Karthik Naralasetty: socialblood saves lives

Donating blood has gone the social network way, and has become much easier and accessible. www.socialblood.org  is a social platform designed to serve a pool of emergency blood donors in 18 countries. All you have to do is become a member of the Socialblood.org on Facebook. 

 The brainchild behind this innovative service is 22-year-old Karthik Naralasetty. A Rutger school dropout, he started a technology company called redcode Informatics in 2009.  By 2011, socialblood.org came into being. The idea behind this was sowed when he witnessed a family in India struggling to find regular blood transfusions for their four-year-old daughter to treat her for a genetic blood disease called thalassemia. 

Naralasetty says, “We created a social campaign that takes advantage of Facebook as a platform to connect citizens of the same blood group and quickly locate emergency blood donors. One of the most urgent needs in case of emergency is quickly locating blood donors so we created www.socialblood.org.”

Furthermore, there are eight Facebook groups for eight blood groups and is opened to the general public. Through the Blood Groups website, global citizens are asked to join a selection of eight different Facebook Blood Groups: A+, A-, B+,B-, AB+, AB-, O+ and O-.  If there is a need for a specific blood type, a message will go out to all the members of that particular blood type group. In the coming days, socialblood plans to partner with hospitals and NGOs across the globe who are willing to take the advantage of the network and help people who need blood.

Launched in July 2011, this social network has grown in leaps and bounds with over 2000 members as of today. Naralasetty expects to reach 10,000 members in all the groups by the mid of 2012. Their numbers in Brazil have been particularly impressive with 300 people joining their respective blood groups and sending out information and alerts in less than a week.  In November 2011, he won the Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Award for his work at socialblood.org.

Nalarsetty’s future plans include currently working on a website that allow users to sign up with their Facebook accounts, and using both data from Facebook and fetching the location data from the users’ browser, it’ll place them on a map. People searching for donors will then be able to press a button on the website and enter the blood type they require and the website will help them locate people within a five-kilometre radius who’ve registered as donors. If no one is found, the search is expanded to the entire city.  Besides this, Naralasetty plans to work on Android and iPhone apps, too.
 

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