The service shares local data with fire departments looking to tailor programmes to residents at risk
Bio
Age of business: 20 years
Name of business: netage, RESC Info Insight
Location: The Netherlands
Team: Two – Nicky van Oorschot and Bart van Leeuwen
Funding: €37,000
Elevator pitch: If data gives fire departments insights into which people in their service area are at greater risk of a residential fire, isn’t it the moral obligation of the fire department to educate them better?
What does RESC Info Insight do?
Fire departments need to more specifically pinpoint their education in order to reduce the number of residential fires.
What does RESC Info Insight do?
With our product we combine residential information, demographic information and statistics from the fire department to create a self-service platform where they can analyse their data and make assessments about which neighbourhoods contain certain types of risk, to better pinpoint people they need to educate. The architecture is tailored to the fire department so they can add any number of datasets and compare forecasts of various population changes. These methods can be shared with other fire departments.
Where did the business idea come from?
Bart is an active fire fighter who has first hand experience of the problems. Nicky developed the original idea during the search for a master thesis subject. During the master thesis, the results of the developed method were so promising that the idea was born to create a service out of the results.
If you were to start again, what would you do differently?
Nothing, never regret your decisions.
How has ODINE helped you so far?
The budget allowed us to promote the idea from a pet project to a solid development project where we can dedicate more hours to it.
What advice would you give to other companies pitching to ODINE?
Although the open data that you use is free, you still need to have a solid business plan to make sure ODINE’s investment is worthwhile for them. Be prepared for a lot of paper work in the month before you start – even better, ask them upfront what they might need from you.
What would you say to other startups thinking of working with open data?
Do it – it has huge potential to kick-start your idea.
(This article first appeared on the Guardian)
