#risenyc

by Daniela Perdomo

Our first public partnership

I’m excited to share that goTenna was recently awarded a grant funded by the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) and administered by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) that will provide goTennas to 10,000 small businesses in our hometown, New York City.

The award comes to us via a grant competition called RISE : NYC which sought to identify technologies that will make cities like New York more resilient in the face of climate change. More than 20,000 people associated with over 10,000 small businesses located throughout coastal Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn — encompassing some of the city’s most diverse and economically disadvantaged communities — will receive free goTennas​ so they can coordinate with other community members in the face of future natural (or manmade) disasters.

goTenna was born out of Hurricane Sandy

During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, 25 percent of cell towers were downed and 6.2 million people were additionally left without power in the 10-state area affected by the storm. That meant that 1 out of 4 people impacted by Sandy had no cell service, and all those people without power had no internet either — disconnecting them completely from each other and emergency services. New York City, of course, was in many ways the face of Sandy and it’s little wonder why. According to the NYCEDC, 2 million New Yorkers lost power and 35,800 buildings saw telecomm system outages.  

I started goTenna in part due to my own experience during Sandy. My cofounder and I wanted to empower people to communicate no matter whether centralized communications infrastructure was available (or affordable), using the very same smartphones all of us already carry around in our pockets anyway. The result, of course, is goTenna.

Ideal for any off­-grid situation — planned or unplanned — g​oTennas communicate on a peer-­to-­peer basis via long-­range radio waves (151­-154 MHz) and offer consumers a private, subscription-­free way to communicate up to one mile in urban areas and up to 5 miles in outdoor scenarios. Our sleek yet rugged device is smaller than a Snickers bar and allows users to send and receive text messages and share GPS locations via a smartphone app that pairs to goTenna over Bluetooth­-LE. goTenna is powered by proprietary networking protocols that make each unit a cognitive, autonomous node that can reconfigure in an ad hoc manner. Users can chat one-­to-­one, in private groups, or broadcast publicly to anyone nearby.

goTenna makes RF accessible to anyone

Public safety and military personnel depend on radio frequency (RF) technology, but what they use requires training, and are very heavy and expensive. By marrying smartphones’ ease­-of-­use and computing power to tried­-and-­true RF technology we’ve made goTenna a low-­power, low-­cost, deceptively intelligent device that feels like any messaging app — except it’ll work when no other can.

Through the RISE : NYC grant, which is made possible by federal funding allocated to communities like ours which were so deeply impacted by Hurricane Sandy, our little startup will be able to provide goTennas to the kinds of small businesses that are the backbone of New York City’s economy. The vast majority of our grant’s beneficiaries are mom-and-pop businesses like corner stores, pharmacies, restaurants, and the like. Our grant also ensures we can benefit communities that predominantly speak Spanish, Chinese, and Russian.

The image in my mind of Sandy remains New York’s cover of a darkened lower Manhattan, where the only lights came from the Goldman Sachs complex and similar Wall Street firms. The financial behemoths can afford resiliency in their comms and power, but small businesses (and even medium-sized businesses) usually can’t — even though the opportunity cost due to downtime is relatively greater. 

“You’re not lost until you’ve lost the ability to communicate.”

While goTenna can’t keep the lights on, we can keep essential comms going, so that the next time NYC goes dark, coordination and resource allocation among colleagues, friends, family, and even strangers nearby can be more efficient. We’re very grateful to NYCEDC, HUD, and our community partners for the opportunity to execute on this grant in our hometown — our team is based in Brooklyn — and are eager to roll the program out in 2016, and explore how we might replicate it with other municipalities down the line.