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 pouring 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 foil the attack, scare away the attackers and attract the attention of the surrounding people.
And it's only the beginning, by the way. The app associated with the cover immediately geolocates the person who activated the alarm and notifies 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 occurs “behind closed doors”, where activating an alarm could even make the situation worse. For this reason, Safee also has a "silent mode" that warns loved ones and captures the scene without making a sound.
In the next six months, the system will be integrated (guess what?) with Artificial Intelligence. The objective is to discern in real time when, in addition to notifying relatives and contacts, there will already be the conditions for a timely intervention by the police.
Technology against a terrible and widespread phenomenon, in short. Hundreds of thousands of victims of aggression and domestic violence: the latter is also a deeply felt phenomenon in France, the country that gave birth to Safee.
Security in the time of the subscription economy
Nobody turns up their noses, nobody makes rhetoric about a society that "needs" technological help for basic things. There are many, too many borderline cases, often invisible to the police and even to friends and relatives.
The space and sense for devices like this are all there, unfortunately. Safee costs around 60 euros (currently around 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.
