This is a re-post from the pingWHEN blog, kept during our participation in Techstars London 2015.
TalkTalk is currently running their annual Digital Heroes awards, and one of our co-founders, Sam Heather, has been nominated.
The awards seek to recognise technologists who have not only harnessed the power of technology, but are using it to help others, whether in their community or through the environment. Sam has been nominated for the Next Generation award, which seeks to recognise young people who have used technology to for social good through a variety of projects.
Sam’s nomination comes as a result of his work over the last six years to use technology for social good. He’s currently working on pingWHEN, a personal safety app motivated by the statistic that 1 in 4 women on college campus in the United States will be sexually assaulted during her years there. pingWHEN is going through the prestigious mentor-led TechStars accelerator programme in London, having received $120k investment from them.
Sam’s previous projects include working on Shy with Julie Markham, a service aiming to provide crucial knowledge about personal and sexual health to those either to shy to ask their family / friends (possibly because of cultural taboos), a common trait of those born since ~2000, or those living in developing countries without access to the raw information. Shy is both a mobile app and an SMS service, to fulfil both of these use cases. Sam also built the first Anonymous Web Browser on the iOS platform called Branon, with the intention of providing free and unrestricted access to information to those living in countries with restricted internet access.
You can vote for Sam in the TalkTalk awards here or by visiting http://digitalheroes.talktalk.co.uk/next-generation-digital-hero/. Voting takes just a minute.