Kai Paterson created the missing child alert and recovery program, known as the AMBER Ready Program after his secretary's son was abducted.  Kai Patterson had also escaped being abducted at the age of 9, while growing up in Newark, New Jersey.

When Kai Patterson's technology company was contracted with the National Football League to produce a version of his Game Prep software for fines and penalties, Kai Patterson's secretary son was abducted by her estranged husband.  Patterson was in the process of developing a talent casting network that enabled actor's profiles to be disseminated through a casing network.  Kai Patterson's talent casting application was called Star*Book, and created an actor's profile from the actors data and e-mailed it to studios that would subscribe to the Star*Book network.

When Kai Patterson learned that his secretary son's information and photograph needed to be made into a missing child poster, which would take days by the police department to make and disseminate to the public and other law enforcement agencies, Kai Patterson quickly copied a portion of the Star*Book application and made a missing child poster.

Unaware that her son had been abducted by her husband, Kai Patterson's secretary used the internet to find several police department's e-mail addresses and sent her son's profile to police using a modified version of the Star*Book application that Kai Patterson had created.  Suspicious that his secretary might not have received the full effort by the police department handing the missing child incident, Kai Patterson contacted his step father, who was a Captain of the Newark Police Department at the time. 

In shock Kai Patterson learned there was no system in place that could instantly create a missing child poster from the child's data entered into the police database and that missing child posters were typically created manually by police or by the missing child's family members. "How do you ask a grieving parent to create their own child's missing poster", said Patterson. After learning there was no system in place to instantly create and disseminate a missing child's information, Kai Patterson began developing what later became the AMBER Ready Program.

Between 2000 and 2009, Kai Patterson worked to develop the missing child safety application, which became AMBER Ready.  After experimenting with several versions of his missing child application, and concerned the the privacy issues of storing non-missing children's information in a database, Kai Patterson determined the best location to enable parents to have their children's information was locked in their cell phone.  Since cell phones, which are also called mobile phones, also possessed the technology to store and transmit information and photographs anywhere, Kai Patterson developed the application and called it "AMBER Ready". 

Kai Patterson's AMBER Ready Enhancements

"Since the AMBER Ready application was created to assist the AMBER Alert Program, which had developed over the years that Kai Patterson was developing AMBER Ready, I though it was a perfect name for the program".  AMBER is an acronym for "America's Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response" and being prepared for an emergency is to be "Ready".

After creating the application, Kai Patterson spent more than 5 years trying to raise the necessary capital to implement his missing child technology and application.  Finally in 2007, Kai Patterson received the necessary funding to launch the AMBER Ready Program.  Over the next 2 years, Kai Patterson established kiosks in malls to enable parents to receive the AMBER Ready Program.  In 2008, Kai Patterson designed a newer version of the AMBER Ready Program, which enabled parents to create their children's profile in their wireless phones without the use of a computer.  The new version was called AMBER Ready II.