Interesting New Mobile Alert Technology
The All Points Blog flags this InformationWeek article about the wireless crisis alert system that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is building. As All Points points out, one of the technologies under consideration is especially interesting because it doesn’t need to track users’ locations to tell whether they should receive a message. Instead, an application on the device simply filters out messages that don’t apply.
Most location-based messaging systems track users’ locations and then send messages only to the users in the target area. The SquareLoop technology the DHS is considering does things slightly differently.
[SquareLoop] doesn’t track a person’s location. Instead, it relies on an application downloaded on the phone and the phone’s wireless receiver to filter messages, which contain a target location and time frame. The phone then determines if the message applies. “We don’t need to know where someone is because we’re pushing all that out to the edge of the network, really out to the cell phone,” [SquareLoop COO Joe] Walsh says. In response to a traffic accident or a biological agent release, SquareLoop can send messages only to those people in the vicinity of the affected area, even days afterward. Emergency response teams can designate, on mapping software, the area in which a given message applies. For those outside that location, the message is archived in case they enter it later.
It’s an interesting way to manage location-based messaging, mostly because it does an end run around a lot of privacy concerns that people have with such applications. It also doesn’t require a database to store users’ current locations, and should be able to broadcast the data quite narrowly. From the article: “People who live in Chicago wouldn’t receive alerts about an evacuation of the Sears Tower, for example, if they were out of town for some reason.” But if they returned while evacuation conditions still prevailed, they’d receive the message then.
So is this a “push” technology or a “pull” technology? A “push-pull” technology? Whatever it is, it’s potentially very interesting, and presents a nice model for one-way mobile communication. We’ll see how broadly it catches on.
Feeds
Let’s see now…to make this technical approach work, the phone or other wireless device must:
a. Have an internal GPS or similar.
b. Have the local storage to store *all* the regions/zone definitions to which an alert applies. These must be stored whether or not the alert applies to the recipient because, you never know, that recipient may travel into the zone during the window of applicability.
c. Run an application locally on the phone which automatically checks its own position, then compares position to each stored alert zone. This must be done frequently, to see if the phone is in any alert zone during that alert’s time window.
Put all these requirements together and you are talking about a wireless device with *significant* power requirements. Make your own call about whether this will “take the location market by storm.”