Decisions For Heroes Blog

SMS is live! But not enabled in your accounts yet. We’re currently testing with a selection of Irish teams.

Exciting Times!

-Robin.

Jemima Kiss from the Guardian interviewed us on the final day of Seedcamp. You should read the entire article on the Guardian site. Below is an excerpt about D4H…

Decisions for Heroes wasn’t selected for funding at the end of the week, but ByteSurgery founder Robin Blandford made it clear that the project is not dependent on that funding to go ahead. It’s a unique idea and one that polarised the Seedcamp crowd, said Blandford. “We save lives. We run a rescue team management application that helps rescue teams reduce their response times and help them make better decisions while they are on a rescue,” he explained.

The mountain rescue, coastguard and lifeboat teas around the british Isles organise their rescues through an ad hoc system of texts and phone calls. Decisions for Heroes coordinates that, so that if both the doctors on call register that they are offline for the next six hours, a warning message will be sent to the team leader. “We’ve gained a huge amount of confidence from meeting these guys,” said Blandford - himself a volunteer for the Irish Coast Guard. “We had an hour with Marten Mickos of MySQL and Andy McLoughlin from Huddle - to have people that senior say that they love your idea is a huge confidence builder.”

“The application has the element that the end user could be a charity or a publicly funded body, and that has polarised a lot of people about how big the potential market is. Some people saw the ision as much bigger, like Umair Haque - he said we should work with the Red Cross over in Asia so they can bring tranparency to disaster relief.”

It was noticeable that there didn’t seem to be anyone from UK Trade & Investment at the Seedcamp wrap-up session. Blandford said that if this had been in Ireland, he would have expected to see the equivalent people there. And he has a meeting today with Dublin’s Hothouse programme, which could offer Decisions office space, salary subsidies and more funding.

“I think there were some teams at Seedcamp who were reliant on winning to get funding, especially the ones that are a consumer play who needed who needed the promotion. But we’ve got revenue starting to come in the next six to eight weeks - we’re hoping to convert 30% of our trail users to pay accounts.’

Is Robin back in the office today? He’s on call. He might even be dangling down a cliff face on rope right now.

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• More from those Seedcampers

We’re at Seedcamp in London this week as one of the top 23 European Start-ups.

We’re blogging the event live here on Twitter and with full commentary and video on our development/company blog.

-Robin.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - I’m writing this post in advance and have it scheduled to post on Monday morning. If everything has gone to plan, I can tell you that D4H flew out last night to London, and David and I should be sitting in University College London’s new engineering building listening to Jyri Engestrom and Michael Birch speaking on a founder panel.

We’ve not been able to announce it until everything was confirmed, but considering the event has already started I can now tell you Decisions For Heroes was made a Seedcamp Finalist and listed as one of 23 top European start-up companies for 2008.

Once a year we will bring together Europe’s top young founders and a world class network of mentors in one place. We will provide access to seed funding, but more importantly we will expose these teams to the collective experience of people who can help inspire the next generation of Europe’s future serial entrepreneurs.

Brilliant.

(sorry it took so long to announce)

-Robin.

(Image Credit: D4H in London for Seedcamp interviews)

We’ve been tweaking the privacy levels on personal profiles and are glad today to press ‘deploy’ on our latest release v213. By visiting your own profile you can now choose how people see your details. While team administrators - member+, editors & the account owner, can always see your details, you can choose what the rest of the team see.

Once on your profile, click [Edit Profile]…

You can now select ‘Share with…’ [Private] or [Team] on each detail. The choice is yours…

Whichever items you’ve selected to share we’ll display on your profile - cool huh!

Of course, we’ll also let your admins know by email if you’ve updated any contact numbers. This will save you telling them at the next training session.

We’ve also made it very easy to see what only you and your administrators can see about you…

…and we’ve taken the numbers off the charts that everyone can see on your profile - so now it just shows stats relative to you, rather than putting any quantitative value on it.

Enjoy!

It’s now much easier to see how many members in each group are available. On the left, is the number available right now - this box turns red if the group fall below their required level. The chart on the right gives percentage availability. In the example above you can see only 50% of the key holders are available.

Within qualifications you can see who has valid qualifications. In the example below David is available (green left tick) while his qualification has expired. Meanwhile Robin is unavailable (red cross on left) but has a valid qualification. Neither is available for response.

How cool is this! Hot off the deployment list yesterday were ‘Response Level Requirements’. You can now [Update Details...] on any group or qualification in the [Members] area and set a required response level.

Your team might decide you always need available at all times - 3 key holders, 4 climbers with ‘Cliff Course I’ level, and 2 First Responders. If a team member marks themselves unavailable and response levels drop below your thresholds we’ll alert you on your dashboard.

And yes - soon we’ll be emailing you if this occurs in the future (rather than ‘live’) and sending you an SMS to alert you in real-time too!

Well what a few weeks! We’ve been in Cork, Ireland meeting some SAR teams, and yesterday returned from London, England while over pitching D4H for Seedcamp.

We’ve just released our promised draft of the ‘Animals’ module for feedback. You can add an animal, dog, horse, to your team using the [ + Add Animal ] on the members list page.

Please submit requirements to be added to this module.

So far, we’ve got…

• Ability to track dog/owner qualifications/courses.
• Ability to track dog immunisations.

Keep them coming

-Robin.