Isabel García Baños CEO and co-founder of Bleta
Another day begins at Bleta. The project has me completely hooked, and it has been our routine for a while now. So what is Bleta?
Let’s start at the beginning.
It was March 2020 and we were on our way back from Australia. Beside me on the plane, Adrià, our CTO. The last few days had been unreal: EarthTech had given us the chance to go to Makepeace Island, a paradise, to learn from the best and pitch the Eways project to investors, after being picked as one of the startups with the greatest potential for positive impact. That experience will stay with us forever.
We land in Singapore and odd things start happening: temperature checks and face masks; we do not quite understand. When we get to Barcelona the rest of the team is there with a plan already in motion: this does not look good, we are off to a house in the mountains to sit out a possible quarantine together. Then it happens, everything closes, and we do not know it yet, but we will be living together for the next two months.
“We want to do our bit in this emergency.”
Another unreal experience begins. We keep working on Eways, extending the working life of electronic devices, but the bad news does not stop. It feels strange to be working on something so far removed from what is happening. One day we make a decision: we want to do our bit in this emergency.
The idea is straightforward: we have second-hand electronic devices that could let people in isolation talk to their families. Is anyone doing that already? A full day on the phone and we have a handful of allies: other groups with the same idea, a wholly committed Col·legi de Metges de Barcelona, organisations that refurbish devices, and individuals and companies willing to donate them. The plan begins; the #acércales initiative begins.
We build the website and send a message to all our contacts: we need their help. Several partners join the initiative and we get support for logistics, advertising and a movement permit, as well as funding from the UPC, the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, to carry the project out. Everything is under way. The next month will be twelve-hour days refurbishing devices and taking them to hospitals and care homes. In all, more than 650 devices donated and put to use so that at least some people can feel closer to their families.
We start ringing the care homes to see how the devices are doing, and the answer is unanimous: THANK YOU. Do the devices work well? Tablets work best, but people still need someone alongside them, because they do not understand them; they cannot even make out the icons and the type. And there it is, right in front of us: a real need. We were not even looking for it, we were deep in Eways.
“The response is overwhelming: the frustration of using the tablet is gone.”
We look for something that already exists to make them more intuitive, and we find nothing. We decide to build a small stopgap prototype: a screen with six large icons and enormous type. The response is overwhelming: the frustration of using the tablet is gone; now people want it all the time. We cannot ignore that. We get home and someone says: “We have to make tablets for older people.” Without knowing it, that was the first definition of Bleta.
