When the University of Ottawa went into lockdown a few months ago, no one knew what was happening.
“There was no information,” said local tech entrepreneur Scott Annan, whose wife works on campus. “Was there a shooter on the loose?”
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When the University of Ottawa went into lockdown a few months ago, no one knew what was happening.
“There was no information,” said local tech entrepreneur Scott Annan, whose wife works on campus. “Was there a shooter on the loose?”
While the incident turned out to be relatively minor, Annan said what stayed with him was the stretch of time when nobody on campus could find out any information.
It’s part of what led him to launch Beacon earlier this year. It runs at onbeacon.ca as a free local communications network that organizes information around physical places instead of people. Users cannot follow other users. Instead, they follow a location such as a campus or neighbourhood, lake or building, and can see what people post within a certain radius of the location. Beacon doesn’t use profiles or names, and it collects no personal information.
Annan hopes that people will use it to post useful information about such things as overnight parking bans or downed trees, or even someone who needs help in the neighbourhood.
“You go to onbeacon.ca and it says activate my device and you’re on and you’re live,” Annan said. “And that’s the whole sign-up process. There’s no reason to create a profile because you can’t follow people.”
Annan himself uses Beacon at his cottage near Bon Echo. If someone sees a wild animal or if there’s a storm, Annan is notified. While he can watch events unfold from his home in Ottawa, he cannot post from home since he’s not physically at his cottage.
The platform offers an optional email address for account recovery and encrypts it. Annan says Beacon collects no other information from users.
A name on the startup scene
Ottawans familiar with the tech scene may know Annan from his role starting Mercury Grove, which he describes as the city's first accelerator and that ran as a co-working space.
"We didn't charge anything and so it became kind of an entrepreneur hub," said Annan, a Forty Under 40 recipient.
He built a microfund out of it and made three investments: in Open Era, Vegan Cuts and Fullscript. "We were the first cheque for Kyle (Braatz) and the team into that company.”
Before that, Annan co-founded the Startup Ottawa blog with Scott Lake, one of the co-founders of Shopify, and in 2018 launched Manual Ventures with co-founder Guido Giordano, a rolling fund of $300,000 to $500,000 that lent to revenue-generating software companies against a share of monthly recurring revenue instead of equity.
Then he spent some time largely out of the startup scene, building Guides, a documentation platform that turns technical material into instructions that frontline workers can follow. Agencies such as the Canadian Red Cross and several fire departments across the country use it. It also gave Annan valuable data about where emergency response systems break down.
“We’re amazing at coordination on a professional level and awful at communication on a civilian, end-user level,” he explained.
While professionals responding to an emergency have what they need, such as radio systems and a team coordinating their response, regular people living through an emergency do not. Beacon allows first response agencies to communicate directly with communities. Annan argues that most cities currently don’t know how to do this, pointing to Ottawa’s internal debates about whether to stay on X (formerly Twitter).
“The reality is they use it because there’s no alternatives that reach as many people as they can,” he said.
Annan had high praise for Gander, the new Canadian local news platform, and said the country needs more of such things.
But while Beacon may work differently from Gander or X, it faces the same challenge that every network faces at the beginning: getting people to use it.
“The challenge is that it’s not useful for a city or policing until it’s got broad adoption,” he explained. “Unless it’s used on a regular basis, then it’s not a reliable service for the kinds of information that we want to receive.”
Annan believes part of the solution lies in another program he’s developed called Community Ready, which teaches people how to survive and coordinate in an emergency before professional help arrives.
“Every citizen in a community should be able to survive for 72 hours in the case that emergency services couldn’t get to you,” he said.
Community Ready maps things like who has a generator and where clean water is located.
“We’re looking at things like having a list of vulnerable members in the community. Do you know who needs to be checked on?”
Since Community Ready holds free sessions in different municipalities, Annan sees it as a way to get the word out about Beacon. However, only a small share of residents turn up to Community Ready events.
Annan admits he doesn’t have a solution. “The short answer is, I got no idea,” he said. “The long answer is, like most startups, we’re going to keep trying a whole bunch of stuff. Airbnb or Twitter, they didn’t know how to do it until they tried doing it.”
Funding could be another challenge. Annan said Beacon will never charge residents for use and he has no intention of selling the startup or listing it on a public stock exchange. Instead, he envisions it being part of a Crown Corporation, community trust or some structure that would help make Beacon an organization Canadians can rely on. He expects to work with community partners, national organizations and long-horizon investors.
He chose Ottawa as the place to launch Beacon due to what he calls a perfect storm of variables. He cited the city’s small-town feel but large-city infrastructure, its varied geography, and the frequent need for emergency communications.
“Within an hour, we have remote communities that have been hit regularly by some of these natural disasters,” he said. “Floods, tornadoes, wildfires, you name it. This region has it all.”
“We’re also pretty pragmatic in Ottawa,” he added. “We’re just realistic about what are the kinds of things that we need, rather than being sold on bells and whistles. It’s not really Bay Street here, but more like Centre Block.”
Beacon is live and Annan plans to push it out through Community Ready and by working with partners such as the Canadian Red Cross, as well as local businesses such as Home Hardware. He would like to pair the software with first aid kits and in-person workshops, and says he’ll know it works if it takes the stress out of even one person’s life. 
