, 2011
A new app launching today provides a single-tap, multi-target alert system for your iPhone or iPod touch. Guardly automatically alerts contacts of your choosing if you feel you’re in danger or have reason to quickly and easily alert a group of people to your location and current situation.
With the free version, you’ll be limited to just creating groups and assigning contacts to them. These could include friends in your immediate geographical area, for instance, or maybe a special selection of friends and relatives who know your medical history and allergies.
You can send alerts (phone, email and SMS text) to these groups of contacts with one click from within the app, but in order to get the full Guardly experience you have to pay up for either a monthly ($9.99) or a yearly subscription ($99.99), which you can do through in-app purchase. Remember that Apple sees 30 percent of that revenue, but Guardly seems more than willing to pay in order to use iOS as a platform for distributing its subscription-based, software-as-a-service offering, something I anticipated as a possible trend following Apple’s introductions of in-app subscriptions.
Subscribing also adds the ability to call 911 with a single tap of the app’s icon from the homescreen (after a brief countdown in case of accidental presses). Auto-alerts can also be set to send to any other emergency contact of your choosing, too. Other premium features include in-app conference calling with your group of responders, the ability share map views and instant messages with your contacts in real time, real-time location tracking and the ability to share photos you take with your device with your emergency contacts.
Guardly is also smart about how and when it calls emergency numbers. It will detect any network failures and automatically call once a signal is reestablished, and it detects your current country using location services and automatically dials the correct emergency number based on that info. The app also offers a loud siren that can be activated in case of emergency.
This is an incredibly sophisticated app that makes amazing use of the iPhone’s built-in capabilities to provide as comprehensive a personal safety solution as you can find in an app. It even sets up your Guardly app’s outgoing caller ID to be that of your iPhone, making it much easier for emergency services and contacts to track you down should you fail to actually get through.
Guardly doesn’t offer much in the free version of its app, but it provides such a polished, thorough experience from beginning to end in terms of app functionality that I won’t be surprised to see people eager to sign up for paid Guardly subscriptions. A SaaS model will also help ensure that the app has a consistent, sustainable revenue stream, which should go a long way towards ensuring the lights don’t go out at a company that many may come to depend on as a personal security resource.
I’m reminded of the emergency call buttons posted at lamposts around campus at colleges and universities when I think of Guardly, only the app model works better because it’s available everywhere and seldom leaves your person. I’m actually surprised more smartphones don’t offer more of this sort of thing as a built-in option, but I expect to see more similar solutions pop up from all sources now that Guardly is making waves.
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From The Financial Post: http://bit.ly/hV7mmQ
James Berkow – April 7, 2011
Ever find yourself in a dangerous situation and wish you could instantly alert law enforcement or a group of trusted confidants?
Now, thanks to a mobile application launched on Apple Inc.’s iOS platform by Guardly Corp. on Thursday, you can.
Founded last year, the Toronto-based company designed the app to function as a mobile personal safety system; a virtual bodyguard if you will. By selecting the Guardly icon, users can simultaneously call an emergency number (default is 911) and notify a preselected group of contacts via SMS or email if they are in distress.
Potential uses range widely and not all of them necessarily involve potentially violent situations such as being pursued down a dark alley. Someone with a deadly peanut allergy, for example, might appreciate having a service such as Guardly to notify everyone they know who is familiar with their medical condition in case they accidentally take a bite of a Snickers bar.
The free version will allow users to create groups and send alerts via phone, email or SMS messaging. But for $10 per month or $100 per year, users can also set Guardly to automatically send photos and location updates from their phone’s embedded GPS as well as activate a loud siren to attract attention when in danger.
Premium users can also activate one-tap dialing to contact emergency services such as 9-1-1, campus or corporate security, with an auto-delay of a few seconds to avoid accidental dials. While there are other apps out there — such as SOS Link — that offer similar features, Guardly’s collaboration features and ability to integrate directly with security agencies and police services helps it to rise above the rest.
“Not every incident or situation require 9-1-1 escalation and sometimes friends, family members, or neighbours who are nearby can respond to a call for assistance even faster,” Josh Sookman, Guardly’s founding Chief Executive, said in a blog post on Thursday.
“We’ve created a mobile app that provides a simple way to bring your personal safety network together instantly, and escalate an emergency to 9-1-1 at any point during an incident.”
The Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) has already partnered with Guardly to provide the downtown Toronto University’s students with a direct link to campus security. Post-secondary students are one of Guardly’s key target demographics.
Also on Thursday, the company announced the completion of its seed round of funding from a group of Canadian investors. Those providing early funds — which Guardly intends to use for expansion of its partner ecosystem and to grow its business and technology development teams — were Toronto-based Extreme Venture Partners and Bryker Capital in addition to several angel investors.
Initially available only for Canada and U.S.-based owners of an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, versions for Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry OS platform and Google Inc.’s Android platform are in development and are expected to be announced shortly.
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