The Guardian Media Coverage
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
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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