Group2call launches essential emergency text services for Schools and Universities

Alan Lougher is a Welshman who’s now, sensibly, living in Florida. (The weather here in London has been rubbish recently).

Alan is Chief Executive of Group2call — he founded the company, which operates from sunny Lake Worth, in late 2006. He dropped me a note to introduce the company and their services. They’re a startup and if their product list is anything to judge them by, they’ve hit the ground running very, very fast.

Group2call, as the name suggests, is all about connecting groups of people via voice and text messaging. For example, their services are used by oodles of sports team coaches who have to face the regular arse of phoning 20+ people every time a training match is cancelled by the weather. That is pure genius. I automatically thought text messaging however the Group2call service will also allow the team coach to record an audio message for it to be then ‘called’ out to people. Smart.

The pricing looks eminently reasonable.

Alan and his team have recently launched a specialist version of their services for schools and companies who need to be able to issue emergency broadcasts via a single text message to hundreds or thousands of people immediatey. For example, organisations located in Florida definitely could use some assistance I’m sure.

It’s important to remember that Floridians live in more or less continual danger of being blown away — something quite unfamiliar to your average British chap like me who’s complaining about ‘spitting’ rain. Florida even has it’s own Hurricane Centre. They don’t mess around. This warning was issued a few minutes ago via that site:

BULLETIN – EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED
SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TAMPA BAY AREA – RUSKIN FL
713 PM EDT MON JUN 25 2007

So I’m all in favour of anything like this. I think it should be implemented by every single institution — company, school, university, whatever. The moment there’s news of a hurricane or any emergency, everyone should be sent a text.

Not just hurricanes though. Think other emergencies — particularly the positively inept management at Virginia Tech recently. Screw sending an email. Get a text or a voice message through to everyone.

A little more on how it works:

Once a group has been setup in the user’s account, they can record a voice message, type one in as a text-to-speech (TTS) message as well as enter text that will be used for the SMS message.

Then, a keyword is assigned to that particular group.

Now here’s the simple part, when an emergency arises the user just texts the keyword to a short code number we provide and our system will start calling all the phone numbers in that group as well as send an SMS message to that group. We can call hundreds of phones a minute, upto 3 phones (cell, work, home etc.) as well as email AND SMS the message simultaneously! Recipients of the text message can also respond to the message too (such as “I’m safe” etc.).

Very smart indeed.