Episode 229: Tablet Command: Rethinking Incident Command with Operationally Relevant Technology with Will Pigeon

Episode notes

Accountability in the fire service means knowing what you're accounting for, where you are, where your crew is, and what's going on around you. Here's how Tablet Command can help:

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

In this episode:

How does Tablet Command integrate with CADs and provide early notifications, customized maps, and staffing solutions for firefighters?

How does Tablet Command enhance collaboration and information sharing?

Tablet Command aims to become the standard MDT solution for the fire service, revolutionizing incident command with technology.

Learn from Will Pigeon - CEO and Co-founder of Tablet Command .

Tablet Command, an incident command application, started as a standalone app for the iPad, allowing users to manage resources and view them on a map. Since its 2013 launch, it has evolved to integrate with CADs, provide early notifications to firefighters, offer customized maps, and integrate with staffing solutions.

The app addresses challenges like managing high-rise incidents and ensuring accountability. Future features include incident sharing and ongoing improvements for enhanced user experience. Tablet Command enables real-time incident sharing between communication centers, aiding collaboration in mutual aid situations. It also offers in-app audio streaming, allowing users to stay informed even without a radio.

The company aims to become a standard MDT solution for the fire service, integrating with different CAD vendors for a unified tactical operations platform.

So click play now to hear what Will has to share!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

1. 0:00 Kevin's intro
2. 0:50 Will's background and why Tablet Command
3. 4:37 From an iPad app to an integrated platform
4. 11:52 Getting departments to adopt new technology
5. 15:19 Tech that frees up mental bandwidth
6. 19:34 Features built by firefighters
7. 22:59 Tablet Command in high-rise operations
8. 26:55 The vision for the next five to ten years
9. 31:01 Keeping the interface simple
10. 34:29 What accountability means on the fireground
11. 39:00 Why more agencies don't use it yet
12. 45:40 Upcoming events: Metro Chiefs and TSI
13. 47:51 Will's parting thoughts
14. 51:06 Outro

Questions answered in this episode

What inspired the creation of Tablet Command?

Will Pigeon says Tablet Command was inspired by two things: a 2007 line of duty death in Contra Costa County that sparked conversations about accountability and incident command, and co-founder Andy Bozo playing Words with Friends on an iPad. Andy realized he could drag units with personnel counts instead of letters with points, and share that in real time, just like the game did with a player in Texas.

Hear it at 1:32

How does Tablet Command reduce response times?

Will Pigeon says Tablet Command provides early notification to firefighters through a mobile app as soon as the call type and address are verified by dispatch, which is earlier than station alerting in some cases. For some metro departments, this has decreased turnout times because firefighters can start walking to the rig when they see the address and call type.

Hear it at 5:40

What is incident sharing and why is it important?

Incident sharing is a beta feature that allows two communication centers to share an incident between Tablet Command accounts in real time based on predefined rules. Will Pigeon says it solves the problem of mutual aid responses where crews only get minimal information like call type and a note. With incident sharing, crews see all the CAD details, assigned units, and channels from the other comm center.

Hear it at 26:55

Why did Tablet Command keep the user interface the same for every agency?

Will Pigeon says keeping the UI standard means a firefighter covering a line of duty death in another jurisdiction can show up, see Tablet Command, and within five minutes feel comfortable running structure fires. The consistency reduces anxiety and creates what he believes is becoming a standard MDT solution for the fire service.

Hear it at 31:29

What is Will Pigeon's advice on using technology in the fire service?

He says firefighters should not become so dependent on technology that they cannot revert to basics. He gives the example of always knowing how to read a map instead of just following turn by turn directions, so you understand the orientation of the incident and can adapt if the technology fails.

Hear it at 47:51

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 229 transcript

Tablet Command: Rethinking Incident Command with Operationally Relevant Technology with Will Pigeon

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Will Pigeon

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Welcome to the Smart Firefighting Podcast. Today, we're excited to have Will Pigeon, the CEO and co-founder of Tablet Command. Will's extensive fire service and technology background has driven Tablet Command to rethink incident command with operationally relevant technology. Join us as we dive into how Tablet Command integrates with CADs, provides real-time incident sharing, and aims to become the standard MDT solution for the fire service, transforming emergency response and incident management. Enjoy the show. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Smart Firefighting Podcast. Today, we're fired up and joined with the CEO and co-founder of Tablet Command, Will Pigeon. Will, how are you doing today?

[0:46] Will Pigeon: Doing well, Kevin, thank you so much for having me on this podcast. This is awesome.

[0:50] Kevin Sofen: Man, we're fired up to have you. And I've been tracking you kind of being in the technology space within public safety for quite some time now. And you always kind of hear a Tablet Command, like little murmurs over here, and Tablet Command this. But it's always kind of like in the background. And I think you've done a good job of continuing to build up a company and a product and really a solution that brings value. And selfishly, I'm just very excited to learn more and dive into some of what you've done and share that with our fellow entrepreneurs, as well as industry to learn more about you. So I think for maybe some of those that have been living under a rock, though, and maybe aren't 100% familiar with Tablet Command, give us a little bit of a high level, who, what, when, where, why Tablet Command?

[1:32] Will Pigeon: Yeah, great question. So who, what, where, why, how. Let's see. I started in the fire service back in 1998 and I went to work as part of my career to Contra Costa County Fire in 2005 and Andy Bozo, the other co-founder of Tablet Command came to work I think in like 2006, 2007 with Contra Costa as well. In 2007, Contra Costa suffered for the first time a line of duty death. We had two line of duty deaths on July 21st, 2007, Matt and Scott Desmond, Matt Burton. They were trying to rescue a elderly couple in about a thousand square foot house on the west side of Contra Costa County. And everyone perished in that fire. And in any department, it starts a lot of conversation in terms of, you know, battalion chiefs, chief officers, company officers of what could be done differently. Of course, we have the reports that were done, but as a part of that, it inspired a lot of conversation inside the department in terms of accountability and incident command and those types of things. At the time, Andy came from the Pacific Northwest Tacoma Fire Department. And so, the department was asking, chief officers were asking him, hey, tell us what you did for accountability up there. And so, it was believed Tacoma at the time was using clip-on tags. So, you clip, show up to the command post and you clip on your tag that you would carry with you. So, he gave a class on their policy and procedure for that. But it got Andy thinking about accountability. In 2007, also the day before I was married, the iPhone was released. And then about 2009, the iPad was released. And so, Andy was playing Words with Friends and he was dragging essentially a letter out to the board and it had a point score associated with it. He was He was dragging out to the board could be, and he had this epiphany, why can't this be an engine company that I'm dragging out with three personnels instead of the points? And he was playing with somebody in Texas at the time and they were seeing what he was doing in real time. And again, I'm thinking like, oh, wow, I can't see the whiteboard, command board across the street, but I can play Words With Friends in real time with somebody in Texas. And so, with that and the culmination of the iPad and Andy and I working together on another project inside the department, that's what kind of inspired Tablet Command. So Tablet Command started off as a standalone application for the iPad, as an incident command application. So imagine you're a tactical worksheet, or maybe what you're managing on a legal pad or on a whiteboard, or potentially in your head for a first alarm structure assignment. That's what Tablet Command is. It's basically allowing you to assign those resources, see it on a map, but also on a whiteboard and drag those units, those tiles out to a board. We started back in 2013 as a standalone application and since then we've completely evolved and now everyone in the department can see it in real time. So that's kind of just a background and we record everything in terms of timestamp, your activity record, we're able to provide checklists and templates based off your operating procedures and guidelines. That's kind of what it is in a nutshell in terms of Tablet Command.

[4:37] Kevin Sofen: I feel like most good things in life all start with a board game or a game somewhere and to hear the words with friends inspiring. I look forward to hearing the entrepreneurs are inspired by Wordle somehow to see what that may be inspired. But totally, we've heard this dynamic in the fire service of where, oh, well, this exists with Uber, this exists with these other industries, but it doesn't exist in the fire service. And you've done a good job of creating something that was this capability that consumers were familiar with and applying that to the fire service. And you mentioned this sort of now standalone tool around accountability, but the standalone itself was, if anything, it's great, but it still kind of lives in silos. How have you now continued to evolve this kind of integration into Tablet Command to where it's not just a drag and drop tool, kind of a digital whiteboard, which again is value itself, but tell me more about sort of the, this kind of tech integration evolution from 2013 to where you are now.

[5:40] Will Pigeon: quick question. So for those that don't have are not Tablet Command customers, you can still download the standalone application on from the App Store for iPad today. So we want to still give that to people that may need an incident command solution. But when we launched in 2013, early 2013, we launched on the App Store, we took it to an IAFC innovations conference where we had a presentation at that conference, and we had a small conference room of like, fits like 25 people in it. And we filled the room and it was tearing at the seams to the point where we had fire chiefs in the hallway, literally with the doors open, standing out in the hallway, there was no room. The feedback when we first presented that and some of the feedback from our early users was that we needed to do the CAD integration. We needed to get that 911 data that are on their MDTs or that are in the center and be able to populate things like lat and long address, call type, units assigned into our application. Because the standalone application, you have to do that all manually. Meaning you have to type in engine one and select engine one, engine two, engine three, and choose the address. So it's like a white sheet or a white paper, excuse me, a tactical worksheet or a white legal pad with the standalone version. So in 2014, we launched an API and we built some middleware working with a very friendly department to build that first integration. Since then, integration with CADs, people always say, oh, you're not going to be able to integrate with this CAD, can't do it with this CAD. As long as we have the willingness from the department and the agency to do the integration, there's not a CAD that we cannot integrate with. I can tell you a story. We just integrated with a very legacy kind of text-based CAD out of California. We did the custom integration ourselves and it's proven to be super successful. So we've become essentially one of our core competencies is our middleware integrations team, where they're able to integrate into those different CADs. So whether it be Motorola, Central Square, Hexagon, Mark 43, which is a cloud-based CAD, we can integrate with all those different CADs. Since we did the CAD integration, we started to add values as like early notification. So we provide early notification to firefighters with our mobile application. We have a phone application for Android and iPhone, which allows firefighters, engineers, captains, chief officers, duty chiefs, to be able to see and receive notifications early, earlier than station alerting in some cases, because what we do is once the call type is verified by the dispatch center and the address is verified by the dispatch center, we're sending out those notifications to people in the field. So, they get that early situational awareness notification. It's decreased for some of our larger, like some metros, it's decreased their get-out times, their shoot times. So, they're seeing a drop of shoot times where firefighters are walking through the engine because firefighters know better than even potentially the dispatch center or the dispatcher. If they see an address in a call type or a structure fire, whether that's in their first due or whether that's in and they're next to, they're going to be able to start walking towards the rig. And then, still mastering the CAD integrations, we've added value, other things like customized maps. So we partnered with the Esri Silver partners, so basically GIS department or agency can bring on their customized maps that are hosted in ArcGIS Online, they're in the same file format that the GIS departments used to dealing with. So that could be hydrants, pre-planned locations, jurisdictional boundaries, traffic cameras. you see all that data in Tablet Command in the maps. And then also staffing integrations. That's another thing that we integrate with is we're able to integrate with you name it, Telestaff on-prem, Telestaff in the cloud, CruiseSense vector solutions, Aladtech, all these different staffing solutions. We can integrate with that to try to provide accountability and match up who's on engine one at that time. And then also vehicle location integrations. So we can integrate with CAD vehicle locations. We can take locations from our iPads and Tablet Command. We can integrate with the vehicle modems. So it's been, we've gone from a company that started as a standalone application, which is very important. Because, in terms of failure, we're from the fire service, and I have a background in technology, but we understand how technology can fail. From the Comm Center failing their network connection, which I'm sure some of our listeners have experienced, to the CAD going down, to Verizon or AT&T or FirstNet going down in some regions. So we understand that failure can happen. And that's why we started as a standalone application. So we're device first. So basically, if you're managing an incident on our device, you may not get updates because the comp center's dropped, but you can still drag unit resources out there. So ultimately, we got from a standalone application to data systems integrator with the 911 center, early notification, and then everything that you're doing in that application is shared with everyone in the department in real time. And I mean real time. So if you're dragging a unit out, it's as fast as the bits can travel. You're getting that update. And then today, in terms of what we're doing, I mean, we're also integrating from the evolution of Tablet Command. We're also working with a lot of providers now in terms of different vendors, and we're starting to get into the space of actually providing them that real-time data as well. Trying to be better partners with our customers because they want to integrate with other solutions and we totally understand that and we want to be able to provide that data to them a little bit easier than some of, you know, some of your listeners I'm sure are familiar with some of the CAD vendors. There's very large companies, there's big price tags attached with it, big IT departments, big comm centers or police departments, you know, that from an IT or a city governance standpoint might get in the way in terms of integration. We're able to, with, of course, customer opting in, we could, you know, potentially we're getting into data sharing with some of our partners as well, so hopefully that kind of gives you a full evolution of the company.

[11:52] Kevin Sofen: Very much so. I mean, I'm taking notes here and only have like half a page of scribbled notes of continued things I want to dive into, but one, I hate this phrase and I sometimes bring it up, but that the age-old phrase of a hundred years of tradition unimpeded by progress, I know it's like saying Voldemort and it's like a terrible phrase. Having said that, it's still, I know there's sometimes this reluctance of like, well, the pen and paper and the whiteboard, I can touch it, I feel it, I know it works. What's been some of your experiences, especially being in the fire service and being sort of a technologist, entrepreneur, fire service member, kind of hybrid combo, which is just awesome, just combo. How have you sort of overcome this like, hey, like, let's, let's embrace this in kind of a crawl, walk, run mentality and maybe any sort of initial sort of success cases from some of these end users that have started to embrace, adopt and really fully leverage this accountability software?

[12:46] Will Pigeon: Yeah, look, the fire departments across the United States, and I'm sure that the globe are all, you know, we have a way of doing things because we do it that's based off tradition or success or failures and we change things. And so, we have that tradition, if you will, or that way of doing things and to introduce a new technology to an industry like the fire service, I can tell you was, it was not, it's not easy. And there's been, you know, there's been also a cultural shift from a technology standpoint in the fire service in general as well. But when we first started, we had the naysayers to say things like, no, there's no way I'm good with my pen and paper, or I can manage an incident in my head, I don't need this technology or people that are fearful of technology saying, oh, that thing is going to turn off or I'm not going to be able to use it or I'm going to drop it. So you have that, but in terms of success cases, I was riding along very early on, I to say 2014 or 2015 with one of our first full customers. And I was right along with the battalion chief and it was a very busy metropolitan department. They called him the Detroit of California, which is in the city of Stockton. So they burned a lot. And I remember being in the car with him, the battalion chief, and he was using Tablet Command and we pull up to the incident and I think we were the first BC on scene. They dispatched two BCs to residential structure fire, crews are going to work, we're parked maybe one house away on the street, we've got a visual and he stayed in the car to manage the incident. And I remember him dragging stuff on Tablet Command and he looked over at me after about two minutes of making just a couple of calls on the radio and he said, that's basically it. He almost felt like he was bored because there wasn't too much to do because he didn't have to write down the units. He didn't have to transpose those from the MDT. He didn't have to get a roll call from the comp center on who's his alarm. Whatever the system is, the units are just instantly available on the tablet. It's simply just dragging and dropping to a quickly referenced template or your checklist to however you want to manage your incident. And I don't want to say that he was bored, but he then could now focus on the incident. He felt like he could accomplish more quickly with the tablet as opposed to his previous systems of referencing different things at the back of the command board or whatever those systems may be.

[15:19] Kevin Sofen: Diving to that point more, I mean, I think so much of tech is that it's supposed to help us. It's supposed to make life a little bit better. It's supposed to save a little bit of time. It's supposed to reduce a little bit of manual labor. And it's not, I know, like when I worked with Darley full time, the conversation at some points was, especially with the introduction of compressed air foam systems, this kind of, hey, this is going to, you know, displace our job. If it's going to require less manpower, less power to be able to put out this fire, you're not going to need as many fire service members. And it's really not the case. Really, the point of the technology is to allow you to ideally free up bandwidth so you can focus on the other task at hand. What would you say to that kind of idea of, again, not displacing fire service members, but instead trying reduce some of the unnecessary tasks you could focus your mental bandwidth on something else.

[16:08] Will Pigeon: Yeah, I totally completely agree. And I understand the fear that it could potentially reduce the number of firefighters, if you will. But that's just not true. I mean, from my experience of being in the fire service for 22 years is the agency size or the number of firefighters per capita really kind of maintained the same since like the 80s. And so, I think the technology since it's been coming out, since like whether it be an SCBA, turnouts, faster engines, pumping more, what we've done is we're just barely keeping up with... My department never really added firefighters until recently in the last couple of years. And I think that's probably the case with most agencies is that their call volume has gone up by likely 4% per year per annual, and they still probably have the same number of firefighters that they had maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago. I would say that Tablet Command allows an incident commander to provide people. This is actually, Kevin, one thing I want to mention is people say, oh, it's a distraction. You're causing me to look at an iPad. I'm focusing on that. And I get that. I had that same experience when PCRs were digital, just digitized is you're spending a lot of time trying to figure out the UI, Tablet Command at a core for value of a product and a company, we don't want them to look at the iPad. We want it to be as simple as possible so that they're able to focus on the incident. Let me give you one example. If you listen to any radio traffic, which I'm sure you have for on any multiple alarm incident, a lot of times what you'll hear either on a large structure fire response or a wildland response, you'll hear a battalion chief or somebody operating at the command post, hey, give me a rundown who's on my second alarm or greater alarm on my third alarm. That conversation on the radio takes 60 seconds to go through a second alarm on the back and forth, hailing the comm center, waiting for the response, going through all those resources. Then you're writing those down in handwriting. By the way, you're stressed out and I'm sure there's five other things that are happening at the command post. And now you're focusing on that, of writing down that second alarm versus Tablet Command. in the application. We have the CAD integration, they're adding a second alarm. If a unit's swapped out because it's closer, you didn't necessarily hear that traffic or couldn't account for it, they swap it out automatically. It's swapping out with the CAD. So it's just simply a drag and drop. Hopefully that kind of answers what your question is.

[18:41] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think, again, we could be going in a lot of different directions here and bringing value to listeners. So thanks for that context. And as you were talking It also made me think as I'm following Tablet Command on LinkedIn, I do see that you do a great job of continuously updating, continuously innovating, continuously, again, it's a software. So whether you're doing patches and fixing bugs or just making the software better, tell me a little bit more about that ongoing iteration, user feedback, and how that ties into some of your latest feature updates and kind of making sure that, again, it's not just like this clunky digital tablet that you have to use. It's more of a, hey, this is a seamless piece of technology that is saving you time and allowing you to run operations more effectively.

[19:34] Will Pigeon: Yeah, in terms of the features, predominantly a lot of the company, including myself, are either current or former fire service for public safety team members. So to give you, where do the features come from in terms of continuing to innovate. Like one of the features came from, which is AVL sharing, which we launched back in 2018, which has changed the game for the fire service in terms of AutoA to be able to see those. location of those resources. It came from a call I was operating on as a new captain. I was on an adjacent county immediate need strike team for wind driven fire with structures involved. And all I got was the radio channel, the incident commanders, the IC's name, and the off-ramp that I had to be on. That was it. I had no other intel. And so that feature came from just me being in the fire service and knowing what kind of value it would be just to see the other vehicles and locations of those vehicles and that other comp center. And to give you some other examples, we get a lot of feature requests from customers in terms of ideas. And I think the difference between Tablet Command and another company, what sets us apart, is that we've lived the job, whether it be fire, public safety, law enforcement, we've lived the job, and we're gonna hear that feature request and we're gonna kind of noodle on it, if you will, and bounce it around and say, oh, maybe that's not the best way, maybe there's a better way to do what they're actually asking for. Giving an example, we had a large metropolitan department in California that was up for RFP, went out for RFP. In the RFP, they said that they wanted an acknowledge button. They wanted actually three acknowledge buttons. They wanted COVID, stage, and they wanted one for drawing a blank right now. They essentially wanted three acknowledge buttons that they wanted to be able to hit in our application. That was part of the RFP that they wanted. So we read that and knowing, you know, with our background in the fire service, we pushed back and said, no, we're not going to do three buttons. We're going to actually make it better so that you can make it an acknowledged button on anything that you write in CAD. And so the acknowledged button that we have today is basically allows any communication center, any dispatcher to either have a note that's wrapped by a certain number of symbols. For example, star stage or star rescue, apartment 213, star. And when that happens, it prompts all the units that are assigned on that incident in Tablet Command to pop up, it brings a pop up to them elegantly and requires them to acknowledge that. So we're just constantly, we also hear feature requests from people and they'll say, actually it was the same metropolitan agency, they basically said, hey, what about this feature request? few months ago or whatever. And we said, well, that sounds more like a training issue that you have with your captains. And then they said, yeah, you're right. And so, we wouldn't take that in as a feature. So, we're always constantly trying to bring more and more value to the application. Just to give you another example of a feature that we just recently added based off user feedback was a number of agencies on the eastern side of the United States, of course, or any large metro have high rises. So, they're managing stuff vertically in a building. So based off user feedback, we've modified the UI to be able to shift that units column essentially into floors of the building, if you will. So we're constantly listening to users, but we're always vetting those features based off our industry experience and also what would be better for all of our customers as well.

[22:59] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, I saw you speaking at the High-Rise Summit. I think that was kind of the pre-con FDIC or there's something like that, but I'm interested in vertical structures. And granted, There's a wildland conversation and an urban conversation, and there's a lot of overlap here, but I'm interested in from a vertical structure, whether it's a three, just like a standard residential house, to a mid-rise, to a high-rise. What are some of the unique challenges that presents for incident command operations, and how do you see Tablet Command as serving as kind of a piece of the puzzle that helps ensure the most efficient, seamless, safe operations?

[23:39] Will Pigeon: In terms of high-rise?

[23:40] Kevin Sofen: In terms of high-rise, yeah.

[23:42] Will Pigeon: Yeah. So first off, one of the value adds in terms of high-rise is high-rise, at least coming from my agency, during my career, they upped the response on a high-rise response to from a commercial alarm to essentially a high-rise response, which I think a lot of agencies actually augment additional resources on a working high-rise fire. It's a very complex thing. It's a very dangerous thing. It's also very, it's a high risk, but low frequency, or at least it is predominantly on the West Coast and from my experience. So just in terms of resource management, you can look at some of our videos online, but if you put five alarm, so let's say 35, 45 units in Tablet Command, fairly easy to manage. And I know that sounds crazy, but in terms of like, once you start dragging and dropping those resources out to those different divisions as you're managing it at a high rise, it's pretty seamless. units show up and it's just drag and drop. Another thing, when I was a chief officer, or when I was a company officer, one of the things that I always had anxiety about, which I don't think a lot of professionals admit in the fire service, is making sure that they're checking all those benchmarks or checking all those things that they need to accomplish on the incident, whether it be from doing a 360, establishing command, hitting their water supply, those type of things. On a bread and butter fire, those are going through when we're doing all the simulations and we're doing training and preparing for being a company or chief officer. That happens all the time. But it's the ones that are low risk that I think created anxiety for me. And so, having that standard operating checklist available that you could reference when you can take a breath on the radio and see that you miss certain things in terms of assigning somebody to systems or assigning somebody to lobby or a fast attack or rescue team, assigning them to a stairwell. So, you can reference that comfortably, just like a pilot will reference a checklist for an engine failure, you could reference that in Tablet Command. And going forward, I think we're continuing to look at the whole high-rise piece. It's a very complex incident. One of the first things that we did was just rotating. And we've already gotten feedback that from a vertical management standpoint of dragging those two floors of a building, if you will, has been a huge value add to them. Yeah, that's all I can think of right off the top of my head.

[26:10] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, that's helpful context. I mean, you do a good job, I guess, keeping your ears to the streets on what first responders, what their challenges are and what they need. Granted, it's May 2024, and it seems like you've continued to have a lot of these integrations from adapting to the vertical buildings, CAD, MDT, units assigned, this new acknowledged button. A two-part question, what are some wishlist features? Maybe not all is possible to say yet, but are there any kind of features that you're excited about in the future that maybe kind of current future customers should be aware of? And even partly that and the question of, what do you see is the division like the, where do you see yourself in 10 years type, the vision for Tablet Command in five, 10 years from now?

[26:55] Will Pigeon: Yeah, I have to be cautious about sharing features that haven't been released versus what's new and what's kind of imminent just from a IP protection standpoint. But one of the features that we are really excited about, which we're just starting to beta test right now, is something called incident sharing. So we have a feature that we launched in 2018 called AVL sharing or vehicle location sharing. So that feature was, you know, you have the locations of your vehicles inside your comp center, whichever one's used to seeing. But then what we did is we allow multiple comp centers to share with other Tablet Command customers. So if you're on an auto-aid incident, whether it be on a vehicle accident on a freeway that's intersecting two comm center jurisdictions, or whether it be a huge campaign fire, you're able to see those vehicle locations. One of the things that we're working on right now, like I just started with, was incident sharing. So having two communication centers be able to share an incident into another Tablet Command account in real time based off certain rules that the customers would mutually agree to So for example, if you have, and this happens, everyone in the fire service knows that this happened before, but if you have, essentially you're on the boundary of a communication center or your jurisdiction, and you're going into a neighboring jurisdiction for mutual or auto aid, you don't have details. You don't have what you're going to. So the communication center will dispatch you as mutual aid requests will be the call type for engine one, and they'll put one note in on the call. That's all you have. they might tell you the TAC channel and all that stuff. What we've built is the ability to, and I don't want to say it's a CAD to CAD, it's no CAD to CAD, but it allows two agencies to basically share an incident between each other on predefined rules. So if that engine one is named in that foreign or that neighboring comp center, the incident immediately pops up for that company inside of that Tablet Command account. So they have all the same details, they have all the same channels. They have the units that are assigned, essentially the same CAD details that are coming from that other communication center. We're really excited about that. I think that's gonna be a game changer. I think that if cost wasn't an issue, I would guess that 95 or a hundred percent of all communication centers would build CAD to CADs, but there's a huge technical time and money challenge with that. And so what we're seeing is we wanna be able to provide that value to the fire service to make a difference, to either provide early notification so that crews can actually get out the door faster for those auto mutual aid incidents or provide them information that makes them safer. I can't tell you how many times I've been on incidents. I don't even know the fricking tack channel that I'm supposed to be assigned to in that neighboring agency. And I have to call my comm center and ask them to call the neighboring comm center and say, hey, what channel is this incident being run on? That's just, I mean, it's 2024. it's like, we need to knock that stuff off. So we're super excited about that feature. And then another feature that I think really we didn't do a great job of announcing or hasn't taken much traction on is something we launched is in-app audio. So if you have your command tactical channels, you can stream those in-app audio inside your application so that you can listen to multiple channels. I'm sure you're familiar with some of the scanner applications out there where you can select multiple comm centers to listen to. We do the same thing. We can also host it for you. But if you have it on Broadcastify or R Solution, you can listen to multiple channels. So it gives people situation awareness, maybe of their neighboring jurisdiction, or if they're outside of an LMR coverage area, they don't have a radio, they can still listen to that was useful for me. It would have been useful for me if I had that feature when I was a duty chief and I didn't have to get up and go to the kitchen and listen to my portable radio. And I could have just popped my headphones in and stayed in bed and listened to what's going on. So those are a couple of features that come to the top of my mind.

[31:01] Kevin Sofen: Love it. I mean, nothing like developing a product for yourself. If you're truly going to be the user, you know it's going to be good. And to that second part of the question, I get good features and I realize you can't touch it all, but maybe even kind of a macro 30,000 foot view of what do you see, where do you see Tablet Command in 10 years and what is your vision for how you'll continue to positively impact the fire service?

[31:29] Will Pigeon: Yeah, good question. Sorry for not touching on that. You know, what we've had is we've kept the UI. You know, a lot of MDT solutions out there, they are customizable, they're changeable, where, you know, each deployment of a different CAD MDT can change what it is, depending on the vendor and all that stuff. One of the things that we've held true is that we keep it, not standard, but we keep Tablet Commands in terms of the feature set, the same for every agency. Of course, certain agencies may not have in-app audio or certain functionality like the acknowledge button or staticing. But one of the things that we've learned is that customers have taken Tablet Command and they've gone to cover a line of duty death in another comm center, and they show up, and they have Tablet Command. And all of their anxiety goes away, and they're instantly able to run structure fires within five minutes of being assigned to a line of duty for coverage, for example. I think that the reason I bring that up is I think that Tablet Command has created essentially based off our user experience and our users feedback, a simple user interface that has created almost a standard MDT solution really for the fire service. There's MDTs out there and MDTs any CAD vendor will go after predominantly it's law enforcement is one driving in terms of the feature set, but it's also customers and tweaking those things. Tablet Command has gone to become almost a standard. I think in 10 years, I think Tablet Command will become a standard MDT solution. It'll become a normal thing that a CAD vendor can integrate with Tablet Command and that would be their MDT solution. We've had customers say, I don't care what CAD vendor the Comp Center chooses as long as I have Tablet Command. I think that's where it's going to be and I think we'll have, in 10 years from now, we'll essentially create a platform that fire, law enforcement, EMS are all operating on from a tactical standpoint, and having essentially the same access to the data with disparate solutions, because that's what it is today. It's disparate pre-planned solutions, disparate staffing solutions, disparate CAD vendors. Everyone's operating essentially in their own thing with, you know, they're just worried about themselves. We are worried about basically integrating with all the solutions and bringing that standard to the forefront, to the users in the field that matter to make a difference. I mean, to have somebody show up to cover another jurisdiction on a line of duty death and within five minutes feel comfortable running responses on a structure fire, that's like, that's game changing. So that's where I think we'll be in 10 years. And we'll also be great at data integration. I mean, our integration team is absolutely phenomenal in terms of understanding the different CADs, the different staffing solutions. We've gained tremendous experience with our small team that we have. That's one of our core competencies as well. I think Tablet Command will also become like a real-time data hub as well for these CAD integrations. Integrate to Tablet Command and you can integrate to anything else.

[34:29] Kevin Sofen: I love it, Will. And actually, as you were talking about this one thing that if you have a tagline for Tablet Command, but I wrote, Tablet Command, reduce your fire ground anxiety, a little trademark there if you don't have it. But it's true. like it gives a lot, it gives a peace of mind where you kind of have an operational picture of what the heck is going on and you know that kind of wanted to parlay into this next question of this, you mentioned of this anxiety that you have when you're on the fire ground and whether a first responder goes in the building you don't know where they are from individual accountability or even which radio channel to be on and some of these mundane things but in your words and this may sound like a kind of a Freakonomics 101 basic kind of think like a kid type question but like in Will Pigeon's words like what is accountability from a fire perspective fire captain perspective maybe that's different for the different titles but in your words what does accountability mean to you?

[35:28] Will Pigeon: Yeah I think for me accountability when I'm thinking about the fire ground being either a company or chief officer is I know what I'm accounting for what I'm going to where I am and where my crew is. That's number one, that's from an accountability standpoint. But also, what's going on around me, I think you should be accountable for that as well, in terms of where other crews are operating, where of course your personnel and crew are operating and what the situation is. You have to account for all those different things. When you talk about accountability, we're getting into now, there's vendors in the space that are doing personnel tracking and being able to see what person to that level of accountability. I think that's important as well, but it's important. You have to be careful in terms of information overload, in terms of being able to track. Everyone says they want personnel location on a map, and I totally agree with it. And we're talking with solutions like Scent and other solutions, Somewhere Labs, these other providers out there in terms of accounting for firefighter location. But when you ask the question to an instant commander, do you want 200 dots on your map, they're gonna be like, no. So but you have to think about that from an accountability stamp, not accountability, but essentially firefighter location tracking. I'm sorry, I'm getting on a tangent here. That's what this is for. Okay. So, but that's accountability, you know, being accountable, of course, to yourself, your crew, and then also those around you in terms of what's accounting for everything. Of course, it's, you know, when we talk about accountability, though, it's, it's typically looked at it from the company, from the company officer, from the From the chief officer's perspective, I want to say there should be accountability for the firefighter in terms of knowing where they are, what they're getting into, and who they're operating around and who they're working for, right? Goes both ways. So, we put a lot of emphasis, I think, on accountability and the term. From a chief officer's perspective, there's a lot of responsibility for accountability. It goes throughout the whole workforce in terms of who's accounting for who, if that makes sense.

[37:33] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, absolutely. And I've heard other mentors of mine in this space, particularly one being John Tippett from National Fallen Firefighter Foundation, and he had mentioned just the idea of when first responders go in the building, when you don't have any knowledge or accountability of where they are, you're kind of just relying on hope. And hope isn't really always a winning strategy.

[37:58] Will Pigeon: I just want to comment, sorry to interrupt you, Kevin, I think that's important. Because when an incident commander is trying... When you're going to a building, a crew's operating in a building, and an incident commander standing outside, there's that... We talk about this anxiety, and it's nervousness or whatever, but it's healthy. It's making sure you're trying to account for those people, know what's going on. And when you said going into a building and operating inside a building, I think it's also important for a firefighter or crew to even tell the chief officer, hey, this is one, we're going to the second floor. I mean, that's important in terms of, you know, what's your last location is, as well. And even that radio traffic is important. I mean, we may not be able to get, hopefully these companies will be able to figure out firefighter location tracking inside of a building. And I think they're close. But even if we're not, we still can communicate on the radio, hey, I'm going to the second floor, or I'm not going to, you know, I'm going back to the first floor. That's useful in itself. Sorry, I just had that little epiphany. I just wanted to share that. I apologize.

[39:00] Kevin Sofen: what it's for. I mean, I appreciate the context well, and again, what I like about what you've done with Tablet Command is that it is sort of this interactive dynamic like octopus in the sense of like it's just kind of got these different tentacles bringing in different pieces and ideally making it being this common operating platform, common operating picture that just is like simple, easy to use. And to me, I kind of sit here being like, well, a barrier from getting adoption from 30,000 fire departments. And granted, we had mentioned that quote earlier, but you did mention there's like kind of a free option, which I'm intrigued to hear a little bit more and I'd love for you to touch on that. But like, what are any other kind of like, what do you see as the biggest barriers to continuing to integrate this kind of modern age form of accountability within public safety?

[39:50] Will Pigeon: Yeah, you know, first off, I think it's agencies just don't know about Tablet Command. Of course, there's, you know, if an agency has... Tablet Command. They train with neighboring agencies. So, the word gets out that way. Tablet Command tries to do media outreach. We go to FDIC, but I think predominantly it's a lot of agencies throughout North America don't know about Tablet Command. So, that's the first problem with adoption. And for an agency to come on, you still have the naysayers in terms of technology and the industry is shifting, but you still have people that would They say things like, I can manage an incident just fine in my head on a single-arm incident or a two-alarm or three-alarm incident. I applaud those guys that are in the fire service and those women in the fire service, they're able to do that. So I think there's still that reluctance that I want to use a piece of paper. I want to do it in my head because that's what I've trained on for so long. And in terms of implementation and training, the most successful implementations that I have seen in terms of customer deployments have been the agencies that are all in, the ones that have this from the battalion chiefs that are wanting this, to the officer chief, to the firefighter, and it becomes a cultural thing. And the examples I'm going to give are customer Tablet Command agencies or customers where they bring Tablet Command from an incident command solution into their promotional process. So you have engineers using the application as an MDT to captains preparing for the battalion chief's test. It's part of the process all the way into the promotional exam. And we have a couple of customers that have actually said as a matter of policy from an operating policy standpoint, either guideline or standard operating procedure, excuse me, Tablet Command will be used with any units two or more greater on an incident. Those are the ones that I see are the most successful in terms of like training and adoption and implementation. And then one other, and I know you said this is open forum in terms of ideas, one thing I wanted to share from a customer that to counter those that feel comfortable managing incidents in their head, and I applaud you for doing that and it's awesome. But I had somebody, I had a customer that was like a naysayer at first, started using Tablet Command, the battalion chief, again, very busy Metro. And he realized, I can manage this on a piece of paper up to three alarms or whatever, but I'm starting to run out of room in terms of the length of the paper or the whiteboard or the tactical worksheet or whatever it is. He says, as soon as I have like a near-miss event or a mayday or I have a shift in terms of the way the fire is behaving or something like that, I'm behind the ball. Because now I'm managing it on paper, my handwriting is going to be scratched, I have to do all these things. And he says, when I'm managing the full incident, from the first time I arrive on scene until I have that mayday, if I'm managing it in Tablet Command, I'm ready to scale and go with no problem. I know where all my resources are. I know who's on whatever resource. I can just simply just drag and drop them and I can reference that firefighter loss checklist or that mayday kind of instantly. And it was powerful of me to hear that because That's what we intend, but to hear it coming from somebody, you know, a salty battalion chief who I respect immensely in terms of a busy metropolitan department who's able to manage the three alarm incident in their head or just, you know, with a piece of paper, I think he saw the value add, if you will, that if he does have those emergency situations or a shift in an incident, he's not able to scale past that. So.

[43:35] Kevin Sofen: Yeah, that's great to hear. again, this reinforces the term, the idea that risk are dynamic, and the risk change, and especially within the modern-day context of understanding what's even in the building, whether it's a lightweight construction material, is it lithium-ion batteries, is it solar panels. I mean, just all of a sudden, as we know, the situation can change very fast. And while, yes, being able to do another piece of paper is great and impressive, there's also, again, like you talked about, the knowledge sharing and the promotional process and transferring this knowledge, but having a repeatable process that helps you understand, A, what's happening, B, doing Monday morning quarterback, and then C, most importantly, just allowing you to change mid-game. I mean, thinking about sports at halftime, sometimes you have to change your strategy and approach. And you can see my notes here, it's just a bunch of scribbles and whatnot, but if I was calling the shots, I'd like to have it be something that allowed me to be clean and concise and clear, but most importantly, communicate that to someone besides my own brain.

[44:36] Will Pigeon: Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, beyond that piece of paper, think about the value of being able to share all that information to all the responders that are coming to your incident. They're able to see your whiteboard or your thing like a Google Doc, if you will, while they're responding, while they have that three to five minutes of going to the, you know, the captains and company officers are able to see units on the map, the checklist, the status of the checklist, how you're managing the incident, I can't tell you how many times I got up for second or third alarm incidents at two in the morning. I don't know anything that's going on as a company officer, or chief officer, I'm responding to this and I'm trying to piecemeal everything together based off the radio traffic that I hear from that point when the station tones go off until when I'm arriving on scene in terms of staging location. So we're really trying to take all that information and provide it to those units that are responding while they're responding so that they get caught up. They get the CliffsNotes version, if you will. They're not able to listen to all the previous radio traffic, but they can see how the board's being managed and where units are located for staging and all those things. So, no, it's a good point.

[45:40] Kevin Sofen: Man, well said. And so to kind of close us out here, it's May 2024. What's on docket for the rest of the calendar year for Tablet Command? What are some events or some events that you're tracking?

[45:52] Will Pigeon: Yeah, so we'll be at Metro Chief's next week, I'll be at Metro Chief's as well with a couple of our sales folks there, sales executives. And then in terms of other events that we have coming up, we're trying to hit all the big ones. I would, to be honest, I would have to look at a sheet to see what the schedule's like. We were just at FDIC, that was huge success. And let's see what else. Oregon Fire Chiefs, Ontario Fire Chiefs, we were just there. In terms of future events, I'm trying to think, I'd have to, Kevin, you caught me on, I wasn't prepared for this. I didn't have the marketing calendar in front of me.

[46:25] Kevin Sofen: No worries, I know Metro Chiefs is a big deal, that was next week in good old Tulsa, Oklahoma, and this is kind of one that I know you were at last year and I'm starting to probe it now, but the Technology Summit International, TSI, will officially be the first week of December in Oklahoma City, so Oklahoma is trending this year in terms of fire tech, so if it's not officially on your radar, it now is.

[46:53] Will Pigeon: TSI, we will be at TSI. We were at TSI last year and we'll be there this year as well.

[46:57] Kevin Sofen: Thanks for that shout out. Yeah. We definitely need to do a little bit some more round table sessions on implementation of all this stuff because of all the tech and everything as we talked about is great. It really comes down to helping first responders overcome some of these preconceptions of it, maybe not being something that they can use to where these are tools that can be helpful in its simplest form. Yeah, so I guess final thing I'll give you and to kind of drop us off here and I definitely didn't prepare you for this one and maybe you should have, but if you have any sort of a mic drop or and I say mic drop it could be if you have a quote that you live by or a sort of a challenge or a question or it doesn't even have to be related to the fire service or Tablet Command but any sort of parting thoughts of will pigeon ideas or wisdom that you could leave us with here today.

[47:51] Will Pigeon: Yeah. Let's see. One thing is, if you're ever looking at Tablet Command, we integrate with all these different solutions and we'll integrate with anything if it makes sense. So whether it be different vendors in the space, that's one thing I forgot to mention. So I just wanted to highlight that. The other thing I want to mention, which is related to technology is a pet peeve of mine in terms of the fire service. And I know that you probably have shared this, you probably have the same thought, Kevin, is we have a culture now that's gone from when I started, we were writing the incidents down on a piece of paper and a pad and we're looking up in the Thomas Brothers map book on how to get to the call. And now since Tablet Command and these MDT solutions, you're basically just tapping a button on the map and then you follow the blue line and it tells you how to do turn by turn. What I did as a company officer is I never followed the blue line, the turn-by-turn. I would always reverse engineer it and find it on the map and figure out where I'm going and how I'm going to get there. The reason being is I wanted to know orientation of the incident when I got there. But also if the turn-by-turn, my engineer drove by something, I still knew that I could just, you know, hey, no problem, just go around here and I don't have to wait for recalculating. That's one of the things that my... I never thought I'd be a fire chief or a firefighter in the industry having pet peeves in terms of the culture of what's going on with the new fire service today, if you will. But we need to always, and I'm a technologist, we need to always revert back and know how to use a map book or to not always be so dependent upon technology that we're just following the blue line because it's taking us across state lines because that's where the call is, right? If that's the case, Tablet Command would never do that. But I just want to put perspective in the fire service today, since this is a technology podcast, that being a technologist, growing up in the fire service, implementing technology, we still always need to kind of revert back to the basics of like accountability, being able to get... there with looking at a map book and just kind of putting the whole thing in perspective because, you know, some technology may not exist there tomorrow or later today, for example. So that's the only thing I'm going to share, Kevin.

[50:11] Kevin Sofen: I love it. Well, it's still important to remember that the most important tool is this little organ in between our brain or in between our ears and couldn't agree more. While the tech is great, we still need to continue to find the ethical balance of how we're integrating tech into to everything we do. And yeah, well, I just want to say keep going, man. It's really exciting to see Tablet Command be a force for good within the technology integrations ecosystem within public safety. I'm excited about where you're at. I'm really fired up about these other integrations you talked about and how you're going to continue to adapt for not only the wild land, but also urban structures and getting into individual indoor tracking, all stuff that I'm fired up about. And yeah, just on behalf of the industry, keep going, I hope to go work and excited to see what's next.

[50:57] Will Pigeon: Thank you so much, Kevin. It was great being on this podcast. I actually, this is one of my favorite firefighting podcasts, so I've listened to it many times. So thank you for having me.

[51:06] Kevin Sofen: Hey, I appreciate it. All right, well, until next time. Thanks for listening to today's episode. What did you think? What'd you learn? Hopefully something, right? Please reach out on social media with your thoughts on this episode and any other suggestions for future content. We look forward to capturing more important stories across public safety and are here at your service.