Who’s your buddi?

She’s created a security device that could change the world, but Sara Murray’s buddi still has a number of enemies. Here, the confused.com entrepreneur tells us about her latest invention.

Sara Murray makes a mean roast potato, even if she does say so herself. The trick, confides the serial entrepreneur, is after part-boiling them and before placing them on a pre-heated tray of oil, you shake them in a pot until fluffy.

I’ve tried it since and she’s right, the pot-shaking fluffiness makes all the difference. Not that I should have expected anything less. Sara Murray doesn’t do ‘just fine’ nor indeed does she do failure. The 40-year-old is all about excelling in her no-nonsense, quietly fearless way. And whether that’s in the kitchen or the boardroom, it’s all the same to her.

It’s no surprise then that her latest business venture has the potential to be world-changing. Murray has created the buddi, a personal tracking device that can be worn around your neck, linking up to satellite navigation and can track your precise location 24/7, 365 days a year.

A box the size of a child’s palm, weighing just 55 grams, it also has a panic button which, when pressed, links into an emergency response centre and opens a voice channel to communicate through. Meanwhile, the response centre tracks your location and passes details to the emergency services and/or local authority.

“People either love it or hate it. They love it because they recognise the need for it or they hate it because they think it’s an infringement on their civil liberties”

The buddi has been a hit with great swathes of society - adults with elderly parents suffering with Alzheimer’s, parents of young children who are prone to running off without warning. Since launching in 2007, it has been supplied to 30 local authorities, been endorsed by The National Autistic Society and Murray expects the NHS to be using almost a quarter of a million buddis by 2012. There’s also the petbuddi, which enables people to track their dogs.

But the device has also had a significant back-lash. “It’s like marmite,” she smiles, “people either love it or hate it. They love it because they recognise the need for it, and it really makes carers’ lives easier. Or they hate it because they think it’s some kind of infringement on their personal life or civil liberties.”

She’s referring to the ‘big brother’ argument, that paranoid parents (or worse) can log onto the buddi website or contact the response team and track their child’s every move. In fact, she says, the device gives fretful parents more peace of mind. If in danger, parents feel safe in the knowledge that their child can immediately alert the emergency services.

It was her own daughter’s safety that inspired the buddi ten years ago in a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Kent. At the checkout, she realised Rowena, then five, had disappeared. Security was called, the supermarket was combed and she was eventually found. But the heart-stopping moment had made its impact.

It wasn’t until six years later that she took action. On a ski trip in France, Murray was asked to give her daughter a piece of paper with her name and telephone number written on it in case she got lost. She was shocked that this was the only safety precaution. “I thought it was ridiculous, with modern technology,” she admits.

So Murray began searching the market for a buddi-type device. When she couldn’t buy one, she decided to get a prototype made, generate funding and bring it to market.

That this was Murray’s reaction is unsurprising. By 2005, she had already achieved significant business success, both in large corporates and business start-ups. The most well-documented of which is her insurance comparison site, inspop.com, which later became Confused.com.

Car insurance was an obvious market to go online in 1999, she says now. “Insurance companies have to give people a quote for their car. So if it’s someone high risk, the only way companies can stop insuring them is by giving them a difference in price. They also want the balance of insuring men and women, so they vary their prices a lot and that happens every day.”

She sold inspop.com to The Admiral Group in 2001 and isn’t surprised by how successful it has become since. “My business plan said it would be something like this.” Still, she doesn’t regret the sale, though admits: “I’d have hung onto it but I had a lot of investors and they were keen to sell. And I did find the insurance market not the world’s most exciting place.” 

“Plenty of times I doubted I could sort all the technical problems. I was deeply in it by the time I realised how hard it was, otherwise I would have started something else”

Those investor relationships proved helpful again when she approached them to finance buddi. Four years on, £1.3m of Angel investment and a growing market interest from America, Australia, South Africa and Europe, a successful business isn’t the only thing to come out of it. It’s also how she met her husband, Michael Jackson, the venture capitalist who invested £50k of his own money in buddi, and whom she married late last year.

But bringing the buddi to market hasn’t been all high points. The technological side of it is complex and an on-going challenge. The box itself is a GSM (global system for mobile communication) and GPS (global positioning system) antennae in a miniature environment, ‘which is technically very difficult to overcome’.

Radio technology, dubbed a black art for its unpredictability, can cause volatility within the box, while sudden temperature changes can also disrupt it. In fact, in her typically forthright way, Murray admits: “I never doubted the buddi idea but plenty of times I doubted that I could sort all the technical problems. I was deeply in it by the time I realised how hard it was, otherwise I would have started something else. But we opted to continue to make it and develop it and we’ll continue that, making it smaller.”

These days, the buddi’s main competition is True Tracker Pro 6.0, a tracking device without the voice channel which is only available in America. But following a CBS news story on Murray last year, the she now looks set to eat into that market share.

If Sara Murray continues to win the technology battle, and the buddi carries on inspiring interest across the globe, its scope is almost limitless. And whether you are for this or against it, one can’t help but wonder how the stories of little Sarah Payne or Madeline McCann or the thousands of children and adults that go missing each year might have turned out, had they too been wearing the buddi.

There are a range of payment plans available with the buddi.  For more information, visit www.buddi.co.uk