Thursday, January 17. 2008

Non-profit Uses Free Tech/Grants to Enable Communications During Disaster

The project, called Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disaster (InSTEDD), is a nonprofit organization funding by Google.org, The Rockerfeller Foundation and others. It launches today and ties together free software like Twitter and Facebook and Google Earth to enable communications during disaster. The geo example:

One such application will be the so-called Twitter bot framework, which bridges the Web service and phones with a location-detection feature that can link to a layer in Google Earth, [Eric] Rasmussen [CEO] said. That way, for example, Rasmussen could send a message about a patient with untreated symptoms in Laos via SMS on his phone, which might only have one signal bar of service. That message could then be broadcast to anyone subscribed to his messages, including aid workers at UNICEF or InSTEDD's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., which could show his location and note on a Google Earth map.

"We can send an SMS message onto Google Earth in an emergency center, and it sees a dot with a color-coded response, with my name and date. Right underneath that, there's a button that says reply, and (aid workers can send a note that says) we have the resources you need 2 miles north...Suddenly there's a two-way conversation using nothing but a cell phone with one bar," he said, adding: "We've done this."

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