The founders of Harbor Light Software Inc., Bill Spain and Fran Karp, are no strangers to developing and deploying secure data sharing applications to work in "outside the box" environments.

In 2003, Spain and Karp began working on a project to bring mission critical data to police officers working in the field via handheld phones and laptop computers. Working with the FBI and other state criminal justice organizations, Karp secured one of the first ever private partnerships with NLETS (www.nlets.org), the brain of the FBI criminal justice databases in the US.

With Karp building and maintaining the secure network infrastructure utilizing the latest in wireless technologies and Spain building an easy to use and intuitive interface for the officers on the road, the pair quickly made this software the most widely used application for retrieval of real time FBI data in the southeast. 

Transitioning to Fisheries Management

In 2012, while on a charter fishing trip, Karp noticed the Captain was using a pad and paper to record catch and effort data. The Captain was frustrated with the time consuming and antiquated system used to capture this important data. He explained there was a huge gap in the collection of accurate, real-time data within the fisheries industry. Critical management decisions such as the placement of offshore wind farms or catch regulations were being made with little or no data.  This forward-thinking Captain envisioned the fishermen using handheld devices such as cell phones and tablets to collect both catch and effort and biological data on each trip.

To make the transition from the collection and transmission of criminal data to fisheries management was easier than one would think. In the new software, the object of the data was no longer a 6'2" blonde hair, blue eyed felon. The data now focused on a 31" striped bass that was released undersized. Harbor Light's main goal was to make an intuitive application completely designed by the fishermen that would be using it. The result was FishNET, Harbor Light Software's first application to collect real time catch and effort and biological data electronically.  

Maybe it was a fluke (pun intended), but Harbor Light Software began to grow from that first fishing trip and has expanded to include its applications in use on every coast in the US including Hawaii. We have built data collection apps for every fisheries sector including Commercial, For-Hire and Recreational anglers. We realize an app is only as good as the support of that app, so our 24x7 help desk is there to support all our fishermen on THEIR schedules.