It looks like Inspiron Logistics Corporation won the bid for SIUE’s emergency cell-phone notification service/system thingie. (Purchase bulletin) Interesting points to note are they got it for almost 6 times less than UIUC bought theirs, although that system was design for all the UofI campuses, not just Urbana-Champaign. Also, SIUE had 18 respondants to their RFP. That’s a lot of companies in a niche market of emergency rapid response. Seems like a lot of organizations are fear-mongering for solutions like this, and just as many small startups are catering to it. Yay capitalism. Boo fear!

What I’ve heard about the deployment of our system is that you can quickly hit bottlenecks if you don’t have mass-SMS agreements with all the different phone carriers. I guess many of the devices use email to the cell providers email-to-SMS gateways, and when you send out 50,000+ emails it can take a while for those to process. If you’re really looking for rapid notification, you’re almost better off going with a service offering instead of a purchased software solution so that you can leverage off a company who already has SMS-blasting permission and technologies with the big carriers.

But even then, it’s more elaborate than that. How do you craft a message in 160 characters or less that defines a situation and provides instructions/warning? And do it in the 2 minutes the flash demo on the Inspiron website? “Shooter in the bell tower, don’t go outside.” Maybe we should spend the time and the money educating people on personal safety, situational and environmental awareness, pre-existing channels for reporting and learning about emergencies, and stop feeding the fear machine. Yeah, the deaths at Virginia Tech were tragic but why don’t people realize if someone from the dorm or school would have noticed Seung-Hui was acting strange, or tried to talk to him or help him, things might have turned out differently. These are social problems, not technological ones. I’d rather live in a society where we try to help each other and pay attention to the hurts/needs of each other than one where we ignore ticking bombs but have nice, quick cell phone messages when they go off. Let’s quit trying to be so reactive and be a little more proactive.

You can start by smiling to a stranger to today, and helping someone who needs it. You never know what one little touch of kindness can do.

Tags: emergency