Saturday 26 January 2013

Way to Safety

Two months ago a telecommunications engineer from Beirut launched a start-up company that aims to permanently alter the face of urban warfare and eradicate gun-related crimes around the world.

Utilizing the hardware infrastructure we already have, Firas Wazneh wants to launch an application that uses GPS and wi-fi positioning to pinpoint the precise location of gunfire when heard through the microphones of any laptop or smartphone. It’s called Way to Safety.

“I was sitting and I heard gunshots, machine-guns”, he tells me, “and I turned on the media – nothing. The gunshots were really close. After two hours the media told us the gunshots originated near our house, so what the Hell is the country doing to locate these shooters? I thought of the idea [behind Way to Safety]. Being a telecommunication engineer I know that it is possible. Then I searched online, founded my company and thought of the solution, going mobile as an application.”

It’s a simple idea, and not without hurdles, particularly with regard to patents and privacy, but Wazneh is convincing and didn’t mind me writing about his ideas online. He explained the concept to me as follows:

“It’s an application, a mobile and PC application that will sound-triangulate the source location of gunfire. Whenever a shooter fires a gun we will triangulate the position of the shooter in about fifteen to twenty seconds, and our goal is to send this information to the security agencies primarily, then to the media and press, and it’s free to the people in the hot-zones. So when you hear a gunshot and you have the application you will get the knowledge, the data, where the shooter is, for free.”

Hot-zones refer to isolated areas of high gun-crime. One immediately thinks of Homs in Syria, or Tripoli in Lebanon.

The technology has been around since World War I, when well-placed microphones could locate the whereabouts of canons and artillery batteries. There’s a comparable city-wide system in the US, most recently implemented in Chicago. Wazneh concedes that he’s not doing anything new.

“In the US there’s a similar system for gunshot location that’s been around for sixteen years and it’s still growing and growing heavily. It takes a lot of money. The problem is it needs hardware; it’s not scalable. It costs about $50,000 per square mile per year, which the security agencies pay to this private company. They’re not scalable for this matter. They need help, they need equipment on the rooftops, they need to rent places, they need constant internet and electricity. That’s how my thought came to mind: to use the existing infrastructure that we have from phones and laptops, and locate the shot.”

Needless to say for the software to work it requires a lot of people to download the app. “The more people you have, the more accurate it will be,” claims Wazneh. “Basically you need ten to twenty people in a circle with a radius of 1.5km. That much and we will be accurate to 25 meters.”

When I press Wazneh on its usability and the reliance upon its own ubiquitousness, he explains how simple it would be to market, especially in the middle-east, where gun-related deaths are so prevalent. Not only in war-torn countries like Syria, but also in the United States, where the topic of shootings is so hot as to melt steel.

“Because of the scalability of my product,” he says, “being an application, of course I expect it to expand in America. They have about 10,000 people killed per year in gun-related crimes.

“I think it will market itself in the hot-zones,” he goes on. “For example, in Tripoli now they are firing. If I go to the media and tell them, use this application; it will tell you where the shooter is and where they’re shooting from. Or if I go to the media personnel in the hot-zones; if I tell them I need five or six of you to install this application and then I can tell you where the shooter is, and the direction he is shooting, and the quality or type of gun he is using, they will install it.”

Every gun produces a different sound when fired, as identifiable as a fingerprint. Wazneh and his partner will spend a lot of time mapping the sound-signatures of hundreds of weapons over the coming months.

Way to Safety is intended free for civilian users, which one suspects is essential given its prerequisite for popularity, so when I ask about monetizing the service I’m told they will find a way to sell the data to the media and emergency services.

“I’m working on the concept to maybe get investors to help me,” says Wazneh. After he’s granted proof of concept he can deploy the application to different platforms. “Now I’m getting permitted to one platform [Android], then investors will help me to hire mobile developers and draw other mobile users.”

The start-up is young, and already it’s secured its share of funding, but in November Way to Safety placed third in a social innovation competition hosted by the MIT Enterprise Forum after someone raised a question about invasion of privacy. Listening in on a user’s microphone is a delicate issue, which Wazneh recognizes.

“It’s a really good question about privacy. Later on I came up with a solution to make the application mostly open source [code available to the public]. I will verify it with a different company, get my application certified by a different security company to show that it will not hack your phone, nor spy or spam you .”

Technology is not my scene, but where Wazneh is unclear about his strategy for commercializing the concept, he’s sure about his plan: to revolutionize gun control.

“My solution is not for a particular party,” he concludes. “It is for every party all over the world, so there is no more gunfire. It is an ideal thought but I want shootings to stop.”

You can follow their progress on Twitter.

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