“DOOD KATYUSHAZ R COMIN 2 U”

Israelis are already noto­ri­ous for hav­ing their cell phones per­ma­nently attached to their ears. And that’s before they got a hold of a new ser­vice by the start-​​up Cellact. The com­pany is send­ing out text mes­sage warn­ings to Sabras of “a mis­sile or bomb attack, shoot­ing, or other emer­gency announce­ments,” Globes reports.

The sys­tem enables key emer­gency ser­vices staff (police, fire­fight­ers, res­cue teams, and stand-​​by details) to be paged from any­where, includ­ing the field, by SMS through any licensed cel­lu­lar phone. The ser­vice will be charged at NIS 0.20 [$.04] per mes­sage…
Cellact VP sales and mar­ket­ing Gal Biran said, “After the shelling started, Cellact made a deci­sion to har­ness its tech­nol­ogy for the ben­e­fit of res­i­dents and com­pa­nies in the north. SMS use meets two require­ments in the event of an emer­gency; timely warn­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion, and high reli­a­bil­ity even in the event of heavy web traf­fic or poor recep­tion. The sys­tem also pro­vides ongo­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions when peo­ple are indoors or in air raid shel­ters, and can be used to eas­ily relay infor­ma­tion such as the open­ing hours of spe­cific bank branches, or any impor­tant announce­ment that the pub­lic will not be able to see on notice boards because they are con­fined to their homes.” 

FEMA is work­ing on a sim­i­lar sys­tem here in the U.S., with a twist. FEMA’s text mes­sages will “tell you to get to a tele­vi­sion or radio because some­thing unfor­tu­nate has hap­pened that you need to know about.” Sounds like Cellact’s straight­for­ward alerts make a lit­tle more sense.
(Big ups: Sam)

July 19th, 2006 | Sabra Tech | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.