I'm sure you haven't heard of yet Safee and its founder, Luc Nadier, but chances are you'll hear about it soon. Why? The "anti-aggression" smartphone cover that this startup has produced has brought the turnover of this startup from 1 to 20 million euros in a few months, with orders flooding in from all over the world.
Safee presented his invention at the last CES2023 of Las Vegas, garnering compliments and awards. How does it work?
A smartphone cover that wards off an attack. How does?
Want a brutal summary to start with? With this cover, your smartphone he screams like a demon. Thanks to a hidden button on the back, Safee can activate an extremely loud acoustic alarm: 130 decibels, practically the sound of a gunshot.
The goal is to stop the attack, put the attackers to flight and attract the attention of the people around them.
And that's only the beginning, by the way. The app associated with the cover immediately geolocates the person who triggered the alarm and alerts a list of pre-registered contacts, also providing them with a video of the situation in real time.
In this way, the person's family and friends can be alerted and acted upon in an emergency, and the video can be used for reporting. It should be enough?
What about domestic violence?
In the vast majority of cases, domestic violence takes place "behind closed doors", where the activation of an alarm could even make the situation worse. For this Safee also has a "silent mode" that alerts loved ones and captures the scene without making a sound.
Over the next six months, the system will be integrated (guess what?) with Artificial Intelligence. The goal is to discern in real time when, in addition to notifying relatives and contacts, there will already be the details for timely police intervention.
In short, technology against a terrible and widespread phenomenon. Hundreds of thousands of victims of aggression and domestic violence: the latter a phenomenon that is deeply felt also in France, the country that gave birth to Safee.
Security in the time of the subscription economy
No one turns up their noses, no one rhetoric about a society that "needs" technological aid for elementary things. There are many, too many borderline cases, often invisible to the police and even to friends and relatives.
The space and the sense for such devices are all there, unfortunately. Safee costs around 60 euros (currently about twenty smartphone models are covered with as many covers). The cost of the connected "surveillance" services is covered with a monthly subscription of €2,90.
I would make it free, perhaps covering the costs with fines to the aggressors.
