Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 13 October 2009 07:57
Your IT -
Mobility
Page 1 of 2
If you’re in a spot of bother or in real trouble anywhere in the world you can now use your iPhone to immediately alert friends or family, including sending them a map of exactly where you are.
A small start-up company, Xpertise Mobile,
working out of a house in the trendy, ‘artist-quarter’ inner-Melbourne
suburb of Fitzroy, has developed a new application which it has called
i am Safe, which can be activated with the single touch of a button to
immediately alert up to five friends or family that you need help. It
also shows them where you are on a map and also make audio recordings
of any incident and downloads them to the server immediately.
What’s more, all of this happens instantly on activation and works
anywhere in the world, subject to the integrity of the signal on your
iPhone. It’s also not something you can trigger accidentally as
activation begins with a countdown to launch, determined by you on
set-up (between 2 and 5 seconds), and to cancel the countdown, you
simply slide a bar.
The four simple ways i am Safe can potentially help you in an emergency
- providing you have an adequate signal – are, by (i) Making your phone
ring, which might just provide the distraction you need to get away;
(ii) sending a previously worded emergency text or voice message to
five pre-determined contacts; (iii) sending an emergency email to your
five contacts, including a link to a map showing where you are and then
tracking you continuously; and, (iv) recording audio of the incident
and sending it to the i am Safe server for future reference.
This great new, ‘peace-of-mind’ for parents and family, application has
been painstakingly developed over the past 12-months by the originator
of the idea, Tim Hine, and his newly-formed team of three programmers,
one architect and a graphic designer.
Tim, a 64-year-old veteran of the IT industry, told iTWire today that
he was triggered into action when, like all other Australians, he was
appalled by the events surrounding the disappearance and subsequent
death in Croatia of Melbourne girl, Britt Lapthorne.
“A year ago the media was buzzing with reports of the Britt Lapthorne
case and, working in IT, I started thinking about a solution. Being an
Apple-based person I thought of developing the solution on the Apple
platform, and decided to pull together a team to develop the
application.”
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