5 cool civic startups on display at the 2015 Congress of Cities

BlueLight

Preet Anand, founder of BlueLight, said his app can help 911 call centers better respond to calls from smartphones.

“Today, still, if you call 911 from a smartphone, it is worse than calling from a landline,” Anand said. “Dispatchers don’t always know your location, and you aren’t always being routed to the closest help.”

That fact is especially jarring, Anand said, when you consider that 70 percent of calls to 911 come from mobile phones. The Federal Communications Commission estimates that 10,000 people die unnecessarily every year because of a slow response by authorities — some of that could be caused by that necessary extra step of trying to figure out where someone is calling from, Anand said.

BlueLight uses an app-based interface to put a middleman between the user and 911 on a mobile phone. Users input their information, including their emergency contacts, into the interface and allow the app to access their location. In an emergency, the user can call for help from the app. BlueLight then beams that information to the 911 call center, enabling faster response times, Anand said.

The company is actively seeking out cities to pilot the platform with after winning the 2015 Multi-City Innovation Campaign award. Right now, the app is mainly seeing the most use on college campuses and in ski resorts.

“We’re trying to do this first by focusing on areas where 911 is completely broken” Anand said.