Safe Button
Personal Safety Alarm
Summary
Safe Button was a smart personal safety alarm that not only sounded a loud audible alarm but also notified friends and family of your location at the press of a button. It was done as part of the Bay Area Maker Startup Weekend Hackathon in July 2014.
Startup Weekend is a 54 hour hackathon, starting on a Friday evening and continuing through to Sunday evening. People pitch ideas on Friday which get voted on, and then the participants coalesce into different groups around the selected ideas, develop a working prototype, demo, and VC presentation by Sunday evening.
The Startup Weekend at the San Jose Tech museum in July 2014 was a Maker event with a hardware focus. My idea for Safe Button was among the top ideas and I ended up forming a team around it. We won the Best Customer Validation award at the VC presentation on Sunday.
Contributions
The Safe Button team consisted of 9 members (including an honorary kid member!). We worked together to create a working demo-able prototype, and business plan with customer data and validation, and a final VC presentation. As Founder (having pitched the idea), I coordinated among the different team members in realizing the vision, but every single one pulled their weight with a division of labor.
Team: Sridhar Rajagopal, Srini Badri, Rachit Biyani, Isabel Perez Ruiz, Steven Owens, David Fisher, Rahul Makhijani, Kunal Desai, Tad Fisher