Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ]

What is your company called?
Decisions For Heroes

What are its contact details?

*add contact details* 

What are you creating?
We’re helping emergency services save more lives by making better decisions. Decisions for Heroes is a data repository for rescue teams to record and analyse their rescue operations instead of archiving them as paperwork. Acting as a collaborative team management tool; members profiles are generated based on past experience, expertise, and availability. Decisions for Heroes uses this data to become a platform for rescue operations, sharing live and intelligent information with third party devices in the field.

What is really new about that?
Previous systems have been expensive, with military complexity and designed to be stand-alone. Academic attempts to collect data have provided little incentive for teams to partake. By creating selfish activity around team management, providing instant gratitude from live reporting, and connecting to third party devices in real-time; we can record geo-referenced casualty data, search patterns and response profiles that can be shared between organisations to give deep gap analysis and team benchmarking.

How long have you been working on this? As a team?
First prototyped in late December 2007 to help a local cliff rescue team. The project went full-time in June 2008. A second developer joined part-time in July 2008.

What customer need will you solve or why do people need your product?
Rescuers are passionate about saving lives, they need to be when risking their own safety for the life of another. To save a life, a rescue team must gather all the information available to make an uninterrupted line of good decisions. In many cases today, teams have not exceeded paper-based reporting methods or accessing single-user local copies of spreadsheets to create reports. If good decisions save lives, then we can improve decisions by providing more information to teams. Better decisions, save lives.

What specifically is your target market and how is it being poorly served today?
Outside major urban areas, most emergency responses are by volunteers. The UK & Ireland alone has in excess of 1000 officially recognised rescue teams on-call for 999/112 emergencies. Where full-time cover is not required, local authorities often sponsor the operating costs of dog handlers, lowland search teams, sub-aqua units, swift-water river rescue, civil defense and ski-patrols. Mining towns form cave rescue units, fishing ports start independent lifeboats and mountainous regions spur mountain rescue teams. All are staffed by volunteers - this is our market.

*In my opinion, I need to add more numbers in here. I know there are ten’s of thousands globally but it’s almost impossible to get a figure. Advice?*

What gives you an unfair advantage?
Robin is a volunteer cliff rescue climber and boat crew with the Irish Coast Guard. Development of a competing product requires an operational understanding of the requirements of a rescue team, we’ve proven finding developers with this knowledge isn’t easy!

How will you sustain that unfair advantage?
We don’t plan to lock-in data. Even in an open environment, first mover advantage is huge. Moving systems could only be achieved by an entire team or organisational effort, not by a single member. Once connected to third party devices, moving to a competitor may cause the loss of other rescue tools and the requirement to re-familiarise members.

How will you make money?
Decisions For Heroes will charge a monthly subscription for basic accounts, with the ability to up-sell extra features, messaging services and device connectivity. Making money from non-profit groups is always an interesting proposition. We aim to provide tools for teams to cover their own costs with branded public pages sponsored by a local business. There is potential to connect manufactures to rescue teams through showcased equipment linked to real incidents. Further revenue streams have also been identified in data analysis, providing anonymous statistics to commercial groups.

Why is this team the right one for this company?
We’re not there yet, developers required!

*Gulp! Developers needed! How should I word this?!*

If you are incorporated (as a company): who owns what, and what is the detailed
funding history? If you are not yet incorporated: who will own what percentage of
the company?
The business has not been incorporated and is currently owned entirely by Robin Blandford. No funding has been taken.

To date, what specific progress have you made in building your product/company
(e.g. development milestones, feature additions, customer sign-ups, etc.)?
A prototype has been deployed and is open by invite-only to a selection of teams at http://www.decisionsforheroes.com. Daily feedback is being returned from rescue workers in Ireland, UK, USA, Greece & Australia; often with next day releases to respond. An official evaluation has begun with 10% of the Irish Coast Guard and a number of other large rescue organisations have been engaged.

As of August 4th 2008 we have 42 teams who’ve recorded X rescues by 564 heroes. They’ve undertaken Y training execises totalling. This is a total of Z logged hours by volunteers.

Current development milestones centre around enabling VoIP services for intregrated paging, GPS & vehicle tracking connectivity for collaborative tracklog analysis, and reacting to daily feedback from live users. Our mantra, “Better decisions, save lives.” guides us; if the addition of a feature does make a decision better, you’ll find the feature in the trash.

*update stats to latest*

We are really impressed by teams that get stuff done. Please provide a URL
(with login/password details if necessary) to a prototype of your product, or failing
that to a video of a prototype of your product.  Keep the link live from 11 August
through the first week of September.

*Add login details*

When will you have a prototype/beta?
Already launched, sign-in details above.

What tools will you use?
Decisions For Heroes has been built using PHP/MySQL. The application is currently hosted with Slicehost running the Apache web server on Linux. Mapping and satellite imagery is provided by ‘Google Maps’. Code is versioned and deployed to staging and production servers using ‘Springloops’ hosted SVN. Development milestones are tracked on ‘Basecamp’, while customer interactions are recorded in ‘Highrise’. An internal product wiki and email is provided by ‘Google Apps’. Currently development work is ongoing to integrate SMS/Voice services provided by ‘VoiceSage’.

It is always good to evaluate all your future options. If you decided to sell your
company, who would be the likely buyers for the business, and why?
If the company can add significant value to third party systems, there is potential to sell to an equipment manufacturer. A purchase would give access to world-wide statistics on incidents, team patterns and equipment usage which are currently unavailable.

*any others?*

What measurements will you use to value your business in a year? What will it
be worth? What are key milestones that will account for the growth in value from
today to 1 year from now?
The sign-up target is 300 monthly team subscriptions by August 2009. This approximates to 7,500 members recording the data for 15,000 rescue incidents annually. Focus will be applied to gather teams into organisations and up-sell through official channels. Specific aims will be made to gain media coverage from usage in high-profile international aid efforts. The first milestone of success can be considered complete only once a life saved is attributed to Decisions For Heroes in the press.

Who are your main current or potential competitors as well as identified potential
new entrants? (Think hard before you say “none”)
Competitors include desktop solutions designed for running on networked machines in an operations radio room or as a standalone laptop in a vehicle. These solutions tend towards very specific rescue disciplines and have very little inter-connectivity. Potential new entrants include large organisations who may prefer the capital cost of building their own solution rather than paying monthly subscriptions.

What is the single largest competitive threat to your business that you can
identify today?
SAR Technology ‘Incident Commander Pro’ desktop software allows teams to develop mathematical predictions regarding missing person behaviour, other similar software exists. Rather than operating as a collaborative data repository or team management tool, they perform the task of live incident management. If Decisions For Heroes moves to provide a similar service in the future, these tools will provide competition.

Planning for the worst is a key to great success.  Think hard: what might go
wrong?  How can you minimize those risks?
Serious data loss, downtime or a negative reputation from a security-breach would be difficult to recover from. Currently, disk images are taken daily to reduce data-loss risks and SMS alerting tools monitor service levels. To minimize these risks, on-boarding an excellent system admin would be invaluable for the team.

What about your business are you most uncertain about?
1/ There are uncertainties around the access to funds and budget limits of non-profit teams. To maximise earnings, teams will be provided tools to help cover their costs by sponsorship through local businesses.
2/ Concerns exist around the ability to find excellent developers with a passion for the outdoors and furthering that, an understanding of Search & Rescue operational requirements. While this can be surmounted with strong leadership, it will hamper innovation.

What fact would make the most difference to your confidence that your company
will succeed? How and when will you find that out?
If a resource in a SAR situation can make the difference to save a life, a team will find the sponsorship to fund it. Confirmation that Decisions For Heroes has saved a life would ensure confidence that it has moved from a nice tool, to a needed tool. This will become known once data levels increase during our feedback period.

Is your team working full time for the company?  If not, what needs to go right for
this to happen?
Robin left employment in June 2008 to work full-time on Decisions For Heroes.

What do you hope to get out of the Seedcamp experience?
It is an invaluable chance to make incredible connections. A once-off opportunity to network with peers and mentors from across Europe. Being an active part of the Seedcamp week discussions will put us in a privileged position to have the best contacts in our industry. It is hoped that focus remains on the founders rather than the company - helping us to move forward with great speed and confidence not only on this company, but the next company, and the company after that.

Does any founder have a conflicting future commitment? If so, what?  Are any of
you involved in other projects?
Robin has no conflicting commitments.

Apart from open source software, was any of your code written by anyone not on
the team?
All code, design and copy has been produced by the team.

Does any actual or potential legal restriction or limitation apply to any team
member which we should know about (e.g., non-disclosure, non-compete)?
None.

Let us say you have 15 seconds to pitch your business. Can you describe your
business?
“We provide a rescue team management tool to record and analyse rescue operations. This helps the emergency services save more lives by making better decisions.”

What is your favourite movie of all time?
How could we say anything but ‘The Guardian’!…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZy-wcQIsRU

*I’m tempted to put my own movie about the product in here*.

What question do you wish we had asked? What’s the answer?

*seeking submissions on this one! Something around the status quo, changing the world, why should we go to seedcamp etc.?*