Robb Shecter   •   over 15 years ago

Submission: Super Cat City Alerts

Hi,
We just added this submission, and thought we'd share it here for discussion:

Our idea: apply "geotagging" to emergency announcements of many different kinds.
The Result: people will get timely, possibly life-saving info via the currently ubiquitous technologies that can show "events near me."
Proof-of-concept: Super Cat City Alerts. We implemented it as a Twitter service that "tweets" in realtime about power outages in the greater Portland (Oregon) area. Each tweet is geotagged. Twitter makes full use of the geographic information (see attached screenshots). This system allows residents to see Super Cat's messages just by searching for "tweets near me." In other words, the geotagged emergency announcement idea doesn't require its audience to know of its existence before they need its services. 
Future uses: Super Cat will be a source of historical outage data, enabling trend analysis. This is being enabled by its 24/7 collection of realtime outage data in a SQL database.
Our blog and twitter account: http://supercat.srsly.co/