• For teams that work in roster shifts - the ability to set your members off-call by default. This allows them to mark themselves on-call rather than marking off-call.


• Recurring off/on-call periods. Maybe you're not available 9-5 or nights. Now you can set daily or weekly recurring periods. These periods can be edited individually or as a series.


• Alerts for operational on-call levels. You can now set a required number of members for your team to have on-call at any time. We'll alert you if too many people are off-call up to 30 days in advance.

A volunteer in one of the Irish Coastguard’s cliff rescue teams has developed a software solution to help emergency rescue services make better decisions that might save lives. Robin Blandford estimates that there are 50,000 global rescue organisations that could benefit from his software, Decisions For Heroes, which launched this week.

Most students are happy to take it easy during their college years, but not Robin Blandford. From the time he started his studies in digital media engineering at Dublin City University, Blandford’s main priority was to start a company. After university, Blandford was placed on an accelerated management programme at Thomson Reuters.

During this time, he would stay up late at night, developing and releasing software updates for a programme aimed at voluntary search and rescue services. Last week, the 25-year old Dubliner realised his ambition with the commercial launch of his own firm, Byte surgery.

What is fantastic about the goals of the product is its genuine life saving potential. I love the fact that web 2.0 technology has allowed a small Irish company to make such a big difference to a vital worldwide service. [...] The product itself is fairly simple and it only took me about 10 minutes for me to get to grips with it. I think that the Byte Surgery team have done an excellent job in providing an intuitive user experience and it looks like they have stripped out any unnecessary features so it is very focused.What is left is clear, concise and blindingly fast.

I particularly like that the application is targeted at a market outside the technology area - there aren’t many web applications that are so far removed from the office environment;

O’Reilly talks about doing “stuff that matters” and Decisions For Heroes would seem to be doing just that. [...] The fact is I haven’t been able to use Decisions for Heroes as it is a pay service with no trial-plan (well done to the team for having the guts to charge for their service).

This is an impressive professional looking site.The little video Quickstart Guide spells out what the site can do very well. I love seeing technology being used to improve services like this.

I’m absolutley delighted to hear today about the Launch of Decisions for Heroes. Robin Blandford is a very smart guy and through his blog he’s been entertaining and inspiring people for the last few years and I’m glad to know someone launching such a worthy service.

The software-as-a-service model promises to deliver a recurring revenue stream which should have little churn providing there are no serious competitors in the market. This is as far away from “me-too! (dot-zero)” as you can get.

It’s not very often that a web application has such an impact in the real world. Your todo list, micro-blog, word processor, invoice, and photo sharing sites are useful, but it would be very rare that they might save someone’s life!

A web app that helps save lives. Awesome: http://decisionsforheroes.com

How we love to see teams grow! Seedcamp 2008 finalists 'Decisions For Heroes' launches to today.

I’ve met Robin a few times and he’s a great example to any budding entrepreneur in Ireland. First off, he’s done this the hard way. He’s the sole founder of Decisions for Heroes.

...he’s built something amazing - technology that will help rescue teams save more lives. Its essentially a project management tool combined with an incident reporting mechanism that’s able to monitor team histories and readiness and raise alarm for expiration or under manning conditions.

Decisions For Heroes, the ‘BaseCamp for Mountain Rescue’ launches. There are not many startups that set out to save peoples lives.

A young Irish entrepreneur and cliff rescue climber, Robin Blandford will start delivering his new rescue team management software service "Decisions For Heroes" over the internet to rescue teams around the world on Tuesday 19th May 2009.

It’s fantastic to see such a great initiative which will aid in so many search and rescue training exercises and missions and ultimately save lives. I think it deserves all the exposure it can get.

It’s not often that you come across an online application that can literally save a person’s life, but that’s the case with today’s Tuesday Push.

A young Irish entrepreneur is making waves with his new rescue team management software.

Built by Robin Blandford, Decisions For Heroes was trialled for 8 months with 1,800 rescuers in 5 countries before being launched on the 19th of May.

I’ve got to say this is a very well applied idea on how people can use the internet and apply it’s benefits to real life (saving) situations.

• increase awareness of team resources,


• share information about off-call members,


• notify about upcoming activities or missed incidents,


• remind about confirming attendance,


• distribute the whiteboard messages.

In many Islamic countries, religious leaders believe that women cannot be touched by men outside their family. So when catastrophe strikes as it did in last year's Pakistan earthquake; it's up to the women to save themselves.