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 - Tomorrow is the announcement of the iQ Prize winner. Decisions For Heroes is a finalist in the competition, and company founder Robin Blandford will pitch the idea to the judging panel. On Friday Robin was in iQ Content to be interviewed by their Managing Director, Morgan McKeagney. You can watch it here:



For live results from the awards ceremony, follow @robinb on Twitter.

Today we have some fantastic news to share with you. We won the €10,000 iQ Prize judged by Facebook’s EMEA Head of Online Operations, Google UK and Ireland's Online Sales & Operations manager, the CEO of Ireland’s largest online media group, a Golden Spider Internet Hero and the 2007 Businessweek Young European Entrepreneur of the Year, Microsofts Internet Evangelist, and an Irish start-up community lead.

Please leave comments below, or use the 'share on Facebook' button to add it to your wall.

Thanks all,

-Robin.



FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Out of a total of 249 entrants, 8 ambitious companies were shortlisted and took part in Dragon’s Den style presentations to the panel of 5 judges. After their gruelling presentations, the 8 shortlisted candidates had to do it all again and present their elevator pitches to 200 people in the audience at the iQ Prize award night in the Guinness Storehouse, Dublin.

Founded by young Irish entrepreneur Robin Blandford, iQ Prize winner, Decisions For Heroes helps rescue teams 'save more lives'. Identifying a common set of problems found in emergency services, the software was created to capture the information surrounding their rescue operations and training exercises. The system automatically performs analytical charting, draws heatmaps, and benchmarks reports to outline areas of strength, weakness, and expertise.

"The iQ Prize is a fantastic community driven opportunity for an Irish Start-up" said Blandford, speaking at the awards ceremony. Asked how he was going to spend the prize money, "I intend to use the prize fund to travel to the United States to launch trials with their emergency services". Once back home in Dublin, Blandford will "grow the company by taking on an operations expert to focus on data security and scalability".

iQ Content Managing Director Morgan McKeagney, who created the iQ Prize, was full of praise for the winner and shortlist, "I'm delighted for Robin, he's a worthy winner and a great model for young Irish entrepreneurs. His story, and the phenomenonal response to the iQ Prize, shows that Ireland is a hotbed of entreprenuerial talent. Given the right support, we believe that many of these young entrepreneurs can go on to create world-class technology companies."

McKeagney reaffirmed the quality of the entries and urged others to repeat the initiative of the iQ Prize, "If organisations like Enterprise Ireland matched the €10,000 we gave to each of our shortlist, it would be the best investment they could make."

DUBLIN, IRELAND - Today we released "Steps to Get Started", a new help box that will appear on everybody's dashboard. We've found from talking to folks, that people had a problem understanding what steps to take when they opened a new account. This new box will step them through it, step by step. We suggest you take them in the given order.

Note that not everybody will see the same, we customise your steps needed based on the configuration options you give us when you create your account, and the permissions you have been given by your account owner. Once you reach 100%, you can 'Hide Forever' to never be bugged again!

If you'd like to follow our daily movements, please join our Facebook Page or follow us on Twitter. Things are really happening fast at present, with some really big organisations talking about coming onboard. We couldn't be happier!

DUBLIN, IRELAND - This morning at 8.15am, company founder Robin blandford was interviewed on national television channel TV3. The popular breakfast TV show, Ireland AM, featured the businesses of 3 entreprenuers who are fighting the down-turn to set up their businesses in a recession. Despite being interviewed after a woman selling handmade bra straps (actually she has a fantastic business!), Decisions For Heroes recieved almost 4 minutes of air time. Fantastic!

You can watch the interview below.



About Ireland AM (TV3):
Irish viewers have been waking up to Ireland AM since September 1999. Ireland AM offers a morning-mix of current affairs, celebrity interviews, fashion, health, beauty and all other aspects of Irish lifestyle. Ireland AM was voted ‘Ireland's Favourite TV show' at both the 2008 and 2009 TV Now Awards. The programme has enjoyed phenomenal growth and popularity as Ireland's first television breakfast show and is now firmly established as a favourite with families throughout the country.

CLARKSDALE, MISSISSIPPI - Calling all D4H search & rescue dive teams! Brian Smith from Coahoma County, Mississippi in the United States has put together a proposal for adding Search & Rescue dive logs to Decisions For Heroes. With Brian's permission, we have published this form here for general discussion. We're going to build the ability for subaqua dive logs, and would like to get the template perfect for everyone. Please leave your comments here, in the 'Improve It' section inside, or in the more active Facebook discussion.

Brian has kindly hosted a copy of the form, click here to see all drop-down boxes, and form fields.

DUBLIN, IRELAND - In response to the current discussion on how emergency services and rescue teams will maintain adequate cover while up to 50% of members will suffer from Swine Flu Influenza A(H1N1), we have released a special guide on how Decisions For Heroes tackles the situation. The pandemic is currently gaining a foothold internationally and it will be a number of weeks before it is widespread. Now is the time for teams who have others dependent on their response, to plan for this challenge in order to protect the provision of their service.

Visit www.decisionsforheroes.com/swineflu

Please share this with your other EMS colleges via this link or 'Share on Facebook' - the official press release may read here.