Robin Blandford [ ByteSurgery.com - Digital Media Engineering ]

20/08/08 Location

SAN FRANCISCO, UNITED STATES - Just sayin’.

(more pics on flickr)

1 Comments

20/08/08 Anthony :lol: Classic man.[...] »

16/08/08 Louis Walsh Had Nothing To Do With This Photo.

CHICAGO, UNITED STATES - The above are not a Westlife support act, they’re Ireland’s best web guys, Contrast. Contrast launched last night - their first big product is Get Exceptional. We need more of this stuff in Ireland - I love it. I love the themed-ness. Great job and a fantastic way to stand out from the pack.

This photo instantly reminded me of the photoshoot we designed for our project Mission: Possible when I was fifteen. Mission: Possible took me a lot of places (and how I met AntonyMcG at a competition finals!).

Here was our photoshoot… that’s me on the left - you might recognise another face too. I think we should get this group back together and do a repeat shot 10 years later!

Anyway - go Contrast!

-Robin.

4 Comments

16/08/08 Eoghan McCabe Well, we're quite a talented bunch of guys. I wouldn't rule out a band so soon. [...] »

16/08/08 Robin Blandford I used to play Saxophone, not sure I could hit a note on it now.[...] »

18/08/08 Andy Waite There's a good interview with Contrast here: http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/prog[...] »

18/08/08 Paul Campbell Thanks for the flattery Robin. Right now, though, it's heads down and grind grin[...] »

15/08/08 How To Beat Toddle At Their Own Game

CHICAGO, UNITED STATES - This week’s Tuesday Push is Toddle, a web app by Alan & Co. at Spoilt Child. I have always loved Spoiltchild’s work since back when it was Alan alone. I’d love to hire them to do my UI work someday.

The Tuesday Push is a chance for the Irish to pump up Apps from Ireland. A little self-reflection on our web-scene. As with the other pushes (see archives), I use it as a chance to flex my brainstorming muscles on the topic and try to answer the question - if I was competing with them, what would I do?

What would I do if I wanted to kill off Toddle?

1. I’d be very different. Toddle do this by focussing on design.
2. I’d have a different price model. I like Toddles charge per design rather than charge per recipient. Email is for intensive purposes FREE. Charging people per recipient is counter-intuitive. Sure, set a cap of a couple thousand and charge extra over that. I may even think that a €30/year all you can eat is good.
3. I have ‘auto-fill’ where it sucks in my RSS feed and lets me choose the stories I want to email. I do this for imagefile.ie, you can see July 2008 newsletter here.
4. I’d add interactivity. The ability to embed polls, forms, search boxes etc. in the html version. I’d speak with Lenny and see what’s being done in the field of email polls. See if a partnership was possible.
5. I’d offer click-through tracking. I’d redirect every link in the email and provide the stats back to the author in an email 12hrs, 24hrs and 72hrs later. What got people’s interest? Did I have too much content?
6. I’d remove all branding. The customer are paying for a design, they don’t want your logo on it.
7. I would connect with Marcus to be able to load images direct from Pix.ie.
8. I’d have in-place editing where I can type into the actual template rather than seperate form fields.
9. I’d find a very niche use of email newsletters and cash in on that with some very exact templates rather than generalising. This niche might be for a specific industry or use-case.
10. I would look into the use of internal emails, where a team-leader or manager wish to send a monthly newsletter on order status or progress and want it to be pretty but not branded.
11. I would look at the services that surround email newsletters. A good example is mailing list tracking. An embeddable widget that let’s people subscribe/unsubscribe to your newsletter. It could be as simple as providing this as a comma separated list of emails back to the user to BCC: so they always have an accurate list.
12. I’d offer distribution too. An entire package including monitoring bounce-backs.

But I’m not starting an email newsletter Alan is, good luck!

Tomorrow San Francisco (there and want a pint?), then Vegas, then back here for 2 days then relocate everything to Dublin.

-Robin.

1 Comments

15/08/08 Alan O'Rourke Brilliant post Robin thank you. Some of your points we already do. Some curren[...] »

11/08/08 Opensourced Seedcamp Application Form

CHICAGO, UNITED STATES - The internet must make life seem so unfair for those who have gone before us. I’m sitting here in an apartment in Chicago with just my notebook and a wifi connection yet was still able to gather thoughts of some great advisor’s in Europe with the click of a publish button.

Last week I open-sourced the content of our Seedcamp application form on this blog. The intention was to gather feedback, improve it, and in the nature of open-source… help improve others entries too. The hardest bit is starting, and I hoped to create clarity with action and generate discussion around a possible template.

Oh wow! The feedback received was incredible. A massive thank you goes out to Paul (winner of giving me the best kick up the ***), Rob (most visionary), Jason (most though-provoking), Charlie (most real-world), Andy (it’s in the detail), Joe (it’s in the figures) , Conor (it’s in the motivation) , Andraz (it’s in the investment), and my mum (it’s in the spell checks!).

So here it is… the new & improved release v1.0 of our Decisions For Heroes Seedcamp application. This was submitted to the competition on Saturday - project closed (until next year). Thank you all.

What are you creating?
We’re helping emergency services save more lives by making better decisions. Decisions for Heroes is a collaborative rescue team management tool to record and analyse rescue operations. Instead of archiving information as paperwork, we act as a platform, generating real-time profiles of members, available resources, and activities. Decisions for Heroes uses this data to deliver live and intelligent information to third party devices in the field.

What is really new about that?
Our platform for rescue operations is unique in five ways that matter:

• We use the principles of crowd-sourcing and automated data collection to gather as much relevant information to each situation as possible. Previously, input was confined to a single desktop; Decisions For Heroes gives the ability for anyone to contribute from anywhere.
• We leverage better decisions through two key areas; better information and shared learning. By giving access to an entire team, everyone can learn from previous incidents. We benchmark training exercises against actual incidents and track individual expertise to identify domain experts in the field.
• We break away from the desktop. Team leaders can initiate call-outs and collect information via SMS. Decisions For Heroes will make immediate contact with all available members via text-message and pre-recorded voice calls. Based on the response, we send instant reports of estimated response times and gaps identified in expertise back to the intiating handset.
• This is a considerably less expensive, and more accurate method than traditional approaches to collect data. Academic attempts have provided little incentive for teams to partake. By removing military complexity and providing integrated recording tools we minimise the tedious tasks that cause teams to raise their filter levels for clue related information.
• We connect everyone. By using portable data formats that conform with international rescue definitions we become the platform for third party devices to send and receive data. Geo-referenced information can be gathered from many sources, analysed, and permissioned as statistics for entire organisations, regions and countries.

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.  In many cases today, teams have not exceeded paper-based reporting methods or accessing single-user local copies of spreadsheets. To save a life, team leaders must gather all the information available to make an uninterrupted line of good decisions. If good decisions save lives, then we can improve decisions by getting the right person, with the right information, in the right place. Better decisions, save lives.

What specifically is your target market and how is it being poorly served today?
Our initial target market are English speaking voluntary rescue teams on-call for 999/112/911 emergencies. Figures projected from the UK & Ireland give an estimated served addressable market of 0.25m volunteers in 8,500 teams in the disciplines of coast guard, mountain rescue, lifeboats, cave rescue, dog handlers, lowland search, sub-aqua units, swift-water rescue, civil defense, and ski-patrol. Our intended total addressable market includes professional event medical providers, private ambulances, and dangerous work-places with the legal requirement to record accidents, provide first-aid, and reduce incidents.

What gives you an unfair advantage?
Founder and developer Robin Blandford is a volunteer cliff rescue climber and boat crew with the Irish Coast Guard. Development of our service required a network of contacts and the operational understanding of a rescue; we’ve proven finding a team with that knowledge isn’t easy! Without the impairment of converting existing desktop software to the internet, we have been able to design fresh innovative tools directly for the browser.

How will you sustain that unfair advantage?
A large community is essential to providing the volume of data required to produce meaningful decision making statistics. Central to this is a story of people in trouble, who need help, and heroes who go and rescue them. We already have a community forming around the task of improving our prototype and sharing ideas with their peers. Rescuers are keen to share their knowledge by swapping stories that allow them to make a better decision when they face the same situation themselves.

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, vehicle tracking and device connectivity. Potential also exists to connect equipment manufacturers to rescue teams, allowing access to product statistics from real incidents. Further revenue streams have been identified in public interfaces, accounts sponsored by local businesses, stories for local media, analytical data reports, and tools for organisational level.

To date, what specific progress have you made in building your product/company
(e.g. development milestones, feature additions, customer sign-ups, etc.)?
A beta version has launched at http://www.decisionsforheroes.com and is open to a selection of invited teams. As of August 8th 2008 we have 52 teams located in Ireland, UK, USA, Greece, and Australia; who’ve rescued 140 people in need of help on 176 rescues carried out by 616 heroes. Teams have undertaken 466 training exercises totalling 2,700 hours. This is a total of 15,000 hours logged by individual volunteers. An official trial has begun with 10% of the Irish Coast Guard and a number of other large rescue organisations have been engaged. Daily feedback is being returned from rescuers, often with next day releases to respond.

“Advise to anyone - try it and get used to it, its going to be an asset in the SAR community” — Lowlands Search & Rescue, UK.

“It is going to be [a] very useful tool…Very good work.” — Urban Search & Rescue, Greece.

“I really couldn’t do it justice by trying to tell you all about it” — Search & Rescue Dog Handler, UK.

“It really has hit the spot for our organisation and has some promising future developments that will make this one of the most talked about web apps of the future in SAR.” — Technical Rescue Member, UK.

“[T]his is a great site and I think you have hit a real winner in making this. I hope it works out for you as our training co-ordinators here think this is brilliant.” — Independent Lifeboat Crew, UK.

Development milestones are focussed on enabling VoIP services for integrated paging, vehicle tracking, and GPS connectivity for collaborative tracklog analysis. Our mantra, “Better decisions, save lives.” guides us; if the addition of a feature doesn’t make a decision better, you’ll find the feature in the trash.

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.

http://seedcamp.d4h.org/

The ‘Seedcamp Mountain Rescue Team’ can sign-in using the following ‘username | password’ combinations…

******* | ******, ******* | ******, etc.

What tools will you use?
Decisions For Heroes has been built using the open source tools PHP and MySQL. It is hosted with Slicehost on the open source Apache/Linux web server. 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?
Adding significant value to third party systems makes our most likely buyers the manufacturers of paging tools, GPS units and commercial tracking providers. A purchase would give a credibility-level to the manufacturers of consumer outdoor recreation and expedition based tracking services. Buyers would receive access to world-wide statistics on incidents, team patterns and equipment usage which are currently unavailable.

Who are your main current or potential competitors as well as identified potential new entrants? (Think hard before you say “none”)
Competitors are 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 during an incident 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 with the skills to put in place security procedures and enable global redundancy with instant failovers would be invaluable for the team.

What about your business are you most uncertain about?
There are uncertainties around the access to funds and budget limits of non-profit organisations. Earnings will be maximised by providing these teams the opportunity to have local businesses cover their expenses by allowing the customised branding of their public interfaces.

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 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 an indispensable tool. This will become known once data levels increase during our feedback period.

What do you hope to get out of the Seedcamp experience?
It is an invaluable opportunity to make incredible connections. A once-off chance 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.

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 collect and organise information to make better decisions. Better decisions, save lives.”

What is your favourite movie of all time?
How could we choose anything but ‘The Guardian’!…

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

Q: When did you first realise you could change the world?

A: When Umair Haque wrote ‘A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution’ in June 2008 he called out for revolutionaries to use the internet to… “Organize the world’s hunger, organize the world’s energy, organize the world’s thirst, organize the world’s health…”, and we added “organise the world’s rescue operations”. Why will our application change the world? Because this matters. We have a purpose that has a real social impact; our purpose is to save lives.

3 Comments

12/08/08 markvader Well done Robin, the pitch reads so well. Proving yet again that open sourc[...] »

12/08/08 Robin Blandford Thanks Mark :-) Massive improvements.[...] »

15/08/08 Colin Go on Dragon's den and when they all rush to offer you money tell them to stuff [...] »

09/08/08 Wish I wasn’t entering Seedcamp 2008

Then after scoping out some other entrants I could post…

I’ve seen a lot of ‘all crap, no app‘ in the last few days.

without just looking like I was being petty.

Mind you - some entrant look really good.

…but, if I hear “we’re a social network for…” even one more time…

-Robin.

(Thanks to my partner in crime for the saying. It fits.)

3 Comments

09/08/08 Richard Healy I'm hearing you on the social network comment![...] »

10/08/08 Robin Blandford ;-)[...] »

11/08/08 Charlie McElroy Love it! I can add that one to "all the gear, but no idea". The world needs so[...] »