Yesterday at about midday I’d just finished a conference call when I got a Whatsapp from my wife. “Blown a tire,” it said. Great. She was apparently meant to be on the way to see some friends with both our young (3.5 & 2 years) boys. “Blown,” didn’t sound good at all. Not like a […]
If you’ve been following any live TV today you’ll have seen this story about a 3 year old who called 999 about her mother who’d fallen down the stairs. The media is doing a good job of trying to raise awareness in the hope that someone in the area will know the family and be […]
Reading about today’s events at Virginia Tech, I’m pleased that the mobile medium played a critical part in alerting students of the issue: This time the universitys 30,000 students promptly received email and text message alerts warning them about the gunman. The university website and Twitter account swiftly alerted the outside world to developments onsite. […]
Now this is an interesting one. A very interesting one. You know how I’m all in favour of text systems for emergency or company/organisation-wide alerts? Well, that’s based on the system actually working as expected. The ability to be able to send a message to all 5,000 staff immediately (e.g. “Hello, come and empty your […]
ICO Global Communications has announced its launched a new satellite that will allow it to start offering new mobile services later on in this year. The satellite, called ICO.G1, went up yesterday from Cape Canaveral, and reached its orbit later that afternoon. The satellite will let ICO provide services including mobile TV, navigation and emergency […]
What do people do during disasters? Turn to their mobiles, of course. The Federal Communications Commission has adopted a plan that will see mobile networks used to transmit alerts during disasters or emergencies. The system, called the Commercial Mobile Alert Systems, will see texts sent to mobile users including, presidential alerts, imminent threat alerts and […]