uptownben

Over the past few weeks there have been more and more reports of children being forgotten, and dying, in the back seats of cars. Being the father of several young children and a busy CEO, I find these reports both disturbing and frightening. I couldn't even imagine the grief of a parent who realised that his/her preoccupation with the hectic schedule/job/startup caused the death of their child.

I am an app developer,so I started kicking around some ideas of how I could build something to help solve, or at least reduce the occurrence of, this problem. While I try to think of a way that I can have an impact using my skills, I thought it may be worth starting a discussion about the issue and sending out a general feature request to all app developers that create navigation/car related apps.

The feature would be one (or both) of the following:

1. Upon arrival to destination, in addition to the "You have arrived!" message, also speak a reminder to check for backseat passengers/babies.

2. Send a "push notification" message between 5 to 10 minutes after arriving at destination, with a polite reminder about potential backseat passengers.

I just sent an email to Waze asking them to add this in, not sure how far that will get, but had to try.

I welcome any discussion, suggestions, ideas or collaboration on building something that would save even one child.

And for all you parents with startups, check the backseat every time you leave the car. Every time.

For the past few months I've been hard at work implementing this great iPhone app idea my wife and I thought of. This morning, while reading through my usual tech news, I found an article about another startup that has already implemented the same idea and has just received significant funding. Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed and frustrated. They created a really great app with all the features I was working on. At this point I think I need to make a decision, either drop this project or push on. They are a 20 person team with a few million in funding and I'm a one man shop without. What's your opinion?