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?
Image courtesy of Flickr, loop_oh
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark