April 2012
3 posts
“Take a look at Paul Graham’s ideas for frighteningly ambitious startups....”
– @alexismadrigal (The Atlantic)
When Probabilistic Models Fail.
Kenichi Ohmae wrote a great piece in the Christian Science Monitor citing why probabilistic models aided by multiple layers of homogenous redundancy can give a false sense of comfort:
The most important lesson of Fukushima No.1 plant, therefore, is that we should have a multiplicity of means to provide a continuous electric supply and heat sinks. This is not the same as “You should not put all...
January 2012
1 post
December 2011
1 post
Bringing 2011 to a close with a WIN!
At this year’s GovFresh awards, CiviGuard won the Best Emergency Management App category for our Irene “Should I Evacuate?” application.
Given the excellence of the other entries and of the judging panel, it was a very fulfilling way to end an eventful and progressive 2011 for CiviGuard.
As a company based out of NY, it gives us immense pride to see NYC win City of the Year....
November 2011
2 posts
October 2011
1 post
Adaptation > Planning
Planning is good. Adaptation is better.
Fascinating business continuity white-paper (PDF) released by Renesas Electronics Corporation in Japan.
They were significantly affected by the events in Fukushima, key quote:
However, this disaster, which struck such a vast region, revealed our BCPs were not thorough enough. In other words, due to the significant scale of the disaster, the assumptions...
September 2011
10 posts
20% of Calls to 999 are Non-Emergency →
Interesting article from the BBC about Northern Ireland 999 call centers getting a significant volume of calls that end up being hoaxes or simply not urgent enough to warrant use of an emergency line.
Would be interesting to see how much of this can be prevented by having a next-generation system capable of assessing the situation by instantly polling the caller (via Voice, SMS, Web) and...
Beautiful 9/11 Post from Fred Wilson
Couldn’t say it better.
To echo Michael Roth from Wesleyan University on the value of remembering:
But on this 10th anniversary of 9/11 let us also simply acknowledge the claim that our painful memories still have on us. Let us recognize with piety that we still carry the traces of those traumatic events with us, and that we acknowledge their importance to us without trying to use...
“The rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous...”
– Dale Carnegie
CiviGuard & 110 Stories
To honor the 10th anniversary of 9/11, some CiviGuard members got tickets to the ‘110 Stories’ event @ NYU’s Skirball Center.
A great event, for a great cause and a great cast:
Stephen Baldwin, Mario Cantone, Billy Crudup, Noah Emmerich, Katie Holmes, Samuel L. Jackson, Melissa Leo, Ralph Macchio, Aasif Mandvi, James McCaffrey, Cynthia Nixon, Vincent Piazza, Jeremy Piven,...
The Dark Side of a Global Social Fabric
Interesting article in The Register referring to two Mexicans being arrested for spreading false information about children being kidnapped on Twitter. Preying on fear, uncertainty and doubt has never been easier.
It is important that the undeniable benefits of are global social fabric are preserved, while the risks are mitigated to the best extent possible. It is a by-product of a...
Helping New Yorkers Get Out of Irene's Path
With Irene looming menacingly on New York City, Mayor Bloomberg rightly initiated a mandatory evacuation of all of zone A flood zones and some parts of zone B. Zone C is the last sector and confined to only the deepest parts of the city, areas that only a Category 5 hurricane can affect. This was the first time in history that a mandatory evacuation had been initiated for NYC.
Continuing from the...
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
3 posts
Brilliant CNN Story about Collaboration for Mumbai... →
The important and beautiful thing to observe here was the impressive use of a single link, shared rapidly over Twitter to accumulate actionable information. Compared to the hashtag approach (#MumbaiBlasts #Here2Help #NeedHelp) taken by other entities such as Ushahidi, the single shared link yielded more information with less noise.
Every little action helps, but it is important to observe and...
Great video about IPAWS OPEN. Really well done. →
Not quite sure why this video isn’t on YouTube or Vimeo yet, but we fully expect it to be there soon!
March 2011
2 posts
“As CEO your number one priority is to keep the company in business. It is about...”
– Fred Wilson (on Frugality)
January 2011
21 posts
Social Media: Using the right edge of the sword
Social media’s role in a real large-scale emergency in the US is largely unproven. It is convenient to extrapolate Haiti to a similar event in the US, but the reality is that the social media volume Haiti generated in the first three weeks would be what the US would generate in 3 hours during and post-event. We are vastly under-equipped to rationalize this deluge of data, de-duplicate it and...
Thoughts on the Future of Emergency Management
Interesting top 10 list by Rick Wimberly in the Emergency Management blog.
10. Citizens demand more and participate deeper in alerts and warnings.
That point is something we at CiviGuard are certainly betting on.
It’s surprising to see that we continue to perceive the state-of-the-art in public warning to be:
1) a centralized, hub-and-spoke architecture versus a fully distributed...
“Sure, go ahead and test what’s testable. But the real victories come when...”
– Seth Godin in another high quality post.
“Skip the water.”
– Fred Wilson in a crackin’ post!
Disaster Recovery for Small & Medium Businesses is...
Interesting survey by the Symantec folks finds that:
“50% of SMBs have no disaster recovery plan in place, even though 65% of them operate in areas that are vulnerable to natural disasters.”
And:
“It’s not so much an issue with resources, but rather that many (41%) just didn’t realize it would be necessary and more than half don’t believe that computers and...
WatchHere’s a quick overview of our multi-touch UI for real-time scenario management during emergencies. The exciting bits start at about the 1:30 mark, so feel free to skip the “normal” bits :)
You can also go directly to the vimeo link to learn more about how it was built.
CiviGuard makes it into INC. Magazine
Props to Max Chafkin for a great September 2010 article featuring our first customer - the City of Manor, Texas!
A new year, a new blog!
We’ve moved our blog from Squarespace to Tumblr. We’ve had no issues or downtime, just prefer the immediacy that Tumblr offers. Here’s to a rockin’ 2011!
“Rule number one of entrepreneurship is that everyone does whatever it takes.”
– Eric Ries
“A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service...”
– Eric Ries
15 Lessons on entrepreneurship
Our CMO Weighs in After a Year as a First-Time Entrepreneur
After a year in Silicon Valley, people often ask what it’s like living amidst a hotbed of innovators, entrepreneurs and investors, about some of the most important lessons we’ve learned as a start-up and what’s its like working remotely as a team based bi-coastally (in Silicon Valley and New York), with developers in Germany, France,...
Road to 1,000,000,000!
CiviGuard was formed out of the Graduate Studies Program at Singularity University. At the end of the program, the class was split into four teams and given a rather ambitious mission: positively impact the lives of a billion people in a decade.
Each team was forced to think big and inevitably our little unit gravitated towards the disaster response domain. We drew up some fascinating...
CiviGuard goes to Washington DC
A few weeks ago, we had the distinct pleasure of meeting with members of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation (SICP). It was an incredible opportunity to meet with some leading policy stakeholders who value and understand the importance of supporting innovative solutions to real-world problems.
We spent a great deal of time prepping for the meeting – harping...
CiviGuard nominated for 'hottest bootstrap award!
Today, we received word that CiviGuard has been nominated for the ‘Hottest Bootstrap’ Award by theNorthern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC), the largest technology council in the nation.
We’re pretty excited by this.
The NVTC Award focuses on recognizing companies with a demonstrated ability to achieve the “most” with the “least”. Additionally, the NVTC Award strives to highlight...
What makes us tick
The events in Haiti, Chile, Mexicali and Times Square validate the need for developing and developed cities to have next-generation messaging platforms. Platforms capable of making outreach possible from agencies to its citizens and vice versa. Platforms capable of leveraging the distributed nature of the internet, the ubiquity of location and the emergence of the smartphone. Platforms capable...
Leveraging a more connected future for...
A report released yesterday by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that nearly 25 percent of US households have abandoned landlines preferring mobile phones instead. That means 23 percent of all adults or about 52 million Americans live in homes which exclusively rely on mobile telephones. These figures clearly articulate the increasing consumer preference for mobile devices –...
ANOTHER ‘HORIZONAL-TECHNOLOGY DIFFERENTIATOR’: THE...
200% Increase and +60% Penetration by 2015
When CiviGuard set out to disrupt the emergency communication landscape nearly a year ago, we took a risk and invested heavily in several critically important technology development trends. Realizing that in order to be truly innovative and always out front, we determined that a major ‘Horizonal-Technology-Differentiator’(HTD – as we like to call...
CONTINUAL CONVERGENCE: MARKET RESEARCH REPORTS -...
Two interesting market research reports released this week piqued our interest.
The first report issued by Strategy Analytics cites increasing and continual growth of global smartphone shipments (up 43% in 2Q 2010!) and the second report by iSuppli predicts that 80% of cell phones will have GPS capability in the next year.
As Dr. Jagdish Rebello, director and principal analyst for iSuppli said...