Besides having been in the military, being a volunteer Victims Services Crisis Counselor for over a year, and even taking self defense/Krav Maga classes regularly… having a family really brings security and safety to the front of your mind. Over the years, I’ve taken several ideas from articles, EMTs and police officers in my emergency communications toolbox.

Among the the tips I’ve heard about and use are:

• Create a speed dial/short cut on your phone for 911 and other emergency numbers.
• Add a label to your family and other emergency contacts, “ICE – theirname”. ICE stands for “In Case of Emergency” and first responders look for that in phones they find at the scenes of emergencies. I also add the relationship to the person in the contact notes. For example: “ICE – Marcela – Wife”.
• Every night before bed, I put my phone next to my bed and put the “speed dial” screen up… so if there is an issue, I can get to my 911 speed dial quickly.
• Put a list of emergency contact names and contact information on your refrigerator, ESPECIALLY if you have kids. That’s one of the first places that emergency services personell will look.

These tips may make a few seconds difference in an emergency situation. I’ve heard about a new tip that I may add to my security toolbox, an app called Guardly.

“It takes eight taps to dial 911 on the iPhone,” Sookman says. Should the Guardly user place the app in the device’s dock, that process is reduced to three taps, he says.

Although I haven’t used it yet, the app is supposed to help with a few issues with the normal “dial 911″ approach.

• Triggering an alert in the app dials 911 AND a customizable list of family that can be notified of your emergency. They can also be sent SMS text messages and emails.
• Your GPS location is also sent to first responders and family.
• There are also other features like a loud alarm, as well as automatic photos and video coming soon and some paid features.

Here’s a full review of Guardly on Mashable. Guardly’s pricing and feature comparison between the free version and the premium version points out that many of the best features are paid. That’s great from a business perspective, but at $10 per month, that gets a little steep for a family. I haven’t found info on pricing discounts for a family or multiple users, but will post in comments if I do.

I’ll be trying out the app and maybe the premium services before making a full recommendation, but it certainly looks promising. What steps do you and your family take for health and safety?

I wanted to share some of the mobile focused resources that I’ve been interacting with recently. There are a lot of good resources out there!

– Mobile Web Design Blog “How to design web sites for the smallest screens on the Internet” – They have a great post on Mobile in Latin America too.

– Mobile Demystified, a blog by Waterfall Mobile, a leading SMS solutions provider.

– Nielsen Research’s Mobile Research Blog.

– Untether.tv – Great video interviews with mobile industry rock stars, by Rob Woodbridge.

– The Flurry Analytics Blog is a great pulse on mobile usage across all the apps and sites that use Flurry to track their efforts.

My favorite Mobile News sites:
– Mobile Marketing Watch.
– Mobile Marketer and Mobile Commerce Daily
– Mashable Mobile
– MobileCrunch

Organizations:

– The Wireless Industry Partnership connecting mobile developers to information, resources and people. Some great resources and worldwide mobile industry event lists.

– University of Texas’ Wireless Network and Communications Group, they put on the Texas Wireless Summit, next one is 16 Nov 2010 in Austin.

– Austin Wireless Alliance

– Mobile Monday Austin new meetings coming soon! and Mobile Monday Worldwide site, so you can find your local group.

– The Mobile Marketing Association another great resource for events and research.

– The National Retail Foundation’s Mobile Retail Initiative research. The executive summary is really interesting.

What mobile sites do you frequently use? Please share in the comments and I’ll update! More coming soon!

As you may imagine, I’m very interested in the announcements at today’s Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference, so I thought I’d share some of the resources I monitor for
up-to-the-minute news (besides Apple Developer Connection, of course).

There are several “Live Blog” sites and several Twitter users you can follow for updates:

• Ars Technica
• gdgt
• Gizmodo.com
• Engadget.com
• CNN Tech on Twitter
• Mark McClusky from Wired Magazine

After the announcements, let us know what you are most excited about!

We saw an amazing headline this week: “Apple Sells Two Million iPads in Less Than 60 Days“. Which is a pretty amazing feat considering that the iPhone took over 2 quarters (6 months!) to sell that many phones. That’s also counting less than a week in international sales, so that’s mainly in the US. I’ve heard that many US Apple Stores are out of stock, or are limiting the number purchased to 2 per customer, as they are in short supply.

From the announcement of the iPad, to its launch, even today, I hear people asking “Why iPad? What would I use it for?” I got asked those questions about 5 times this week, but yet some people clearly “get” it and are picking them up like free tshirts.

When I try to tell people why I enjoy my iPad, I often feel like it’s difficult to express why it’s useful, why I use it instead of my laptop or why my 3 year old daughter loves and uses it so much. It is different from my iPhone and different from my laptop, but it combines several elements of each… enough that make it a really nice and convenient device to have around.

Here are some of the ways I and my family use our iPad, some of these may resound with you, some may not… I’d certainly like to hear how YOU use your iPad, or why you aren’t.

• Checking and responding to personal and work email, it’s better than my iPhone for typing longer emails.
• Checking and updating Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media status and content. Those links to websites, articles, news, videos… all work great on my iPad.
• Reading news and other content sites via dedicated apps, RSS apps, websites, then sharing on my social networks.
• I load it up with videos, podcasts, iTunesU content and books for travel or other relaxing downtime, for myself, my wife and my daughter. We all use it to consume media.
• My daughter loves it as a educational and fun game device… from drawing apps, to matching and alphabet learning apps, she picked up how to use it on the first day, and continues to learn new apps nearly immediately. What other things can you really say that about, with a 3 year old?
• I use it while my wife and I are watching movies or TV, to look up characters/actors, topics or locations around the world that are mentioned. I don’t have to get up, I don’t have to strain my eyes to see the results. I had the iPad to my wife and share the info… the technology gets out of the way.
• Many days, I use it instead of a printed newspaper while having breakfast and coffee with the family. I can instantly go into more depth during a news topic discussion, or offer insights when somebody says “what happened in Buenos Aires this week?”
• Even though I have the WiFi only model, I’ve taken in on a few daytrips and client meetings, using it for email, Skype calls and our company PowerPoint presentations too.

To not sound like toooooo much of an Apple Fanboy (Although I really am), I should mention that I’m not connected to my iPad like a leash (my wife says my iPhone is stuck to my left hand though). I don’t use it all the time, I don’t use it to create long-form content, like this blog post. This amount of content is really more suited for my notebook computer… this may change if I get a Bluetooth keyboard though (when my wife lets me).

Sometimes I use my iPad instead of my phone, sometimes instead of my laptop… sometimes instead of the TV or newspaper too. My family and I use it on the road for fun, I use it for work and presentations. It allows me to bring less gear with me, but still gives me access to much of the information and utility, and it can be a lot of fun too… I am certainly hooked, and I bet you would be too. Give one a try and see what you think… let me know too!

Although most Americans haven’t used text/web/data services on their mobile phones, mobile ad companies active and some are getting acquired by major players. AOL, Google, Yahoo and several startups are all focusing efforts to either buy or build mobile ad platforms.

Market research firm eMarketer says American ad agencies spent $421 million on mobile advertising in 2006, a figure that is estimated to jump more than tenfold to nearly $5 billion by 2011. Wow.

More info here at Business 2.0.

Some of the mobile ad companies I’ve seen: AdMob, AdBrite Mobile, Millennial Media, ThirdScreen Media, Greystripe and Hovr.com (ads for mobile games).

If you are using Google Maps to check out cities in California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada or New York, you’ll notice a new option in addition to “Traffic, Satellite, Map or Hybrid”… “Street View”.

It’s a nice way to “virtually tour” places you’ve never been, or to see the neighborhood of an office you are heading to. Very cool!

Below is a screen grab of a street level video view of New York’s Times Square. You can move forward, back, turn around and down connected streets in the interface.

Some cities, New York at least, have 3D building views as well.

Of course there is also speculation on “virtual billboards” and other advertising in this video… I’m sure it’s coming…

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been re-reading some of the old information architecture books from the mid- to late-90′s… from Clement Mok’s Designing Business, to Richard Saul Wurman’s Information Architects. It’s great seeing their early efforts, most of which are still amazing… they brought such order to very chaotic information. Subway maps, road atlases, information graphics, business process graphics… Tons of great examples and learning experiences in those two books.

As I’ve been looking over those, I’ve realized that my focus on information design has been mostly around electronic spaces, web, email, mobile, software… but it can also be about phone books, maps, directions to and from stores… it’s really a pervasive discipline. And if you look at some of today’s media, still an under-used one.
Even art can have an information design aspect to it: CNN profiles an interesting art project showing snapshots of people’s emotional experiences as they move through a city. Not just the streets mapped with a GPS, but how a person feels, heartrate, respiration, blood pressure and notes of what they did and saw.

“There are different ways of mapping the city that aren’t strictly about the practicalities or financial sensibilities that we usually guide our urban planning with”

At the artist’s site, you can download some data for Google Earth, and see lots more examples of UK cities mapped.