Many lessons have been learned from the recent Virginia Tech student shootings. Here's one of them: when it came to alerting students to the fact that a gunman was at large, email proved itself to be ineffective. As a result, mobile handsets are now being viewed as the safety and security devices of the future.
The US government is already considering introducing mandatory mobile messaging solutions for every university in the wake of the shooting tragedy. And educational institutions globally are looking at ways to harness mobiles as safety apps. For Australian wireless messaging specialist, MGM Wireless, which exclusively targets the education sector, the Virginia Tech tragedy has resulted in a rush of demand from universities for its SMS-based broadcast service as a crisis management communications solution.
MGM Wireless CEO Mark Fortunatow told Charged that the publicity surrounding the tragedy has made institutions re-prioritize the importance of being able to communicate with students and parents at all times. MGM's system was initially developed as a method of monitoring student attendance with parents receiving notification in the case of an absentee. But Fortunatow says the emergence of critical safety issues has meant that the application is being increasingly adopted as the primary communication tool between student, teachers and guardians.
The vendor-neutral MGM system can't physically track students, but Fortunatow says that the company is currently exploring a GPS-based solution for 3G handsets which it plans to launch internationally. Little wonder - location is a key component of personal safety services. And long before Virginia Tech, some mobile operators had already launched location-based safety and tracking services. In the US, cellcos are required under E911 regulations from the FCC to provide location-based information for emergency response teams. In Japan and South Korea, cellcos like SK Telecom, KTF, LG Telecom and KDDI have offered GPS-based child-tracking services for years (although Korean operators were accused by a lawmaker earlier this year of offering the services illegally under a new law (passed after the services were launched) requiring them to notify customers when they are tracked).
However, most operators don't offer safety/tracking services - partly because GSM networks (which account for 80 per cent of the world's mobile users) can't support GPS without expensive add-on equipment, and partly because they view safety tracking as too niche.
As such, independent service providers like Mobiles2go are stepping in. Mobiles2go, an international provider of safety and monitoring services, initially launched focusing on children's safety with its i-Kids service. Already entrenched in markets such as South Korea with over 85,000 users, the solution provides children with a cute GPS-enabled handset that monitors the child's movementswithin five meters on a web-based map. It then sends alerts to parents when it moves outside designated safety zones - even when the phone is off.
Related content
- Motive Big Network Analytics - Infographic
- MBB viewpoint: The market situation, key challenges and strategies
- FiberHome products are serving more than 20 million subscribers in Asia Pacific with its FTTH integrated solution.
- At a glance: Global SaaS market and Huawei's CSB Cloud Marketplace
- Taming the Big Data beast