Physical security firm Code Blue Corp. will partner with Toronto-based Guardly to roll out its mobile personal safety app to its emergency communications product suite.
Guardly’s mobile app acts like and panic button that you keep in your pocket. It connects users who find themselves in an emergency situation to alert emergency services and connect with a selected network of friends and family. The app allows the group to work together to address the problem and updates them with critical information.
Code Blue was founded in 1989.
Code Blue is a more traditional security solutions firm based in Holland, Mich. and was founded in 1989. It offers college and corporate campuses solid blue light posts that can be triggered in an emergency incident, with an intercom that connects the person in distress with a member of a security or safety team. Now Guardly’s mobile app will be added to those blue-light posts as a point of contact.
“We’ll be adding a layer of mobility to their traditional hardware blue light phone systems,” says Josh Sookman, CEO of Guardly. “We’ll help bring more personalization to the emergency response.”
Guardly’s Web-based backend can alert first responders to the caller’s location, name, physical description, medical conditions, and other things held on file at a university or business. Last week, Guardly announced it would be rolled out for use by Toronto-based OCAD University’s campus safety team.
A partnership with Code Blue means the firm will have opportunities to see their product used on more college and university campuses, as well as other areas like corporate campuses and hospitals, Sookman says.
“It helps to validate what we’re doing here, having a partners that’s been around for a couple decades,” he says. “They have a good sense of what their customers want.”
A Ball State University study found that 69 per cent of college students currently use smartphones, and that’s expected to rise to 90 per cent by 2014.
Brian Jackson is the Editor at ITBusiness.ca. E-mail him at [email protected], follow him on Twitter, connect on Google+, read his blog, and check out the IT Business Facebook Page. 
