BBC News By Mary-Ann Russon Mary-Kate Smith was out kayaking off the coast of Connecticut last August when she overturned. "I was very scared, didn't know what to do, or where to go," she says. Only four months earlier another kayaker had drowned in the same area. That incident had alarmed the mayor of coastal city Stamford, who asked the local emergency services to look at new safety technologies. Carbyne, a cloud-based emergency communication platform, was installed in August. It enables a 911 dispatcher to send a text message to the caller. This includes a link, which once opened starts a video chat.