PROTECTION FOR TOURISTS
NO ONE EXPECTS to end up in trouble – heart attack, mugging, car breakdown in the middle of nowhere on a dark night etc. Unfortunately, this stuff can happen.
Mobile phones are a boon in bad situations – call an ambulance, call a breakdown service, call a friend. But what if you don’t speak English? Or you are here on holiday and don’t know the number? Or you don’t know where you are?
GPS is good for that, but if your life depends on someone being able to find you quickly, normal mobile GPS technology isn’t failsafe. There are urban canyons, lifts, underground car parks. Then the device defaults to your last known location – which isn’t a bargain if you are unconscious in a pool of blood.
Auckland-based company 2Life has developed a monitored personal safety service which works off a smart phone and uses new triangulation GPS technology. Press the 2Life icon and you are connected to a call centre, which will link you to emergency or breakdown services, translating if you don’t speak English (Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and Hindi offered so far).
Co-founder Stephen Katz says the idea came from an elderly aunt who had a medical alert system at home, but was stymied by the fact it only worked within 50-100m of the base station at home.
“Worrying there might be an emergency while she was out was inhibiting her quality of life,” Katz says.
Working with a software developer, Katz began building a safety alert system based on smartphone capability and enhanced GPS. 2Life was launched in 2014, with its first major customer being AUT, which wanted a safety system to offer newly-arrived foreign students.
Now the company has signed a deal with the third biggest global China Southern, and China Travel Services. Katz says the two state- owned companies are keen to promote 2Life to Asian travellers coming to New Zealand with little or no English, but wanting to travel independently.
“China is New Zealand's second biggest tourist market, with over 310,000 visitors arriving in the year to April 2015, up 26% from the previous year,” Katz says. “In the past, Chinese visitors have been restricted to tours because of not being confident on their own. What would happen if they got sick, or lost, or their vehicle broke down?”
Katz says the China deal will see 2Life offering concierge services too, and the app will be being bundled into a $50 mobile phone package including a New Zealand Sim card, calling minutes locally and to China, texts and data.
Disclaimer: 2Life shareholder Mike Hutcheson is also a director of the company that owns Idealog. But the story meets our normal Idealog editorial criteria: an idea so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a weasel.