>AMBER Ready: The Moonlighting Cop, The Wanna Be Mogul and The Killer App That Wasn’t
Editors Note: A link was added to the section referencing Fairview Police Chief John Pinzone.
Editors Note II: A paragraph discussing the indictment of former AMBER Ready CEO Kai Patterson was inserted, along with a link to the indictment and his comment about the matter.
A small company in Morris County, New Jersey is evidence the first of how very bad things happen to good ideas when Wall Street gets involved.
Like most Wall Street initiated disasters AMBER Ready (AMBER stands for Americas Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response) began with some noble intentions. The backstory: In 1998, a veteran computer engineer named Kai Patterson witnessed firsthand the horror his secretary went through when her son was abducted by her estranged husband. Specifically, he was struck by law enforcement’s waste of time in trying to get recent pictures and accurate descriptions of the missing, a problem that virtually guaranteed a lower chance of safely recovering them. (The secretary’s son was found unharmed a year later.)
Fast forward to late 2008. Patterson has given up more lucrative corporate work and is now working full-time on the issue, having raised some capital from John Thomas Financial, a scrappy young investment-bank. Convinced that his old model of having a small army of marketers canvass malls, school fairs and PTA conventions for customers to sign up via personal computer is inefficient, he hired a mobile-phone applications developer called Blinglets. Unlike previous versions, this would enable any customer with a cell phone to download their children’s pictures and key identification data to a form AMBER Ready provided. In event of an emergency, within a few minutes police throughout the region could have everything they need to coordinate recovery operations.