I was checking out an article over at reuters.com and a question posed by an Israeli civilian to a military officer giving a lesson on rocket attack safety got me thinking.
Here's the question, right from the article at Reuters
You can get AMBER Alert information sent to your phone. This one is a cheat for me because I learned about while working at Sprint/Nextel. Nextel has been the most vocal about this capability, but virtually all mobile phone providers participate. For those of you who aren't familiar with AMBER Alerts, they are issued in an area where it believed that a child has been abducted.
Most NBC affiliates have functionality to receive certain information via SMS, but you need to do some digging. If you look under "email alerts" (this link goes to the corresponding site for NBC 11 in San Jose, but if you find the website for your affiliate you should be ok) you'll see that there is a lot of information that can be sent via html or text, but that's still just email. "Breaking News" can be sent to text or pager address. This is an email-based way of sending a text message. Basically, it's your number then "@", followed by a domain for your carrier. For example, I would enter mynumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com. From these sites if you click on "Severe Weather" you can set up SMS alerts for severe weather in your area/county. This is really cool and useful, albeit a little hidden.
So, there are a few examples of what we can get right now. We can be alerted to severe weather and breaking news. Local law enforcement can let us know if a child has been abducted. Maybe it won't be too long before Avi B. can be warned about an impending rocket attack.
Does anybody out there want to get alerts on their mobile that they aren't able to get right now? Is anyone getting alerts that we don't know about? Leave a comment and maybe the link to more information? That'd be great. If we get enough responses I'll see about putting together a list of those links for everyone to have easy access to.
For right now, here are some links to get you started.
If you want to know what the heck an AMBER Alert is - www.amberalert.gov
Want to get AMBER Alert info on your mobile? - www.wirelessamberalerts.org
To get to the NBC email alerts page, from which you can get to the other alerts -
NBC11 - San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland
NBC4 - DC, Maryland, Virginia
For your own affiliate, you may need to poke around on their website a little bit or call their information line.
Here's the question, right from the article at Reuters
That's it. That's what got me thinking. I t got me wondering "I wonder what kind of public safety information can I get on my cell phone?" I mean, I don't know about any of you, but I don't go anywhere without my mobile phone. Text messaging is the easiest way to send out information very quickly to multiple people all at once. There are plenty of "fun" alerts that we can get sent to us via SMS very easily. Twitter is a great example. Before I got a BlackBerry I was totally abusing my unlimited text messages wither Twitterings. Fun as that is, let's see what kind of safety info we can get via SMS.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Avi B. wanted to know if he could receive a warning via a text message on his cell phone of an impending rocket attack on southern Israel from the Gaza Strip.
You can get AMBER Alert information sent to your phone. This one is a cheat for me because I learned about while working at Sprint/Nextel. Nextel has been the most vocal about this capability, but virtually all mobile phone providers participate. For those of you who aren't familiar with AMBER Alerts, they are issued in an area where it believed that a child has been abducted. Most NBC affiliates have functionality to receive certain information via SMS, but you need to do some digging. If you look under "email alerts" (this link goes to the corresponding site for NBC 11 in San Jose, but if you find the website for your affiliate you should be ok) you'll see that there is a lot of information that can be sent via html or text, but that's still just email. "Breaking News" can be sent to text or pager address. This is an email-based way of sending a text message. Basically, it's your number then "@", followed by a domain for your carrier. For example, I would enter mynumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com. From these sites if you click on "Severe Weather" you can set up SMS alerts for severe weather in your area/county. This is really cool and useful, albeit a little hidden.
So, there are a few examples of what we can get right now. We can be alerted to severe weather and breaking news. Local law enforcement can let us know if a child has been abducted. Maybe it won't be too long before Avi B. can be warned about an impending rocket attack.
Does anybody out there want to get alerts on their mobile that they aren't able to get right now? Is anyone getting alerts that we don't know about? Leave a comment and maybe the link to more information? That'd be great. If we get enough responses I'll see about putting together a list of those links for everyone to have easy access to.
For right now, here are some links to get you started.
If you want to know what the heck an AMBER Alert is - www.amberalert.gov
Want to get AMBER Alert info on your mobile? - www.wirelessamberalerts.org
To get to the NBC email alerts page, from which you can get to the other alerts -
NBC11 - San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland
NBC4 - DC, Maryland, Virginia
For your own affiliate, you may need to poke around on their website a little bit or call their information line.
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