Virgina Tech shootings have made SMS emergency alerts a pressing issue. The authorities used an email alert system to inform all the students and the staff about the shoot out. In total 4 email blasts were send before the second shoot-out, with the last one sent couple of minutes before the second shoot-out. Since, very few students were logged onto internet; email was actually read only by few people.
Authorities also called dormitory phone but this system cannot reach 17,000 students who stay off campus. If the university had a sms alerting system, more people would have known about the iminent danger and hence the second shoot-out would not have claimed so many lives. Few months back in January, University of Texas used SMS alerting system very effectively to inform 67,000 students about the ice storm. Thanks to the state-of-art technology, next day the campus was empty and there were no weather related incidents. Mobile phone is the best medium when it comes to receiving immediate information. Traditional alerting systems like automated phone alerts or the email alerts are either more expensive than the sms alerting system or are slow than the sms alerting systems.
In India, sms alerting system is leaps ahead than in the US. Companies like ValueFirst www.vfirst.com specialize in providing mobile messaging services to corporates. ValueFirst has a virtual 2-way sms gateway and it can automate any corporate communication with the help of its state-of-the-art product - Velocity Plus. Large universities in India have already started adopting the mobile messaging systems to be prepared for any calamity. Now, boarding and Montessori schools are also adopting these systems to keep the parents informed about the kids.
Contact Details:
Nimesh Bhandari,
VP- Mobility Solutions
ValueFirst Messaging
info@vfirst.com
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