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The future of emergency communications--as well as how supervisors will track sales reps, hotel managers connect with housekeepers, airport crews dock planes or music-festival staffers prepare to handle drug overdoses--may be found in a Flatiron district office adorned with portraits of traditional Hawaiian warriors.
This is the headquarters of Lua, a mobile-messaging application designed for business that is the brainchild of a half-Hawaiian, self-taught developer who signed his first paying customer four years ago, when he was 23. It was the U.S. Department of Defense.
Not nearly as well known or well funded as the workplace chat-service juggernaut Slack, Lua--named for a Hawaiian martial art--did gain notice last year when it helped MetLife Stadium weather an anthrax hoax days before the Super Bowl. Using Lua's encrypted instant-messaging and conference-calling features, stadium officials were able to contact nearly all security personnel in real time and immediately know exactly who had opened their messages.
It was the kind of scenario Lua founder Michael Keoni DeFranco alludes to when he gives clients the origin story of the company name: Hawaiian warriors trained in darkness so that "they would move as one" when they entered battle.
Wave of deals
Part of a flood of messaging apps targeting business, five-year-old Lua is now riding a wave of deals as email and texting prove both unwieldy and vulnerable to hacking. Meanwhile, mobile communications are becoming central to all kinds of businesses as...