DALLAS—
Three of the most dangerous things you can do on the road are look down, take one hand off the wheel and hit buttons on your phone. Vicki Dickerson is a mother of seven and sees people doing it every day."Oh I just say a little prayer that they are being extra careful," said Dickerson as she had lunch with her children in West Village.
Yet tens of Thousands of drivers are not being careful and the body count is mounting. Thirty states and the nation's capital ban texting while driving, but not Texas. That's where WebSafety enters the picture. The Dallas-area tech firm is one of a handful that developed a cell phone application designed to prevent texting and driving.
"Our application takes over any of the applications for texting, email or web browsing and blocks them so that they can't be used until the vehicle stops," said Travis Bond, CEO, WebSafety.
The company's software is called CellSafety. The application works with most GPS-enabled phones. It tracks your location as you move, using a minimum of two satellite signals. When it determines you're traveling more than ten miles an hour in any vehicle -- car, bike, plane, anything -- it kicks in. If you do need to send an emergency text, once you stop your car, it'll take the software anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes to do so.
The software still allows you to make calls, and "you can send an unblock request by touching one button on the screen and whoever the administrator or the parent is can make a determination if you are really not driving. And they can release it by texting back, for two hours," said Bond.
WebSafey also announced a new agreement with a Georgia firm to provide the application to government and corporate drivers. It is not available on I-phones yet. There is a fee for using the service.
