TechRepublic’s Karen Roby discusses the tech behind a new safety wearable and an AI-assisted content platform.
It’s no surprise that technology is transforming human interaction in an increasingly virtual world. In this video for TechRepublic, Karen Roby highlights two different ways tech is changing lives and business. The following is an edited transcript of Karen’s conversation with Silent Beacon Founder and CEO, Kenny Kelley and Ink CTO, Alexander De Ridder.
Karen Roby: It’s amazing how technology can truly change and save lives. We’re talking first with Kenny Kelly, the CEO, and founder of Silent Beacon. Kenny, first tell us how this technology came to fruition.
Kenny Kelly: I actually got involved in a motorcycle accident where I ended up crashing and landing on the side of the highway. I didn’t know where I was, didn’t know what exit I was at, had no clue if I had anything broken or anything like that. I was just sitting there, and I couldn’t get to my phone. My phone was right there, but my arm had the glove on it, and I couldn’t swipe. I couldn’t do anything. And I was thinking, “Gosh, if there was just one simple press of a button that I could do that would alert everyone. Not just 911, or not just my phone service, or something like that, but alert a whole safety net of people that I was in trouble. “Here’s my location. Come and get me” in multiple different ways than that just would have been just perfect for that situation.
Karen Roby: So Kenny created Silent Beacon, and now it’s being used by people all over the world for personal and business situations.
Kenny Kelly: I wanted to create something that was a safety product but didn’t have reoccurring fees with it so people could get this and it would be affordable for the majority of people out there. That’s why I created something with Bluetooth so it could piggyback off the technology you already have. It’s about two inches in diameter. It’s circular, and it has two buttons on each side. That’s to avoid false alerts. So, if this is in your pocket, or I accidentally press it, pressing one button won’t do anything. It will just alert your phone.
You can see that my phone has a notification that means that “Yeah, hey, I’m connected to it.” If I press both these buttons, that sends the connection through. So they’re really easy to hit buttons. We also have indented buttons in another version, so if you’re an athletic guy like me and you’re always moving around, you’re not going to accidentally press both of them. So they’re both kind of incaved on both sides so you can simply press it in the middle.
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It also comes with a speaker and a microphone so you can call 911 or call your loved ones and talk directly into it. That way you don’t ever have to grab your phone if you’re in an emergency. As long as you’re roughly around 200 feet of your Smartphone, with this version, it’s going to call 911 or whoever you’ve pre-stored.
Karen Roby: And the next tech we’re highlighting focuses on a company called Ink, the first AI web content optimization platform that is designed just for writers.
Alexander De Ridder: When we think about content performance, we really think about three things. Great content needs to be found. It needs to be engaging with your audience. And then it needs to achieve the purpose for which you put it out. It needs to convert. And especially in the first pillar, your content needs to be found. This is where a lot of content creators are finding it increasingly challenging to understand when they create content if it’s good enough for the search engines or the AI black boxes of the world.
Karen Roby: Like so many other companies, Ink is harnessing the power of AI to make a significant difference for their clients.
Alexander De Ridder: In the past, Google would rely more on the backlinks alone for knowing what content to trust and so forth and whether or not a search term was exactly mentioned in a piece of content. But increasingly, Google is now able to thanks to neural networks and related technologies increasingly able to understand what content is really about, and so this is where we find ourselves in 2019. It is not sufficient to just jam your content with certain keywords in the hope of ranking, and it’s not sufficient to just build a bunch of links to your content.
You actually need to serve exactly what users are looking for from a topic point of view, from a semantic, or idea point of view. People often ask what goes into content ranking online, and there are a number of factors, but they mostly fall into foundation, authority, and intent. Foundation relates to how well your site is technically optimized and performing. Authority deals with how trustworthy your site is from a, for example, link authority perspective. And finally, intent is where most content creators have flown blind until now because Google’s AI is judging your content, but you don’t really know or have any insight into this. So, with a high content relevance score, you optimize the chances for Google to be satisfied with you having an intent match.
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