Who’s on Location?

My primary aim for this blog is to provide travel information (in English) for families and wheelchair users for activities, sightseeing and dining options on the French Riviera.  In other words, local knowledge of accessible areas whereby travelers can visit with their baby stroller without second-guessing if there are 200 stairs to get into the restaurant, or a wheelchair user or person with restricted mobility can dine out and know a restaurant has a ground-floor accessible toilet.

Sometimes, I do blog about items totally unrelated to living here!   The other day I was collecting some keys from guests staying at a holiday rental apartment and they advised me there had been a fire at a neighbouring building in the middle of the night but thankfully they knew the fire procedure for the building and were not evacuated etc…It brought back memories of fire safety drills for companies I worked for in New Zealand.

Health and Safety, and Fire safety regulations in New Zealand are very regulated and followed.  France does of course have regulations but it seems to be much more relaxed regarding company policy and actual procedure.  I have experienced buildings here without evacuation plans for residents, or fire extinguishers on each floor.  Shock horror!  no, not quite.

I digress.  I have recently heard about a great Kiwi product – Who’s on Location – which would have benefited some of the NZ companies where I was a past employee.  I have previously worked for 2 large wholesale travel companies, and a smaller software company each with large numbers of employees onsite and regular visitors onsite.  How did we manage the visitors?  ‘Signing in and out’ at a visitor book at reception.  How did we manage fire evacuation drills?  Having designated fire wardens and back-up wardens.  BUT these systems were flawed because the wardens would check the physical building to the best of their ability under time pressure before verbally reporting to the fire department.

This is where I believe Who’s on Location is genius – it offers a web based visitor management so companies know who is onsite, due onsite or left the site.  And crucially, they offer mobiEvac via mobile phone for real-time information of who is onsite.  Wardens can receive SMS messages of who is safe outside or needs help evacuating.  I would assume most people would take their belongings including mobile phone in the event of an evacuation ( I do ). This can only be valuable to a company to ensure their employees are safe.

I think this product would be an asset for some of the companies based here especially in our local business and technology hub of Sophia Antipolis (Air France, Amadeus, Bouyges, Samsung from October, France Telecom etc).

Check out Who’s on Location at http://www.whosonlocation.com or @WhosonLocation via Twitter

(I have no affiliation or sales connection to Who’s on Location whatsover and any opinions are my own)