Blue Shoe Technologies Donates Disaster Management Communication Tools

September 28, 2005, Durham, North Carolina-- Blue Shoe Technologies Inc, an SBA certified 8(a) business headquartered in Durham, announced today that the company will donate several hundred copies of its “Visual Communication Aid – Disaster Response Team Edition” booklet to various relief organizations, including the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and others.

“As a small business, we wanted to mark our ten years in business in a unique and creative way,” Blue Shoe’s Founder and Chairman of the Board Fred Jacome stated. “In light of the terrible tragedies that have occurred with the recent hurricanes, we decided to utilize our company expertise as Communications Triage™ specialists and donate visual communication aids to disaster management teams to assist with hurricane and other disaster recovery efforts now and in the future.”

“Communications Triage™ involves the application of technology to address specific communications issues, in this case, language barriers, and assist an organization in the most effective allocation of limited people resources to address them,” Jacome explained. “The use of visual communication aids allows first responders to quickly communicate with a multilingual, multicultural population without having to wait for scarce translator resources to arrive,” he continued.

The company recently delivered a set of Visual Communication Aid booklets to the Emergency Response Team (ERT) at Ft. Bragg, developed by Blue Shoe in a pioneering project directly supported by AMC-FAST, USASOC and BCBL in Ft. Huachuca, Arizona. Ft. Bragg’s Emergency Response Team, lead by Chief Steven D. Blackburn, was instrumental in defining jointly with Blue Shoe the exact content and layout needed by his team to overcome the daily language and communication barriers they encounter with people that have little or no knowledge of the English language and find themselves involved in grave emergency or accident situations in the vicinity of the Fort.

Blue Shoe Technologies expects to begin delivering booklets later this week. Finch’s Copy & Printing Center in Durham executed the re-printing for Blue Shoe. Visual Communication Aids (VCAs) primarily use visuals to assist communication in situations where a language or other barrier to verbal communication exists. Relying on the age-old “talky pointy” method employed by military personnel for years, a VCA is a simple durable paper card containing numerous printed illustrations that use graphics and occasionally text. A VCA card exemplifies a variety of situations. Each illustration in a VCA card is intended to be used to non-verbally communicate questions, requests or commands, by simply pointing to it while showing the card to a listener and using body language to reinforce communication for action. A sample card from the booklet is shown here:

Blue Shoe Technologies Inc is an innovative IT professional services company, specializing in Communications Triage™ solutions to assist organizations with managing and allocating limited resources for optimum efficiency in information and knowledge discovery, classification and transformation tasks. Blue Shoe’s primary clients are the US Government and DOD.

Over its ten-year history, Blue Shoe has steadily built successful long-term relationships with its customers based on delivering quality results, collaboratively planned in partnership with its clients. Blue Shoe is a leader in Communications Triage™ solutions, specifically in the areas of foreign language processing, high-volume transactional systems, visual communication, and structured and unstructured information retrieval.

For more information, or a demonstration of the VCA system, call (919) 403-SHOE (919-403-7463), or email ct@blueshoe.com.

Media contact: Diane Currier
(919) 403-7463 ext. 1106
diane@blueshoe.com

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