Safety app designed to stand out in crowded field

SAFETY FIRST: Find Me Safety co-founders Kim Fuller, left, and Tammy Fuller, center, with Gerald Deane. The app was launched in 2013. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
SAFETY FIRST: Find Me Safety co-founders Kim Fuller, left, and Tammy Fuller, center, with Gerald Deane. The app was launched in 2013. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

The Find Me Safety app, the brainchild of a Lincoln-based entrepreneur and her cousin, is not alone in the evolving universe of mobile-phone applications aimed at providing an alert service to enhance personal safety.
Popular technology websites such as TechHive and Mashable occasionally highlight apps intended to keep students and others safe in emergencies by notifying contacts and enabling real-time location tracking. Guardly, based in Toronto, is one example. Watch Over Me, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Singapore, is another.
How this $2.99 Find Me Safety app, with its one-time fee, differs from these and other popular free or subscription services, however, may enable the co-founders, Tammy Fuller, 52, of Lincoln and Kim Fuller, 53, of Tulsa, Okla., to establish a startup business for the potentially handy tool, they say.
These unique features include an ability to notify contacts about one’s location or emergency status regardless of the condition of the phone or cell towers once the alert has been put in motion. In addition, the alert can be set in motion by shaking the phone if that setting is enabled, the app inventors say. There also is no subscription cost, just a one-time fee, they said.
The app also has a “follow me” feature showing everywhere that the user has been since the alert was activated to contacts via text, phone, or email (or all three). The feature is valuable particularly if a user doesn’t arrive at their destination as expected, either because they’re lost or in danger in some way, Kim Fuller said.
The Fullers, natives of North Attleboro, launched the Find Me Safety app in 2013 as a tool for use in tornadoes and later, hurricanes and typhoons, but to date have only attracted a total from all the apps’ incarnations of 2,223 downloads.
“Disasters are few in number, so we’re making our big push for the general-safety app,” Tammy Fuller told Providence Business News in January. As they’ve done so, starting in January 2014, the app began to attract attention.
In September 2014, the Today show featured a segment on it, and in November, Tammy Fuller won a 2014 Tech10 Award from the Providence-based Tech Collective in part because of her work with the app. The duo were semifinalists for the 2014 Tulsa TCC StartUp Cup, for the first version of the app, called Find Me Tornado. Though they didn’t win, they received valuable advice from experts in the field, they said.
“Since creating the first iteration of the Find Me Safety Tornado app, the company has launched various spinoffs to not only further the apps’ benefit to the company, but to benefit the safety of the public at large (for example, expanding into real estate, hurricanes, and even everyday actives such as jogging and dating),” said Giselle Mahoney, communications and media relations manager for the Tech Collective, explaining the reason for the Tech10 recognition.
The app was Kim Fuller’s idea, the cousins told PBN, but Tammy Fuller was able to help execute it by using her company to provide the proprietary communication service that gives the app its powerful range across the globe.
Tammy Fuller, who has a master’s degree in computer science with a concentration in artificial intelligence from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, co-founded Eco Messaging in 2004 with Gerald Deane to create small-business software applications for automation and going paperless. Their software happened to include a lot of small-business notification systems, she said.
Kim Fuller is the founder of KF Public Affairs in Tulsa. That media relations firm is a partner in the creation of the family of apps, she said.
In May 2013, the day after tornadoes hit Moore, Okla., Kim – a self-described “problem-solver” who has worked at the White House and Pentagon – reached out to her cousin with an idea. She wanted to know if it was possible to create an app that people could trigger when they entered a disaster shelter that would automatically start notifying designated contacts with last known GPS locations after a 15-minute countdown. Her cousin liked the idea, and the Find Me Safety Tornado app was born about three months later. The app has the potential to alert people if a shelter collapses and the one sending the alert is in danger, and has a practical side, notifying contacts so the sender wouldn’t have to make repeat calls, Kim Fuller said.
Echo Messaging provided the proprietary backend automated communications system, the Fullers said, making it possible to focus on creation of the mobile-app components.
Wanting the app to be more broadly useful to people, like when they are going out alone for a jog or meeting strangers, the duo created the Find Me Safety app, making the countdown component optional.
When Kim Fuller researched a kidnapping and murder she discovered the victim had her mobile phone with her. This led her to add an optional “shake” feature. The app user simply shakes the phone if he or she is in imminent danger, forwarding the alert and GPS location of the sender with minimal effort.
Sandy Brown of Scituate, an agent with Keller Williams Realty in Cranston, contacted the Fullers and distributed fliers about the app to Realtors who attended an Oct. 11 safety seminar for Realtors in the region. She has downloaded the app, tested it in a trial run and keeps it handy, particularly when showing foreclosed or vacant houses in remote areas, she said.
“I love the app,” Brown noted. “Even if they charged a monthly fee, I would pay for it just to have that peace of mind.” •

No posts to display