But perhaps one East Bay company can finally drag 911 into the 21st century. Location Labs of Emeryville, which Dutch mobile security giant AVG just purchased for $220 million, is looking to disrupt emergency calls.
The company’s edge is not necessarily technology but reach.
For example, if you wanted to purchase a 911 call app, you would need to download the software from iTunes or the Android store.
Location Labs, however, distributes its technology through the nation’s four largest wireless carriers. The company already sells services that allow users to keep track of family members and automatically lock down phones to prevent driver distraction. So once Location Labs develops a service that can transmit photos and location data to emergency responders, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint will presumably sell it to their millions of customers.
“Smartphones are very much (underused) as a safety device,” said Location Labs founder and CEO Tasso Roumeliotis. “When you dial 911, it uses some arcane network system to determine where you are and it only gives the person’s location within a 50- to 100-meter radius. It doesn’t know your name, your health concerns, what happened. Is there a riot? Are you in the middle of the desert?”
“But your smartphone knows exactly where you are because of Wi-Fi and GPS,” he said. “When you look at what a smartphone can do for you — aggregate information and feed it back to a public service like 911— we are going to look back 10 years from now and say 'I can’t believe there was a time when we dialed 911 and it barely knew anything about you.’”
When 911 debuted in 1968, it was based on a system of landline phones connected by copper wire. Despite periodic upgrades, the system has severely lagged behind the rapid emergence of digital technology.
“The devices and technologies people use to communicate with one another are growing, in both number and complexity, faster than the legacy 911 system’s ability to keep up,” according to a 2011 report sponsored by the research arm of the U.S. Transportation Department. “In this environment, there is consensus among stakeholders that the time has come to update the infrastructure to enable the transmission of digital information like video and photos from callers to the 911 center, and on to emergency responders.”
In the Bay Area, a population surge has also severely strained the region’s emergency response system. Between 2007 and 2013, 911 calls in San Francisco have jumped by nearly 22 percent, city figures show.
San Francisco did recently roll out a $3.7 million 911 dispatch system, but police and fire officials complained that officers were having trouble getting information from dispatchers on their computers.
The next-generation 911 system, the U.S. Transportation Department report said, should be able to instantly deliver location information and photos along with the actual call from smartphones to dispatch centers.
A number of groups are working on the problem. SirenGPS in St. Louis developed an app that automatically connects the caller’s location to a dispatch center. BART police recently debuted a security app to let riders transmit photos to dispatchers.
Location Labs, though, has offered mobile security technology long before the iPhone ushered in a new era of smartphone dominance. Founded in 2002 with backing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, BlueRun Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures, the company was one of the first outside services to be directly marketed by major wireless carriers.
“The initial thesis of the company was everyone was going to own a phone,” Roumeliotis said. “The differentiating aspect was the fact it was also going to be in your pocket with a location beacon. There were amazing things you could do when you know where you are all the time.”
The company currently boasts 1.3 million monthly subscribers through the likes of AT&T and Verizon. Location Labs’ core Sparkle mobile technology platform is also preloaded into 20 million smartphones.
“Part of the appeal of our model, rather than going naked on the app store, we are sold by the operator as a core part of the service offering,” Roumeliotis said.
That’s why it makes sense for Location Labs to expand into emergency calls and even senior citizen health alerts, he said.
“If you’ve got elderly parents, your willingness to happily pay for these services is pretty high,” Roumeliotis said.
©2014 the San Francisco Chronicle
