permood
http://www.mobilemarkaz.com

http://searchviews.com/archives/2007/04/virginia_tech_shootings.php

Your observations seem a bit tangential here.

You keep talking about the the media as a reactive process. What we call the “news” is reactive, it relates what happened. But if we (as in “we media”) could tell the story as it happens, lives could possibly be saved. But by 10:17am, the first account on the Roanoke Times (according to the timestamped reporting), it was a half-hour late.

You should pass this January 2006 IHT article to a larger audience:

Mobile providers resisting SOS alerts:

South Korea, the Netherlands and possibly even tiny Appleton,
Wisconsin, are starting to use a little-known but widely available technology called cellular broadcasting to send emergency text messages to mobile phone users threatened by weather, industrial accidents or terrorism.

But the global advance of the mobile phone emergency alerts, which are also being considered by India, Malaysia and Finland, is being resisted by some cellphone operators, who fear government regulation, increased costs and legal liability from false alarms, experts said. Some carriers, they said, are concerned that the technology could undermine the conventional short messaging system, or SMS, which generates the bulk of operators’ revenue from wireless data.
…
Resistance from large cellphone operators is the main reason cellular broadcasting has failed to make gains in the United States, even after the government’s much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina, said Douglas Weiser, the head of the U.S. branch of the Cellular Emergency Alert Systems Association, who is based in Tampa, Florida.

Pretty damning.

And, btw, if you have another day at Nokia, I’d be curious what they have to say about such capabilities (granted, it’s the US Networks you want to speak with).