Why we built Lanturne

Most of what we make at Technium Foundry is built for a fight. DealJudge, Veilbreaker and Overquoted all exist to put an ordinary person on level terms with a market that knows more than they do. Our rule has always been the same: find the gap, build the thing that closes it, and put it in the hands of the person on the wrong side of it.

Lanturne is the exception. There is no market on the other side of it and nobody to out-negotiate. We built it for a reason that is a good deal closer to home.

One of our engineers has a mom who lives overseas. He is on one side of an ocean and she is on the other, most of a day apart.

For years he called her every Sunday. If she picked up, he knew her week had been fine. If she did not, he kept calling. Her phone would be in her coat, or in another room, or on silent. Some Sundays he could not reach her until the evening, and by then he had already imagined every bad reason there is.

Then came the Sunday she did not answer at all.

The next morning her neighbor called him. His mom had fallen in the kitchen the day before. She was all right, but she had been on the floor for hours, with her phone on the table across the room.

He told us about it that week, and together we went looking for something that would tell him at once if his mom fell or went quiet, wherever in the world he was. Most of what we found was a medical alert pendant with a monthly contract and a call center. His mom would not wear a pendant. To her it said she was old and needed watching, so she took it off and put it in a drawer. The rest were apps that only work when the phone is in your hand, which is exactly when you do not need them.

She already wore a smartwatch every day, and she liked it. It was on her wrist when she fell. That watch could tell whether it was being worn, read her pulse and detect a fall, and it was connected to the internet. And yet nothing on it could tell her son she needed help.

What troubled him most, and then all of us, was that every product we looked at waited for something to happen. She had to press a button. She had to fall hard enough to be noticed. She had to be awake enough to do something. Lying on her kitchen floor, she could do none of those things, and nothing would have gone off.

So we built the part that was missing: a watch that notices when nothing is happening. It does not wait for a press or a fall. It keeps checking, quietly, all day long. Is the watch on her wrist? Is there a pulse? Has she moved? If she is wearing the watch and it finds no pulse and no movement for longer than he has chosen, his phone alerts him. If her watch goes silent, his phone alerts him. Nobody has to press anything.

Every morning her watch also asks her one question, and she answers it with one tap. If she does not, he finds out. If she can reach the help button, his phone shows him where she is. There is no call center in between, and his phone can be anywhere in the world. A watch with its own mobile connection needs nothing else. Without one, her watch reaches us through her home Wi-Fi or through her phone nearby.

We still believe in closing gaps. This one simply was not between a person and a market. It was the ocean between a son and his mom.

The team at Technium FoundryJacksonville, Florida