When five founders take the stage in Seoul on February 28 to compete for hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding at WeWork’s Creator Awards—a global competition for mission-driven companies, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits—one will touch on a particularly painful national trauma.
In 2014, the sinking of the Sewol ferry led to the deaths of 304 students and teachers. The accident—which was due in part to a lack of emergency rescue devices—ignited national outrage.
Ha Jin-seok, then a college student, decided to create his own life-saving device to prevent future accidents. In 2015 he founded LifeChair, a Busan-based company whose first product is a small chair cover that can be used as a flotation device. Because the life vests are located at each seat, they’re instantly accessible in an emergency.
“On ships, life vests are usually stored in a separate box. In emergency situations, however, they take too much time to reach,” says Ha. “Our device is hung on the chair so that people can immediately grab the cover and put it over their heads.”
Conventional life vests lose their buoyancy after an hour or two, but Ha says that LifeChair’s flotation period is as long as 24 hours. It also secures the neck, increasing safety.
In the future, LifeChair hopes to embed data-tracking technology in the life jacket. “This will make headcount more accurate in emergency situations,” says Ha.
Another company determined to save lives in emergency situations is Credo, whose smart band increases the wearer’s chances of successfully performing CPR on heart attack patients.
Credo’s four founders, who worked in the emergency-services industry, noticed imprecision in how CPR data were recorded. The wearable band increases the accuracy of CPR and transfers data through an app.
“We have heard from many CPR professionals that it is difficult to keep the accuracy for the 20-30 minutes that CPR is performed,” says co-founder Ham Seung-mun. “We wanted to help increase accuracy because we don’t want to compromise a miracle.”
The product has been distributed for educational use to safety departments, schools, and health professionals, but the Wonju-based company hopes to expand to firefighters, hospitals, and the public. For that to happen, the device must be approved for medical purposes. “We need financial support for production and certification,” says Ha. “If we win, we want to use the prize money for these purposes.”
Leveling the playing field for the visually impaired
Leading an ordinary life isn’t easy for the visually impaired. It’s especially difficult for the 90 percent of the blind population that is Braille-illiterate because of the lack of effective educational tools.
Dot—which produces a Braille smartwatch that tells time and displays messages, notifications, and directions using a tactile dot panel—aims to change that. The product is not only affordable (less than one-tenth of the price of existing devices) and portable but also stylish and sleek. It is operated via voice recognition and translates text in five languages into Braille.
Co-founder and CEO Kim Ju-yoon was inspired to build a lighter, more accessible device after seeing a visually impaired friend wearing a heavy assistive device. With Dot, the Seoul-based company hopes to increase Braille literacy and grow the intellectual workforce of the visually impaired.
“It’s hard to be part of the knowledge-based workforce if you are illiterate in Braille,” says marketing director Choi Ah-rum. “In Korea, jobs for the visually impaired are limited to musician or masseuse. But in the U.S., even Google’s head engineer is visually impaired. This is possible because of education.”
If they win at Creator, Dot hopes to distribute the watches free to low-income visually impaired individuals, schools, and NGOs, as well as create educational software programs for learning Braille.
Putting planet-saving ideas where your mouth is
The average Korean consumes more than 500 cups of coffee a year—25.6 billion cups nationally. Unsurprisingly, South Korea ranks fourth in the world for the number of Starbucks stores per capita.
The more Koreans drink coffee, however, the more they pollute the environment. The amount of coffee discarded in Korea was 410,000 tons in 2014 (up from 270,000 tons in 2007), which, when discarded and incinerated in waste bags, produces 76,670 tons of carbon dioxide, not to mention the 105.6 billion won ($94 million) spent on disposal.
Seoul-based company Coffee Cube has set out to make a dent in this environmental problem by upcycling coffee grounds.
The company, which has been producing environmentally friendly clay from coffee grounds for children’s play, is working to produce building bricks to be used in construction and interior decoration. “We wanted to recycle massive amounts of coffee grounds,” says founder and CEO Lim Byeong-geol. “That’s when we thought of coffee bricks.”
Coffee Cube is planning to mass-produce bricks that can be decomposed and recycled, unlike cement bricks, which cannot. Franchise coffee brands such as Starbucks have already preordered the product to use in their interior walls.
To run the factory, Coffee Cube will need more funding and human capital. “We hope the factory will turn into an educational facility for children and adults alike,” says Lim. “They will see how the coffee ground is recycled and regenerated as environmentally friendly and disposable building bricks.”
Freshcode is another Seoul-based business that hopes to help the environment, with a unique take on salad delivery. Customers preorder salads through the company’s website and orders are delivered within two to three hours at 250 designated delivery spots.
At first glance, their service may not sound any different from other healthful meal delivery services. But what differentiates them is the “spots,” which are central locations for customers to pick up their meals.
“Instead of delivering to 10 [individual] locations, we can reduce it to one,” says co-founder and CMO Yoo I-kyeong. “This way, we can reduce exhaust gas produced from driving the vehicle.”
In addition to decreasing car pollution, FreshCode—which is a WeWork Labs member at WeWork Yeouido Station in Seoul—cuts down on waste by making only preordered meals. “In offline stores, it’s not easy to predict the demand of customers, so they throw away leftover ingredients,” says Yoo. “We know our demand accurately and can produce zero food waste.”
The next problem the company would like to tackle is the use of plastic containers, which are more efficient than paper. If they win at Creator, they’d work to produce their own environmentally friendly food containers.
