DUBLIN, IRELAND - Our service Decisions For Heroes has been announced as one of the 6 finalists in The Europa Awards as Best Social Innovation from the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region. The Europas - The TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 recognise and celebrate the most compelling technology startups, Internet and mobile innovations of the year.
There were some comments on the announcement page questioning the ’social contribution’ of all the finalists in the category. I replied with the following…
Robin here from Decisions For Heroes, hi and thanks for your comments.
Sure, we are a commercial service, but we see charging a very small fee as key to providing a high quality service.
It is important to note that we are not a ‘for profit’ we are a ‘for more-than-profit’. Take a look at our ‘tangible human outcomes’ here http://www.decisionsforheroes.com/about
Our core service delivers new and powerful tools through consumer technology to rescuers who volunteer on-call 24/7 to save lives. At the heart of it, we are providing analysis of their data to give them statistics on how their team perform allowing them to optimize their training. Soon we will begin to collate missing person data, and attempt to create predictions on their location weighted by localised result sets. We will connect rescuers from flank teams, allowing them for the first time to get a live view of the resources surrounding them. This is new - this is serious social innovation - as we say “we save lives”.
Vote for D4H!
The Awards Ceremony will take place in London at the Delfina with an audience of 300 on July 9th.
Winners are determined based on popularity vote and a judging panel, so I would really appreciate your click! Click Here To Vote, it just takes a few seconds!
DUBLIN, IRELAND - Last night, Decisions For Heroes was announced as a finalist for the €10,000 iQ Prize. The prize fund, sponsored by iQ Content had 249 entries, so it is brilliant news to have made it to the final 8.
We’re giving €10,000 to help grow a good idea into a great business. No strings attached. Seriously…
Bring on July 8th, when we have to make an elevator pitch Dragons Den style, to the judging panel! The judges include representatives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, a number of Irish Start-ups, and London investor Nic Brisbourne.
What is fantastic - is the quantity of entries. Here are the other finalists - great to see some known (and unknown) names.
Decisions For Heroes (Robin Blandford) –A web application that saves lives by helping rescue teams record and analyze their rescue operations and training
GetitKeepit.com (Alan Coleman) – A web application to help consumers declutter their lives by offering an online portal for the management and retention of important documentation
MyHotel.ie (David and Matt Sherlock) – A website and booking engine that reinvents the traditional booking model, offering hotels a powerful new marketing channel with no booking fees
Neurosynergy Games (David Delany, Lorraine Boran and Michael Boran) – Innovative online brain training application designed to enhance both intellectual (’IQ’) and emotional (’EQ’) performance for healthy people and people with specific mental disorders
Octopied (David Behan, Ronan Morris and Michael Flanagan) – A web application for freelancers, helping them manage invoicing, project management, sales and support through one simple and cost-effective tool
Our Writers’ Bloc (Owen Gallagher and Karl Quinn) – An online marketplace that connects self-published authors directly with their readers, and facilitates the distribution of material over multiple formats including mobile phones and e-Reader devices
Pendle House (Michael Furey) – An online currency exchange marketplace that allows companies and individuals around the world to trade currencies directly with each other, cutting out all transaction costs
Plink (Mark Cummins) – An image-driven search engine that allows users take a photo of an object with a mobile phone, and automatically retrieve information about it online
Wow! It goes without saying, that if a €10,000 fund can attract 249 potential business ideas - should the government not be supporting more of these events?
The Tuesday Push is a way for the tech community in Ireland to make some noise about ourselves by highlighting Irish products every second Tuesday. This week the Tuesday Push is FineTuna.com.
FineTuna allows you to upload an image or take a browser screenshot, add comments or markers to your image and send it on to your designer or developer by email.
DUBLIN, IRELAND - I love Fine Tuna as a concept. As expected from Alan, the design is gorgeous and the app works seamlessly. Rather than be a business in itself, I believe FineTuna is an opportunity for SpoiltChild to get known, and spread word about their Email Marketing App Toddle.
For such a simple task as annotating an image, it needs to be fast. The competition for me is Skitch, which Alan is closing in on with the Firefox Plugins, but I need to be able to snap screenshots anywhere. I’m picturing a small desktop app that works on a keystroke giving you a crop box, once you click, drag, and release over your area you automatically get it uploaded and FineTuna open on your screen ready to annotate.
DUBLIN, IRELAND - When you launch something new, everyone wants to get their oar in. They want to tell you what they would have done. They want to explain to you how you could have done it better. They want to offer you their advice on how you could improve a feature.
It’s hard. It’s hard because you get criticism. Naturally you want to defend yourself, your talents, your product.
“No, no, you see we’re launching that next month…”
“No, I already thought of that…”
“No, you don’t understand our market…”
“No, we prioritised this instead because…”
Well I have learnt something new.
When somebody wants to give you advice, it is not a debate.
Remember that. Remember that, because it is extremely powerful advice.
The person giving you advice is trying to help you, they just want to get their ideas off their chest and communicate them to you. Do not answer back.
Take notes. Listen.
Go home, analyse what they said. Try and see their point of view. Decide if you can take anything from what they said.
Remember, it is not a debate - Listen. Nod. Smile.
-Robin.
(Playing ultimate frisbee in Killarney this weekend. By Author.)
6 Comments
04/06/09 DM I wouldn't have written this article like this........[...] »
DUBLIN, IRELAND - I’ve been meaning to publish these stats so others can learn from it. We launched decisionsforheroes.com two weeks ago today, and thought it would be valuable to show the traffic to the site. We were blogged about on the Tuesday Push (thank you all!) on the 19th, which also led to a large amount of Retweets on Twitter.
We were written up on TechCrunch EU and syndicated to TechCrunch.com on the 20th. This caused even more retweeting, and commentary.
What is interesting, is that there were more visits spurred from the Tuesday Push than TechCrunch. But, Twitter sent the most traffic by far. I’d like to note that while TechCrunch didn’t pull through massive traffic, some REALLY good contacts got in touch, including some first sales thanks to the TechCrunch feature.
You can see the stats above for Day 1 and 2 of the launch, note that ‘Google’ includes all Google Reader click-throughs, and Twitter API clients are not counted - only people who clicked through from twitter.com.
![Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com ]](http://www.bytesurgery.com/blog/wp-content/themes/starkers/images/blank.gif)
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