Alertacall makes company acquisition look like a “Dodl”

Alertacall is pleased to announce its recent acquisition of Cambridge based “Dodl Ltd”, a company founded by Dr Michael Pedersen (formerly a team member at Microsoft Research) to create elegant and easy to use software for Android tablets that makes it simple – “a Dodl” – for older people to receive images, videos and other messages from their family members.

Dodl Ltd had already worked with Alertacall to develop key intellectual property to use in Alertacall’s own products and such was the success of those projects that it became obvious that a coming together of both companies would allow their respective investments in these kind of technologies for older people to reach a much larger audience.

James Batchelor, CEO of Alertacall said “It’s been a pleasure working with Dodl over the last year and this just seemed like an obvious step, we’re all very excited about this because some of the intellectual property that comes as part of this deal will enable us to take a different approach to some of our core projects, it will also accelerate some aspects of product development.”

He added “Ultimately we are confident it will mean our tablet based offerings, all of which include our unique approach to daily contact will be amongst the best offerings in the world for organisations that house or support older people.”

Dr Michael Pedersen founded Dodl Ltd after becoming frustrated at the existing applications available for communicating with older people via tablets.

He said “Keen to send family pictures, updates and other information to my own grandmother I took it upon myself to create something that was incredibly easy for her and the rest of my family to use. I felt that whilst there were many applications out there, most were too complicated, and too fussy. A lot of work has gone in to the Dodl interface to make it as simple as possible – and it worked incredibly well for my own grandmother. It was an obvious opportunity so we built a company around the idea and created a system that would scale to tens of thousands of users.”

He added “The sale of the company to Alertacall is excellent, because I am keen that as many people as possible use what we have created and understanding Alertacall’s strategy and passion for improving contact with people – I’m very confident that it’s in good hands”