Dead Zone: Why Your Phone Fails in a Crisis — and the Israeli Tech That Fixes It | DotSaga

Astroworld. Burning Man, Nova Festival. Your phone shows five bars right up until your life depends on it — then the network chokes, calls drop, and help can't be coordinated. Cell networks were never built for mass emergencies. An Israeli company called DotSaga built the fix, and in this episode they explain how it works. 

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Transcript

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 0:00

And we're creating an off-grid solution. This can save lives in terms of timing of how fast we got to the situation, understood what's happening.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 0:13

Have you ever been crushed in a crowd or lost your kid at a festival or watched your phone become just a useless brick? It's incredibly new technology called.saga. It's one button, instant SOS, real-time location, and no cell service needed. I am Jennifer Weisman, and today we are talking with the founder of Dotsaga, Noam Goldman. Your phone, the app you're using right now, all of it Israeli. But when you hear Israel on the news, you don't hear about any of this. You only hear about conflict and bomb. This is the Israeli Trailblazers show, sharing innovators that are making your world better. They're stories that you just don't know about. Welcome, Noam. How are you?

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 1:01

Thank you very much. I'm good, Jennifer.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 1:03

So safety should not depend on a signal. People assume that if you're in a concert, there's a whole security team getting your back and you're good. But in fact, that's not really the case, is it? How did Dot Saga come to be?

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 1:19

A few years ago, I was managing live events, about a thousand attendees in each event. Two of my attendees were sexually assaulted during the event. It's very hard to hear those kind of stories, but when you're managing sites, these are things that you are supposed to be aware of. And we did have security and medics. I got the message about that situation, about the incident 24 hours later. I was trying to understand how could me, as an event manager, security expert, not know about a situation during my event. Then we started looking and discovered the gap in the security and communication world. What you're describing is a false sense of security. Yeah, because you're managing security today in a collective way. X amount of security guards on a Y amount of attendees, but the numbers are different. So my question was: why is there no technology that can solve that problem?

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 2:10

Why is it so important to have security that is not cellular dependent?

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 2:14

The first thing that every security told me is that they're regulated to use walkie-talkies for communication. This working on cellar towers and centralized communications. Your phone is going to an antenna, the antenna goes back to another phone. And what we developed is actually the ability to communicate between the end user directly to the command center based on the same regulation methods of radio communication.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 2:40

What makes.saga unique?

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 2:43

Off the grid means that once you are wearing this tag when you walk into any site with no need for seller service. So you can text, watch locations, communicate. It works like kind of a receiver and transmitter. Anything that you're going to be sending through your phone will not be sent from the phone to the antennas that we spoke about. It will be sent through this communication device. This is your new walkie-talkie. It's hard to imagine that we took such a big device and squished it into a small tag, but this is allowing you to communicate with your phone with no need for seller service. And with one press of SOS, the command center, your family you came with, your friends will get a vibration, an alert that you are in danger. So it's also a communicator, but also allows you to have the whole enjoyment of your app with no need for seller service.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 3:31

How would it work, say, at the US Open? Huge event, many people playing on different courts, 50,000, 60,000 people there. You carry this button, you put it in your pocket, you run into trouble, you press the button, and what happens?

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 3:48

When you enter the US Open, you get a ticket. The ticket is going to be embedded in our tag. So it's not just for safety, it's also for experience. So when you get in, you get the tag. The minute you feel in danger, you're gonna hit the SOS. Your first circle is gonna get the alert. So you came with your children, and one of your kids just hit the SOS. The parent and the guardians will get the SOS immediately and see your location on the app and know that something is happening.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 4:14

All of this is done with through radio waves. So that's one differentiator. Everything is embedded inside of this wristlet.

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 4:21

Yeah, this is a whole game changer. One of the biggest technologies that we embedded is the accelerator in terms of if you have no movement of the tag. Two weeks ago, a 19-year-old girl in France that died in a ski site. She fell from the blue slope and no one knew about it for almost four hours. If she had a dot saga tag, after about a minute of no movement, someone will get an alert. So it's not just the active features that we have in the product, it's the proactive jail fencing. If someone goes out of the zone that we set up for him, the security will get an alert. You got out of your slope, you're going to the black slope. You're in Disney. I put my children only in a few places to be, and they got out of that zone. The whole proactive analytics in terms of security could save lives. In 2021, when Travis Scott was running his concert, Astro World, 10 people were squished. The security team knew about it, they saw it, but when they try to go audio on the walkie-talkie, no one heard them because of the speakers. The attendees weren't able to explain what's happening to them because they were getting squished. It took 40 minutes for Travis to stop the concert. Our technology, when we see that it's too dense in one area, we have a proactive alert that's going to say this area is a dead zone, try to stop it or tell Travis to stop the concert. And actually, there's a lot of ways that we can save lives on the proactive features that are in the product.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 5:48

How do you think a dot saga tag would have changed the outcome of that horrible Hamas-led terror attack in Nova in 2023?

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 5:58

When we started this, we started from a mission of sexual assaults and creating safety solutions. And back then I was in Miami in an accelerator program and I was posting on LinkedIn that I'm creating this feature. And I got a message from a producer saying, hey, it looks amazing. Can we use it? I want to hear more about it. I didn't understand exactly who it was. I just knew he's an event producer and he's running events. A few months later, the war broke and we all went to reserves. And then I called up my co-founder, Alon, and I shared with him the situation that listen, what this product could have done in Nova. And I opened my LinkedIn and I was asking myself, who was that producer that asked me if it would be ready for his event? And I figured out it was Nimo Dalin, the founder of the Nova. He asked me two and a half months before the October 7th event if he can use the product, the technology. It's a map, it monitors all your attendees, it communicates with no need for seller service. We could have seen 3,000 tags around the site, where everyone went. Each soldier could have known where he's heading to, not just even thinking about the situation of tags going into Gaza and maybe finding hostages, but the whole understanding that our tools will be saving lives, we'll be handling mass situations. Our product will work no matter what, no matter how many people you're going to be handling inside of a site.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 7:19

Horrible part of this is that had you seen 3,000 SOS tags going off in that moment, it would have given a big red flag to what was actually happening at Nova. That's a very sobering story. Imagine there's a cellular blackout. This works no matter what, right? This is fail-safe.

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 7:41

Exactly. We're creating an off-grid solution. We're connecting you to the most relevant security guard around you. There is a security guard probably behind you that could come and help you.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 7:52

You just don't know it and there's no communication connection between them. Any reason that people would be afraid of this technology?

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 8:01

In the beginning, we got questions about privacy, tracking. You're using the tag and you're leaving it at the site when you're going. You don't take it home. You're uploading to the tag only the critical information that you would like to upload. I don't need your full name. It could be JW Allergy for Peanuts, 45 years old. That's it. Thank you very much. You don't need more than that. Just look at it as a walkie-talkie, a smarter walkie-talkie.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 8:30

So it's an off-the-grid radio wave product that does not need cellular towers, and you can manage 50,000, 100,000 people, right? Everyone gets a tag, and that's it. There's nothing else that you need to know. Yeah. Okay. We're talking about music festivals. There is a growing trend, especially in America, where kids are not allowed to bring their phones into the school. Kids in a day, they are used to shooting drills. They have all sorts of real-time security issues. And really, there's no system that a kid could carry if they run into an SOS.

Guest, Dotsaga, Noam Goldman 9:08

Yeah. You hit one click of a button on the tag, a drone could immediately get the communication and location of the tag and just come right away and give you a better picture of what's happening. This can save lives in terms of timing of how fast we got to the situation, understood what's happening.

Host, Jennifer Weissmann 9:24

Personal safety should not depend on the bars on your phone. And thanks to innovators like NAOM, it doesn't have to. If this opened your eyes to what's actually coming out of Israel, please share it and subscribe to this show. Headlines just show conflict. We show contribution. I'm Jennifer Weissman, and this is the Israeli Trailblazer Show, bringing you innovators that make your world safer, healthier every single day. You just didn't know it.