Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Top 8 Coolest Android Apps For Security Professionals

As a security professional, I recognize that I am in a niche career field.  With regards to being in a small but growing industry, I'm forever discovering the small amounts of electronic tools to aid me in my professional endeavors.  Even worse, I have an Android smartphone.  If you've Googled anything having to do with apps or web sites that have tools for our industry, you already know iTunes has a significant portion of quality products.  I'm no quitter and I like to think outside of the box.  Over the course of this year, I discovered several apps that have just the right tools needed in this job.

1. First and foremost is the note-taking app - Evernote.  This app when paired with an existing account through their site enables you to take notes, record audio, tag your location, and attach pictures and other documents.  Whether you're in an investigator or a physical security planner in the field, this app is perfect.
 Click here to learn more.


2.  Next up is EvidenceCam. This app will - stamp your GPS coordinates, date/time, and address where you're located as well as include a "Notes" tab to add user notes regarding the photos captured. This app is great for investigators who take photos for evidentiary reasons. Here's an actual shot from EvidenceCam.  Click here to learn more.


3.  FloorPlan Creator is perhaps one of my favorites.  It allows you to use your camera and through "augmented reality" create a virtual floor plan of just about any room.Check out the video below to get an idea how it works or click this link to download.



4.  News360 is a news app which takes your interests and compiles news based on them. Awesome for those times when you need a single place to go for your news.  Here are some if its features I enjoy the most.
  • More than 30,000 sources, from the top national news providers, to local and niche sites and blogs
  • The Home feed - stories from the day’s headline news and your specific interests are merged together into a single stream, so that you don’t have to jump between sources and topics to avoid missing anything important 
  • A flexible and smart personalization system, so that you can tailor your news however you want, by choosing the topics, sources, companies and people you want to follow, and News360 will pick up on the nuances of your interests as you read 
  • Synchronize your interests and saved stories with News360 on your phone or at news360.com 
  • Local news using your tablet’s GPS
Click here to learn more.

5.  Ever been out in the field or at your desk trying to determine how a particular vehicle looked?  If you're in the field doing an interview or doing a statement, it can be quite frustrating to rely on a description by a witness or your own recollection possibly hours later.  There's an app to help you accurately identify vehicles called The Patrolman's Vehicle Guide.  According the app's description section, 
"The Vehicle Identification System (V.I.S.) is the only Patrolman’s vehicle guide that’s made by police officers for use by fellow officers. It’s perfect for law enforcement officials to use on the streets, for pinning down vehicle information when interviewing victims and witnesses, or to help determine or rule out suspect vehicles in an investigation. This app works great for security officers on patrol, too.

Inside this application, there is an extensive image database of almost every make and model of vehicle released in the past decade. It’s fast, easy to use, and can cut out a lot of time and legwork from the investigation process, which may mean the difference between solving the case or having it go cold."
To learn more click here.


6.  Remember me blabbing about Evernote earlier?  Well, give me a second to talk incessantly about PolicePad.  Those of us who have done security operations or law enforcement know how hard it is to take professional and legible notes while you're in the field.  Notepads have pages that can be torn or lost.  As luck would have it, something happens where your have to right a report with accurate times, location, people, and dates.  PolicePad does all of that and a bit more.  Click here to learn more.


7.  Okay.  There are "cool apps" and then there are COOL apps.  SmartTools is definitely the latter.  It is an all-in-one measuring tool app.  Through the use of the tech available through your phone, it can determine length, angle, slope, level, thread, distance, height, width, area, compass, metal, sound level, and vibration. It also comes with a flashlight and a magnifier. I told you it was awesome. Click here to learn more.



8.  Let's face it folks.  We meet some interesting people in some very challenging situations.  A prudent security professional realizes any interaction with possible threats can escalate very quickly and has a plan to mitigate the risk from that happening.  One tool I recommend is Guardly.  It's a duress alarm/emergency notification/safety app.  According to the app's description section,
"Out of the box, Guardly comes packed with a free service that allows you to reach everyone in your safety groups by one-way emergency alerts, which include your location, group name and other information that can help them reach you.

Guardly’s premium service instantly connects you to a multi-party conference call, private and secure instant messaging session and real-time location tracking throughout the span of your call for help."
To learn more about Guardly, click here.  Stay tuned because we'll have more details in the very near future about Guardly.  For now just take our word for it, this is an awesome app.



Folks, this list isn't all-inclusive but I think these apps have been extremely helpful to me in my professional endeavors.  Take this opportunity to look them over and let me know if you have some others you'd like to see added.

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