Yesterday, Fab and I had a meeting with CPR group who did this GeoGeny solution. It as in Montreux during the Jazz Festival
The GeoGeny interface was conceived by CPR Group (Switzerland) Inc by calling upon different telecommunications technologies (GPS, GSM, GPRS, SMS). (...) Used for the first time on a large scale during the Montreux Jazz Festival 2003, GeoGeny considerably facilitated the security forces command centre’s job for the duration of the festival.Security professionals, all subjects who have to react as quickly as possible in the field, civil defence, the army, the police and private investigators need reliable and effective solutions to manage their teams. GeoGeny is a geo-relational system that is used by the protection service which protects people and goods. GeoGeny ensures that these demanding trade bodies have proven know-how at their disposal as well as equipment and software that is as pragmatic as it is efficient.
The Montreux Jazz Festival’s security forces’ command centre is benefiting from the advantages of GeoGeny for the second consecutive year. The positioning of police cars and firemen, ambulances, life guards and those patrolling on foot is shown on a central screen. All the above mentioned bodies are permanently linked up to the command centre, by GMS, GPRS and SMS. Knowing perfectly what’s happening in the field, the operator manages their forces and sends orders with optimum efficiency.
Some terminals, worn on a belt, are additionally equipped with an alarm button that offers maximum security to isolated workers and to those who are carrying out risky jobs. This allows them to be connected directly and discreetly to the post operator, thus further guaranteeing that they will get prompt help if there’s a problem - wherever they happen to be.
Here is the device, called Secufone, it's designed and manufactured by a joint venture between them and another swiss cell-phone company: Precisa:
Why do I blog this? even though the situation they develop technology for a rather centralized (control room) than decentralized (I am more focused on spatial coordination in decentralized settings), it's interesting to see how it looks like. I would be happy to check their logfiles (even anonymized!) to see how poeople use such tools, especially self-declared positions (through SMS) versus GPS automatic positioning. There would be a lot to learn from this in terms of users' acceptance, users' reactions to the technology (how do they behave if they cannot be positionned or if they cannot communicate?). It seems that they use such information to improve their design, as one of interns told us.