The Tomigaia Blog

SendWordNow

The events of last September have left a permanent mark on the hearts
and minds of New Yorkers and all Americans. And from the all hardship
And loss can come inspiration. One entrepreneur that I have become
acquainted with here in New York decided that there was a niche that
was as yet undeveloped in emergency communications. Sanford Cohen, the
inventor of SendWordNow, considered himself a very wired/wireless individual,
with a cell-phones, voice-mail and text-messaging making him very easy
to contact, and very able to communicate. When the telecommunications
infrastructure of New York City failed during the terrorist attacks,
he was frustrated that he could not tell any of his family or loved
ones that he was safe. Since he had much entrepreneurial exprience
with e-mail/communication systems in the past, he decided to try to
quickly invent a new combination of exsisting technologies that would
meet the needs of people who need to notify a lot of people in a hurry
during an emergency.

SendWordNow assigned you with a ID number and paper cards that you can
distribute to people who need to reach you and your family in a hurry.
Then one toll-free call or web-based message is all that is needed to
get the message out. For each person to contact, you must provide at
least one email address, or at least one phone number. Once this is
set up, the benefits become clear. If you have a parent who is
susceptible to stroke, and you give your ID number cards to the
neighbors and care workers, in the event that something happens to
your parent, anybody who knows how to use a phone can leave a message
at SendWordNow. That message is them transcribed into text and sent
out as e-mail (mobile or not) as well as outgoing calls to the family
at work and at home. The technology to do this may seem simple at
first glance, but a scalable, robust system that connects e-mail,
telephone and other networks turns out to be far from trivial to
make. All this complexity is hidden from the customer. The appeal I
see for this technology is ***increased peace of mind*** for the many
families today that are distributed over large distances and need to react
quickly in emergencies.

I think that this idea has a lot of potential applications beyond the
obvious family-usage scenario. For example: It could be a
cost-effective way for a school could contact all parents/caregivers
in the case that school was interrupted for any reason and ask them to
come get their children. For companies that run plants (like the
uranium processing plant at Tokai-Mura in Japan that had a recent
critical event), it could be a tool to quickly notify area residents.
(The service does not yet support international phone contacts, but
will likely expand to cover other nations in the future. E-mail/mobile
phone e-mail works in any country, of course)

This kind of original idea will most definitely have an impact on the
future of people's experience with technology in the near future, and
hopefully save many people from having a lot of avoidable emotional stress.

{If you are interested in trying out the service, SendWord now has
given me a Special Code Please contact me for it.)

The Web is no longer fun?: Pulsators!

As many have noted, the New York Times declared the fun days of the
web to be over in a recent column.

I think that if you look hard enough, there is still fun to be had out
there. A digital artist and good friend of mine here in New York named
BigTwin has been working for a few years to perfect an interactive
visual tool/game/design tool called Pulsators.

http://www.technopeace.com/ (Uses Shockwave Plug-in)

To try it out, the interface is refreshingly non-intuitive. My advice:
make sguiggles with your mouse, and click on one of the control
settings, and them make some more squiggles to see what is different.

Internet Governance?

I attended a panel discussion this month sponsored by Business 2.0 and
moderated by the editor-in-chief and friend Ned Desmond. The main
topic was "How to Succeed at E-Business (Without Going Insane)", and
the topic seemed to resonate with the audience of corporate IT
managers. One of the panelists that night was John Patrick, former
head of Internet Technology at IBM. He had some interesting opinions
about the future of e-business, and the amount of work left to be
done. I agreed with his feeling that customers and companies have just
covered the tip of the iceberg. He also asked the assembled to look at
the behavior of teenagers and how they interact with technology to get
a better idea of their own future customers. Having noticed myself how
quickly Japanese teens adopted cell-phone e-mail and other wireless
technology, I felt that he was on the right track (My question: Will
American companies really look hard at teen needs today? Hard to say.)

At the end of the session, I was able to ask the panel a question, and
the one I asked (in a nutshell) was: will the problems of Internet
Governance become a factor in the future success of E-businesses? John
Patrick, who has been intamately involved with this issue, gave a
generally optimistic answer. He did admit that there are also a
mountain of problems left to be solved in this area.

My perspective is shaped by working on the 'Net in Japan for the last
8 years. Having seen how global initiatives failed to help the
Internet in Japan, and how the Japanese Internet took its own course
has led me to believe that the influence of the ICANN has not been
great.

As you can read in their own recent report [1], the ICANN's own head
wants to reform it, but as the New York Times wrote today [2], many
people, including me, doubt that the ideas presented will really solve
the problems of the ICANN.

Companies like New.Net are jumping into the fray, and trying to fill a
void left by the lack of vision at ICANN [3]. And with elections in
the works, I don't know who to vote for! [4]

I don't think that there is a magic bullet to solve these complex
issues, but unless something is done soon, there will be troubles with
consequences for every entity (corporate, NGO, NPO, or individual) on
the 'Net today.