Press Clipping

Sunday Business Post - Software coming to the rescue in Dublin

Sunday, 24th May 2009

Transcript

Source: Sunday Business Post

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.

The firm’s first product, Decisions For Heroes, is a package of software for search and rescue services, such as the coastguard and mountain rescue services. The reporting and analytics technology is designed to manage all the elements of a rescue team, from training requirements to the documentation required following a rescue operation.

Blandford said that the Irish Coastguard was testing the product, and feedback to date had been positive. ‘‘They’re running a trial on a national basis,” he said.

‘‘They’re pretty enthused and I’m hopeful they will go for it. If so, the plan would be to replicate that elsewhere.”

Blandford knows the needs of such teams, being a volunteer for the coastguard in Howth in Dublin.

‘‘We do about 50 rescues a year,” said Blandford. ‘‘They’re all cliff rescues. Typically, it tends to be either people who climb up from the bottom of the cliff and get stuck, or suicides.”

While developing the software, Blandford has been living off an Enterprise Ireland grant for the past year. He received the grant, equal to 50 per cent of his last salary, by persuading the state body that his Decisions For Heroes product had the potential to achieve more than €1 million in sales and could generate at least ten jobs.

Blandford hopes that this will be achieved by making the software work for different kinds of organisations and companies. ‘‘There are quite a lot of people looking for something like this online,” he said.

‘‘This is built for lots of different purposes. For the moment, we’d like to get it adopted by as many rescue teams as possible.

‘‘These are teams of about 30 people, many of them volunteers,” said Blandford. ‘‘At €40 a month [for software], the price is small. But an organisation that’s big enough to build its own application wouldn’t be our market. We’re looking to do it around the globe among smaller outfits.”

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