For the second time in the past months, emergency notification has received a nice plug from a national business publication. Inc. magazine, which touts itself as "The Magazine for Growing Companies", cited CiviGuard in a near-front-of-the-magazine article about Gov 2.0. Inc. says Gov 2.0 brings "the virtues of the Web to government". It described CiviGuard as a "high-tech version of the old emergency broadcast system. Alerts are distributed through smartphone apps and text messages."
In its July edition, Inc. did a profile on Nixle, a notification service that allows public safety to push out text alerts at no charge.
Interesting that such a widely read "mainstream" publication that doesn't focus on public safety has written articles twice recently about an industry that serves a niche market within public safety. It's also interesting that neither CiviGuard nor Nixle have historically strong market shares in the notification industry.
Is something afoot? Perhaps so. The notification and alerting "space" is becoming increasingly important (maybe even interesting), and the big-time players in the industry may be changing. Certainly, the large cell carriers are entering the field. See our recent post on Sprint and the State of California conducting the first pilot of CMAS, the Commercial Mobile Alerting Service. If the timeframes stick, by 2012, emergency managers throughout the country should be able to provide text alerts to cell phones within a selected geographic area...at no charge...through Sprint and other carriers.
Times, they are a'changin', and people, they are a'watchin'.
All the best,
Rick
Alerts & Notifications
by Rick Wimberly & Lorin Bristow: Best practices for emergency notification programs
by Rick Wimberly & Lorin Bristow: Best practices for emergency notification programs
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