DUBLIN, IRELAND - Today is the launch of our new 'On-Call Planner', a tool to help rescue teams schedule their members availability. This tool will allow you to work out shift rosters, ensuring that at no point during the day you break any requirements. For example, you may wish to keep 15 members on-call at any time, in in those 15 have 3 first-aiders, a doctor, and 5 heights rescue. Now you can calculate this up to 30 days in advance.

Other features in this release include...

• For teams that work in roster shifts - the ability to set your members off-call by default. This allows them to mark themselves on-call rather than marking off-call.


• Recurring off/on-call periods. Maybe you're not available 9-5 or nights. Now you can set daily or weekly recurring periods. These periods can be edited individually or as a series.


• Alerts for operational on-call levels. You can now set a required number of members for your team to have on-call at any time. We'll alert you if too many people are off-call up to 30 days in advance.

All accounts will be automatically upgraded for free with the new features within the next 24 hours. Keep checking yours.

Here is a video walk-through guide outlining the new features:



Press [Play] to watch.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - 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.

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!

-Robin.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Last night, Decisions For Heroes was announced as a finalist for the €10,000 iQ Prize. The prize fund had 249 entries, so it is brilliant news to have made it to the final 8!



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 start-ups, and London investor Nic Brisbourne.

More here.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - A whole bunch of new releases for you this week. The biggest shift is the Incident, Exercise, and Event pages. Their layouts have changed to reflect a structure that can hold more data for you down the road. The maps are bigger, more prominent, and the attendance list is much tidier.

We've worked down the attendance status levels to 3 traffic lights - red, amber, green. When you create an event, just 'request' the people you need and they may sign-in themselves and confirm or deny their attendance at the activity. Also, now as an editor, you can confirm people's attendance yourself if they can't do it themselves. These small changes will make a huge difference to editors.



Communication is a hugely important factor in team management, and a long requested feature was the ability to message the attendees of an event. Using the new comms icons on the activity page, you can now do just that - send a message to those 'Potential Attendees', 'Confirmed Attendees', 'Unconfirmed Attendees', 'Absent Attendees'. Go try it!



If you are in the UK or Ireland, you'll start to see more SMS icons appearing. These icons let you send an SMS message to either a group or individual. For example, you could send the text message to everyone coming to your training session tomorrow "Bring your technical gear, we're going climbing.". We'll update you live as each message is delivered, so you can see if someone didn't get it. More on our SMS capabilities soon - and hopefully news of this service launching in the United States.



All your accounts have been upgraded automatically! Enjoy.

-Robin.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - We've owed our United States users this update for quite some time. We had been using a European date format e.g. '23/04/09', while in the United States it is common to use '04/23/09'. This gets very complicated when you have '04/06/09', is this June 4th, or April 6th?

To solve this, we have now put dates in international format e.g. '23 Apr 2009', easy!



Next up, measurements. Imperial and metric options are now available in your Team Account settings. If you are a team 'Account Owner', visit [Team Account] -> [About Your Team] -> [Measurement Units]. Here you can pick to have all your units converted between miles or kilometers.





All your accounts have been upgraded automatically. Enjoy!

-Robin.

(P.S. We still use International English rather than American English, so we apologise if you see 's' instead of 'z'. e.g. 'Organisation')

DUBLIN, IRELAND - We have had a lot of press over the last week! This morning we were on the 4FM Breakfast Show, Listen To Recording Here!

If you've been following us on Facebook or Twitter, you'll also have seen we've been written about in two national papers.



The Irish Times - New software will help emergency services to save lives, says developer

A volunteer in one of the Irish Coastguard’s cliff rescue teams has developed a software solution to help emergency rescue services make better decisions that might save lives. Robin Blandford estimates that there are 50,000 global rescue organisations that could benefit from his software, Decisions For Heroes, which launched this week.

Sunday Business Post - Software coming to the rescue in Dublin

Most students are happy to take it easy during their college years, but not Robin Blandford. From the time he started his studies in digital media engineering at Dublin City University, Blandford’s main priority was to start a company. After university, Blandford was placed on an accelerated management programme at Thomson Reuters.

During this time, he would stay up late at night, developing and releasing software updates for a programme aimed at voluntary search and rescue services. Last week, the 25-year old Dubliner realised his ambition with the commercial launch of his own firm, Byte surgery.

Fantastic!

-Robin.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Wow, what a day! Last Tuesday we launched D4H and received a huge amount of press and blog posts pushing our service. Thank you to everyone, here's a quick recap.

Reva Health

What is fantastic about the goals of the product is its genuine life saving potential. I love the fact that web 2.0 technology has allowed a small Irish company to make such a big difference to a vital worldwide service. [...] The product itself is fairly simple and it only took me about 10 minutes for me to get to grips with it. I think that the Byte Surgery team have done an excellent job in providing an intuitive user experience and it looks like they have stripped out any unnecessary features so it is very focused.What is left is clear, concise and blindingly fast.

David Kelly

I particularly like that the application is targeted at a market outside the technology area - there aren’t many web applications that are so far removed from the office environment;

Paul M Watson

O’Reilly talks about doing “stuff that matters” and Decisions For Heroes would seem to be doing just that. [...] The fact is I haven’t been able to use Decisions for Heroes as it is a pay service with no trial-plan (well done to the team for having the guts to charge for their service).

Joe Scanlon

This is an impressive professional looking site.The little video Quickstart Guide spells out what the site can do very well. I love seeing technology being used to improve services like this.

Antons Hat

I’m absolutley delighted to hear today about the Launch of Decisions for Heroes. Robin Blandford is a very smart guy and through his blog he’s been entertaining and inspiring people for the last few years and I’m glad to know someone launching such a worthy service.

Dave Concannon

The software-as-a-service model promises to deliver a recurring revenue stream which should have little churn providing there are no serious competitors in the market. This is as far away from “me-too! (dot-zero)” as you can get.

John Keyes

It’s not very often that a web application has such an impact in the real world. Your todo list, micro-blog, word processor, invoice, and photo sharing sites are useful, but it would be very rare that they might save someone’s life!

@ryancarson

A web app that helps save lives. Awesome: http://decisionsforheroes.com

Seedcamp Blog

How we love to see teams grow! Seedcamp 2008 finalists 'Decisions For Heroes' launches to today.

Co-Clarity

I’ve met Robin a few times and he’s a great example to any budding entrepreneur in Ireland. First off, he’s done this the hard way. He’s the sole founder of Decisions for Heroes.

Will Knott

...he’s built something amazing - technology that will help rescue teams save more lives. Its essentially a project management tool combined with an incident reporting mechanism that’s able to monitor team histories and readiness and raise alarm for expiration or under manning conditions.

TechCrunch.com / Mike Butcher

Decisions For Heroes, the ‘BaseCamp for Mountain Rescue’ launches. There are not many startups that set out to save peoples lives.

Irish|Dev

A young Irish entrepreneur and cliff rescue climber, Robin Blandford will start delivering his new rescue team management software service "Decisions For Heroes" over the internet to rescue teams around the world on Tuesday 19th May 2009.

Derry O'Donnell

It’s fantastic to see such a great initiative which will aid in so many search and rescue training exercises and missions and ultimately save lives. I think it deserves all the exposure it can get.

Laughing Lion Design

It’s not often that you come across an online application that can literally save a person’s life, but that’s the case with today’s Tuesday Push.

Tipp Tatler

A young Irish entrepreneur is making waves with his new rescue team management software.

Helen Tracey

Built by Robin Blandford, Decisions For Heroes was trialled for 8 months with 1,800 rescuers in 5 countries before being launched on the 19th of May.

Jeromakay

I’ve got to say this is a very well applied idea on how people can use the internet and apply it’s benefits to real life (saving) situations.

Thanks All! What a day!

-Robin.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - On launch-day, we not only updated our branding and launched to the public, but we also did a new software release. All of your D4H team sites are now running on Secure Socket Layer (SSL) 256-bit encrypted connections.

What does this mean?
Two things! First it means that all data that travels between your members browsers and our data centre is encrypted to a high level. This includes everything you either upload to D4H or download to your own computer. With SSL, no third parties with access to your internet traffic can interpret the data. Second, it means we are who we say we are. A 'Trusted Root Certificate Authority' has signed our SSL certificate to say Decisions For Heroes owns the content at this domain, preventing an imitation using the same certificate masquerading as D4H in an attempt to steal users passwords.

How do I know I'm using SSL?
We now automatically connect to you with SSL by default. You can easily check, just look for the 'https' in the web address (rather than 'http'). Sometimes you'll also see a padlock icon 'locked' rather than 'open' in your browser status or tool bar.

I hope it has been a quiet week on the rescue front for you all.

-Robin.

DUBLIN (IRELAND) - Today is our official product launch! It has taken 1 year of software development and 1,800 rescuers like you to provide feedback, and get us this far. We have now officially launched Decisions For Heroes and are allowing teams from all over the world to sign-up.

We'd love you to spread the word by telling other rescue teams to visit www.decisionsforheroes.com and get started with their own account. You'll also find lots of goodies there like this product news blog, badges for your site in our press kit, and international contact numbers to get in touch.

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Something light-hearted today, here's a music video of a helicopter rescue (wet winch) filmed in tilt-shift. Thanks to Alan O'Rourke for the link! Filmed in Australia by the West-Pac helicopter crew.

-Robin.