h a l f b a k e r yIt's as much a hovercraft as a pancake is a waffle.
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for mission-critical apps and situations what you really need is a decent emergency alerting system that is independant of your cellphone.
what I want is a red strobe light (like an old police light) that I can press, record a message and have the alert sent to every other member of my team. This
will then set off the light and play the message.
"The servers are all down"...Cool.
Of course, each unit is 'net connected and is IP capable.
A special purpose device for general application.
(?) Friend.Link, updated URL
http://www.playmate...riendlink_main.html
They've rearranged their site, here's the new URL. [egnor, Aug 19 1999, last modified Oct 04 2004]
[link]
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Not bad, I had kinda thought of something similar, though on a much smaller scale. Instead of a tethered-down strobe-and-speaker combo, I had thought of adapting an existing technology, the Friend.Link paging messenger. Each unit is independent, and they're cheap.
While I have issues with their design (look for youself, they're somewhere on the Playmates Toys site -- www.playmatestoys.com), the devices are cheap, vaguely customizable, and easy to use. their only drawback is range, about 25 feet.
the development required to adapt them would be to figure out their paging protocol and develop a small flock of ip-enabled repeaters for an office space. one could use a system similar to some of the contenders for the "world's smallest webserver" I've been seeing for the past couple of weeks. some of them aren't much more expensive than the friend.link units themselves, and if the two-way units less than $20US, the chips that drive the radio signal can't be _that_ much, or that hard to use... |
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Untethered versions could make use of those dinky little satellites that Iridium sent up. |
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Friend.link is cool, but I want more distributed. I also want single-purpose and plug'n'play. |
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This still seems quite a good idea |
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Wouldn't a pager do this? |
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Don't smartphones do this? In fact, I'm pretty sure there are
several services that do this on smartphones and probably
on dumbphones and smartwatches too. |
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