Young Entrepreneur – Jonathan Fischer
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Young entrepreneur, Jonathan Fischer, demonstrates the Speed Demon.
Jonathan Fischer is just 20, but he’s been working on this gadget since he was 16. Inspired by the tragic death of a Lunenburg teenager in a high-speed auto wreck, he wanted to create a machine that would alert parents whenever a child became too careless behind the wheel.
Speed Demon combines a GPS navigation unit with a cellular data modem and some very smart software. The prototype earned Fischer an honorable mention at the Massachusetts State Science Fair in 2005. His proposal for turning Speed Demon into a moneymaker took first prize in a couple of business plan competitions, earning him $20,000. That helped Fischer polish up the software and form an alliance with a manufacturer in Finland that builds the box. Now, Fischer is a sophomore business student at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt. He’s also a budding entrepreneur, with dozens of Speed Demon units stacked up in the basement of his parents’ Lunenburg home, waiting for orders to roll in.
The Speed Demon is available at Fischer’s aptly named website, www.livefastdriveslow.com. At $250, plus a monthly $15 service fee, it isn’t exactly cheap. But the device does deliver exactly what it promises – a simple, powerful, yet nonintrusive way to discourage young drivers from speeding.
After you buy a Speed Demon, you register it at the company’s website, and start programming speed limits for the car. Perhaps Speed Demon’s coolest feature is its ability to distinguish between high-speed highways and slower surface roads. It can be set to send a warning when the car exceeds 70 miles per hour on Interstate 93 or 40 miles per hour on Massachusetts Avenue. That’s made possible by some fancy programming that compares the device’s GPS coordinates with detailed maps of every street in the country. Fischer came up with the software, and he’s filed a patent on it.
Read the full story in The Boston Globe.
