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Coverage of the rollout of the Commercial Mobile Alert Service (CMAS, also known as Wireless Emergency Alerts, or WEA), is getting more attention these days. We have seen articles from Mobile Health News, Ubergizmo, Mobile Burn, and a slew of local news outlets. Perhaps the biggest coverage came last night from NBC Nightly News’ Brian Williams. The short video clip is below:
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On May 1-3, an Emergency Alerting Policy Workshop was held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The event focused mainly on use of the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), and was sponsored by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), International Telecommunications Union (ITU), World Meteorological Organization (WMO), Environment Canada (Canada’s weather bureau), Public Safety Canada (responsible for public alerting and alerting between officials), and Canada Center for Security Sciences. Many interesting policy issues were discussed, including the unique challenges of Google.org regarding its Google Public Alerts feature. Continue reading »
AWARE has just received an invitation to the upcoming Commercial Mobile Alert Service (CMAS) Town Hall being held on Tuesday, May 22, in conjunction with the 6th Annual National Homeland Security Conference in Columbus, Ohio.
The CMAS Town Hall will provide alert and warnings stakeholders with a timely opportunity to help shape current and future planning of CMAS Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation (RDT&E). Continue reading »
First Google and now Weather.com is getting into the alerts and notifications business.
Weather.com currently has a paid alert subscription service Notify! After paying a monthly fee and entering your zip-code you will receive a phone calls from none other than Jim Cantore (we assume pre-recorded) alerting you to a weather related emergency in your area. Continue reading »
We recently had the opportunity to interview Mike Gerber of the National Weather Service (NWS) about the NWS’s plans for the Commercial Mobile Alert Service (CMAS), also known as Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA). As you may know, CMAS/WEA enables alert originators to send geographically targeted alert messages to mobile devices across the country, currently to a space as small as a county. Though local and state emergency management offices are able to originate alerts (and have been signing up with FEMA to do so), many expect the NWS to originate the vast majority of all CMAS messages sent, due to its role in alerts and warnings around weather events.
