RE: And since were on about snagit today, here's an easier way to tweet with snagit;

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gregory P Sweet
 
> Actually New York State/The New York State Emergency 
> Management Office is
> very progressive in making sure that important notification 
> get to as broad
> an audience as possible.
> 
> You can sign up to receive notifications via phone, e-mail, 
> or sms here:
> http://www.nyalert.gov/ (you can restrict to your immediate 
> jurisdictions
> and the type of alerts to receive)
> You can follow alerts on twitter @nyalert or more specifically
> @ny_<jurisdiction>
> 
> And my personal favorite, found form the Facebook page of the NYSCIO
> (http://www.facebook.com/nystatecio), Alert messaging via Xbox:
> http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/state-local/sho
wArticle.jhtml?articleID=221900336


In a rather retro vein, my wife is a sales rep for a "dying" 
industry that refuses to die. 

Paging.

As in, those little boxes you see clipped to many people's belts, 
that AREN'T cellphones (or Netbooks using Skype...). 

A _big_ selling point, for emergency workers, first-responders, 
medical personnel, military, and all sorts of essential services 
personnel - or, for their bosses and dispatchers - is that paging 
alerts and text messages (for alpha-numeric pages -- yes, pagers 
can have e-mail too) go out EN-MASSE, and essentially all at once. 

You have, say, 1100 in your military quick-response unit, and 
another 650 in the logistics squadron that preps their transport 
and supplies, you can have all those pager numbers in a single 
group that is activated by a single call or message to a single 
phone number. You can make up the message on the fly, or it 
can be pre-set. When Outer Frapistan blows up (or gets flushed by 
that tsunami) and the bigwigs make the decision to send in the 
team, half way 'round the world, both the team members and their 
critical launch crew all get buzzed within minutes of that single call. 

Contrast with the same number of people carrying cell-phones. 
You'll be lucky if the last ones get the message hours later. 
There's no automatic confirmation that they've heard the 
voice message or read the text message. 

Also, pager signals tend to punch through in places/situations 
where cell calls don't.  The handshake is much simpler and 
quicker, so the chances of the connection being made are 
higher.  Cell systems don't even put the call through if the 
connection parameters aren't good enough for "acceptable quality" 
voice. 

Lots of disaster situations in recent years saw important, 
necessary people receiving "critical" and urgent cell messages 
(voice or text) hours after the call was initiated. 

Pagers get the message _now_ and keep beeping until they're 
acknowledged. 

Cellular system providers have been backfilling for years, 
trying to get that robust capability into their systems, 
and they still haven't got it.  

Snazzy features and cute ring-tones mean little when the point 
is to alert everybody _right-frick'n-now_ that the forest-fire 
has changed direction and the wind has picked up.



 - Kevin 







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