Yesterday I was on a little field trip in in Vicksburg, Mississippi, invited by DHS Science & Technology’s Army Corp of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) to witness the demonstration of their final levee plug prototype. To arm you with some random US trivia over the holidays, there are over 100,000 miles ofRead… Read more »
Think twice before joining an unsecured wireless network. It just became ridiculously easy to hijack confidential information from your agency and co-workers. If I was on the same open WiFi network as you – sitting outside your home, at your office (if you still didn’t put a password on your router), a Starbucks, an airport,Read… Read more »
I have a new guilty pleasure: ChaCha. In a nutshell, text any question you have to ChaCha (242-242) and a human on the other end will Google it and text you back the answer at no charge. While it’s great for folks without smartphones, it’s also addictive for those who do – knowing a realRead… Read more »
Chris Bennett’s Crisis Blog (CB2) Part 1 of 2 on the TSA Debate The TSA pat-down situation is making national and GovLoop headlines this week as images of naked body scans and videos of screaming children being frisked circulate through millions of travelers and non-travelers alike. In today’s CB2 I’ll propose a partial solution toRead… Read more »
It’s always great when you discover something that’s not only fun but can make your job easier. Recently I became aware of a service named GroupMe that enables you to instantly define a group of friends or co-workers and text them all at once with a single number. To give it a try, I setRead… Read more »
Today’s CB2 will be brief, following a great time at the Philly GovUp last night. I came across a crisis-related article on CrunchGear last week that really piqued my interest: Which Cellphone Did The Yemeni Terrorists Use? If you’re not familiar with last Friday’s incident, explosive packages from Yemen arriving on air cargo planes wereRead… Read more »
This week I have the pleasure of blogging from the 20th Clean Gulf oil spill conference right across the bay in Tampa, FL. The conference hosts oil companies, government agencies and inventors with the latest and greatest oil recovery technologies. Last night I caught up for dinner with Billy Nungesser, President of Plaquemines Parish andRead… Read more »
I’ve been going about alerting all wrong. I consider myself to be somewhat of an expert in the crisis alerting space, having built or deployed SMS, FM and satellite text and video notification systems in the past. I’ve also been fairly vocal on how their inherent limitations of cost, public adoption rate, and lack ofRead… Read more »
CrimeReports.com If the evening news has taught us one thing, local crime really captures our attention. It was only a matter of time before the web would catch onto that in a big way too. One of my new favorite sites for 2010 is CrimeReports.com. They take local law enforcement data from over 900 policeRead… Read more »
Mobile payments – the ability to send and receive money from your phone – is a big emerging trend I’ve been watching. It was only a matter of time before someone turned an iPhone into a credit card swiper (see Square) or enabled me to split a check for sushi by paying my friend withRead… Read more »