Microsoft's Guardian App For Women's safety

Exclusively available for Windows Phone platform, the Guardian app sends alerts to select contacts, mails and posts to Facebook groups along with your location details.

The Guardian app has a 'track me' feature that allows select users in contact to track the user in real time, using Microsoft Windows Azure cloud services and Bing Map APIs. Users can also send an 'SOS' alert, connect to security agencies, police and hospitals in case of any emergency through this app.

To use the app, users need to add names of select contacts to the settings who can be reached out to in an emergency situation. Users can alert them through the SOS button. Clicking the SOS button will send a distress message to selected contacts, alerting them along with users' location. The SOS button also sends emails to select email ids and posts to private Facebook groups.

A group of Microsoft employees developed the Guardian app in a span of over six months. Microsoft's new distress app comes in the awake of recent cases of violence against women in the country, especially the last year's Nirbhaya case. So far, quite a few distress apps have been launched. Notion Ink recently launched “I'm Shakti” application for the Android platform.India’s first managed security company, SMART 24X7, recently launched ‘Panic’ Button, an Android operating system for smartphones. Some of the popular safety apps available for smartphones are Channel V's VithU, Me Against Rape, Fight Back by Whypoll, Street Safe and The Eye watch.

                     

"Our employees wanted to do something to enable people to feel safer in our cities. So they used their spare time to develop Guardian. It is a robust personal security app with more safety features and capabilities than any other comparable app available to Indian smartphone users today, Microsoft IT India Managing Director Raj Biyani is quoted as saying.