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"  Stephan Boyer, the founder of Kitestring\u2014a new service that alerts your emergency contacts if you don&amp;#039;t respond to its check-ups\u2014is a true gentleman. When I reached out to him about the piece I wrote last week on Kitestring, one of the first things he did was offer condolences to me and the friend I mentioned in the story (&amp;quot;This New App Could&amp;#039;ve Prevented My Friend&amp;#039;s Rape&amp;quot;). The next thing Boyer did was politely answer my questions about the web-based service he created (it&amp;#039;s not an app, actually): how it works, what it does, why he founded it. The latter explanation I found as charming as his condolences. &amp;quot;The idea for Kitestring came to me in late January,&amp;quot; Boyer says. &amp;quot;My girlfriend, who lives in a dangerous neighborhood in San Francisco, called to ask me to check up on her as she was walking home from work one day. I wondered if there might be an app or service that could offer a little extra safety for her when she goes out at night,&amp;quot; he tells me, like that&amp;#039;s just what all men do. Chivalry, it seems, is not dead\u2014it&amp;#039;s just gone hi-tech.  That&amp;#039;s when 23-year-old Boyer, a computer science grad student at MIT, saw an opening in the personal safety app market. &amp;quot;Everything I could find required action from the victim to activate [a distress signal, emergency call, or whistle],&amp;quot; he says. Of course, that&amp;#039;s really not the most practical thing in a crisis, when you often don&amp;#039;t have the time or the clarity to swipe at your iPhone and call for help. &amp;quot;At that point I felt that the idea for Kitestring was just begging me to build it.&amp;quot; So Boyer got to work on a web-based &amp;quot;safecall service&amp;quot; that, on its most basic level, works like this:    Thus, the main differences between Kitestring and popular safety apps and services are these things: 1) It&amp;#039;s a web-based service, not an app, which Boyer says makes it easier for him to fix techy bugs immediately 2) It&amp;#039;s works off of the users inaction, not action 3) It doesn&amp;#039;t use GPS, like many other safety apps and services (bSafe, Circle of 6), so you&amp;#039;d want to set your custom alert message to inform people where you might be or where you were going (&amp;quot;Walking back on Fifth Avenue from the concert at Madison Square Garden&amp;quot;) 4) But because it doesn&amp;#039;t use GPS tracking services, it&amp;#039;s also free, which most apps (or at least their GPS services) aren&amp;#039;t &amp;quot;I originally designed Kitestring for people like my girlfriend who feel uncomfortable going out at night, but I&amp;#039;ve been pleasantly surprised with great feedback from several other demographics, including mountain hikers, real estate agents, the online dating community, and the elderly,&amp;quot; Boyer says. Personally, I&amp;#039;d certainly like my friends to be in the loop if I went to, say, check out a couch I saw on Craiglist; if didn&amp;#039;t respond to Kitestring&amp;#039;s check-ups for an hour, they could be be notified that I was at 276 Main Street, Apt 6B. But that&amp;#039;s just one of many ways Kitestring could work. Since it launched in February, Boyer&amp;#039;s seeing dozens of uses for the service. &amp;quot;Last Saturday, a middle-aged woman sent me an email explaining that she uses Kitestring to check up on her in the mornings so her husband can travel and not worry about her silently passing away in her sleep,&amp;quot; Boyer recalls. From that sweet, vaguely The Notebook-y check-in to the applications it could have for victims of violent crime, Kitestring seems pretty brilliant. No, it won&amp;#039;t prevent bad things from happening, of course. But if you were going from point A to point B or spending the night alone and something went wrong along the way\u2014a car crash on the highway, a mugging, a seizure in the middle of an afternoon jog\u2014it could definitely help you get help faster when you can&amp;#039;t reach for your phone. For a free web-based service, that seems like a pretty priceless offering to me. Bravo, Stephan Boyer. (And P.S.: Go sign up for Kitestring here.)  Photos: Courtesy of Stephan Boyer, Kitestring "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/news/a15403/kitestring-founder-stephan-boyer/?click=hprc>