It is just one example of the dozens of technologies developed in the wake of Haiti to help relief efforts in disaster zones.
"There's plenty of technology for rich white men," Dr Gardner-Stephen says. "It's the rest of the world that we need to help."
Haiti impact
Another project born out of the Haiti disaster was the Trilogy Emergency Relief Application (Tera), a mass text messaging programme now being rolled out by the Red Cross in 40 countries around the world.
It allows aid workers to navigate a disaster-hit country from a computer screen, identify all the mobile phones being used in a given area, and blast them all with urgent 140-character updates with a click of a button.
It was first developed in Haiti with the help of local mobile network operators, allowing messages with advice on water sanitation and medical aid to be distributed to millions of people across the Caribbean country.
"I don't know of any other means of communication where you could reach that many people, that quickly and that directly," says Sharon Reader, a communications adviser for the International Red Cross currently working on setting up the Tera system in east Africa.
It's not like the radio when someone has to be switched on and listening. It's a buzz in their
pocket and they're going to be able to see that information immediately."
She says the sheer volume of mobile phones now sold in developing countries makes text messaging the ideal way to communicate.
Global mobile subscriptions are expected to reach seven billion this year according to the UN, with developing countries in Africa and Asia seeing the fastest growth.
Crowd sourcing challenge
The Tera project also allows disaster victims to send messages back to aid agencies, telling them
where they are and what they most urgently need.
That makes it similar to other recently developed applications designed to harvest the huge volumes of information generated in the immediate aftermath of a sudden-onset disaster, like a war or earthquake.
The Ushahidi project was used in Haiti to crowd source information from the Haitain population, using social media sources like Twitter and Facebook alongside text messages, with information visualised on an online map for humanitarian agencies to use.
Similar platforms became popular following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.