At the summit

Wednesday I was in attendance at the Nebraska Digital Summit, a gathering of government technologists at the Embassy Suites here in Lincoln. I attended a few breakout sessions, and enjoyed some time rubbing shoulders with a diverse group from many other fields. In the afternoon, I was one of three speakers in an hour long plenary session that followed the TED format--in other words, fast--a lot of information stuffed into 18 minutes.

My topic was location-based services in public safety. I demonstrated the LBS application for police that we invented here in Lincoln, P3i, which is now commercialized as CrimeView NEARme, then I talked about several other uses for location-based services in police, fire, and EMS service. Interestingly, the second speaker, who followed me, spoke about the same topic in a broader context: how LBS applications are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in many fields.

We have a couple other location-based services applications in the wings here in Lincoln's public safety agencies. The Emergency Communications Center and Lincoln Fire & Rescue are doing some preliminary work to spin Lincoln up on PulsePoint, an application that provides information about sudden cardiac arrest incidents occurring in public places to nearby citizens who may be able to hlep. We are also experimenting across all agencies with a location-based emergency alerting service, Ping4Alerts.

Like my fellow presenter, I think LBS will continue to be a dominant theme in information technology, as the mobile device becomes the primary way in which we all consume content.