Safety through technology: Las Vegas startup out to protect teen drivers

Cox Business

Executives from Cox Business present Text Safe Teens CEO Leon Wilde, middle, with a prize check after the company won a pitch contest in October.

According to the government's most recent annual statistics, 3,154 people died and 424,000 were injured in car crashes involving a distracted driver. The age group with the largest proportion of distracted drivers in fatal crashes: teenagers.

“It’s such a dark subject that people don’t want to think about it,” said Leon Wilde, CEO of Text Safe Teens, which is tackling the problem with a mobile app designed to keep teens drivers' focus away from their phones. “But we do. We have to think about it.”

Text Safe Teens, backed by investment from its founders, has started to see success with its DriveSafe Mode application for Android and iPhone. In July, the company won first place at a pitch competition hosted by local blog Tech.Co. Not long after, in early October, the company won a first-place prize during a local Cox Business pitch contest. Now, the company is working to perfect a version of the app for iPhones and roll out new products.

Click to enlarge photo

A screenshot of the Safe Drive Mode landing page on the iPhone version of the application.

The app detects motion and sends notifications to parents' email accounts if the teens are using phones — texting, talking or shuffling music — while driving. Parents download the application onto their teens' phone, then create an account that links it to the parents' email.

On Android phones, the application provides parents close to total control. DriveSafe Mode locks the phone when motion is detected, which makes it effectively inoperable, Wilde said. The only exceptions are to allow emergency calls to 911 or preset numbers, and teens also can request an override on phone locks if they are passengers.

“What are the odds of you getting something on your phone important enough that you need to kill yourself for someone else? Unless you are President Obama, probably fairly low,” he said.

Daniel McGehee, who studies distracted driving as the director of human factors and vehicle safety research at the University of Iowa, said the technology was not unlike the standard engineering practice of designing safety into a product, such as putting a guard on a table saw.

“You’re designing the hazard out of the interface by locking it out while you are moving,” he said.

Despite having a product that experts see as a natural safeguard, the company is in early stages, tweaking its product, seeking partners and scouting funding with an eye to expansion.

When it comes to iPhones, Text Safe Teens is still sorting out some big technical issues. Chief among them is that Apple does not allow applications to lock down all functionality on the phone. Right now, the application is only capable of sending a notification to parents, rather than overriding all functionality. And the notices only work when the application is open. So if a teenager leaves the application closed, a parent might be left out of the dark on their behavior.

Closing these loopholes on the iPhone is a priority for Text Safe Teens. Roughly 98 percent of its user base — and the application has about 110,000 downloads, Wilde said — have iPhones.

“We’re hashing out those details,” Wilde said.

Text Safe Teens is developing a workaround that would make the iPhone essentially inoperable, possibly by reducing the brightness of the screen, he said.

While the company has partnered with Sinclair Media, which provides it enough ad revenue for Text Safe Teens to offer the app for free, its primary goal is to work with an insurance company that might offer a discount for using DriveSafe Mode. Doing so could solve a key challenge for the company — apathy among parents.

“The one thing that all of this is missing is a real incentive for doing it,” he said.

Despite comprising just two employees, Text Safe Teens has ambitious plans. The company expects to launch a mirror DriveSafe Mode application that would send parents notifications on their smartphones rather than through email. It has already launched a preliminary version of its SchoolZone Mode, which allows parents to monitor and control teenagers’ phones during school. And it has plans to launch a social media feature targeting texting among older drivers.

In addition to teen driving, Wilde sees fleet management as a natural market for the company’s technology, some of which is patented.

“Our goal for the company is to save lives. Obviously, at some point we have to make profits,” he said. “That’s not the underlying goal of the company.”

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