Tuesday, May 17, 2016

New feature in PulsePoint

PulsePoint released a new version of the app yesterday. The update adds one significant feature you may notice, called "roaming agency." This feature causes PulsePoint to add the agency at your current location to the incident list. You don't have to look it up any more, until and unless you want to follow that agency and get their notifications on things like traffic crashes and fires. Here's a short video with the details:

"Roaming Agency" Overview from PulsePoint Foundation on Vimeo.

This should be particularly convenient for those users who live in an area where several jurisdictions close to one another have implemented PulsePoint. Your list/map of incidents will always be in your current location.

When you travel, a glance at PulsePoint will now let you know whether your current location is a PulsePoint connected community. Hopefully the middle part of the country will eventually  start to fill in as more agencies adopt this technology.

Lincoln has just over 8,100 users who have downloaded PulsePoint and are following Lincoln Fire & Rescue as of this morning. Not bad, when our goal was 5,000 in the first year since the launch in early October, 2015 and we still have almost  five months to go.

It seems that for the moment "roaming agency" is only a feature in the iOS version of PulsePoint. In Lincoln, 56% of the downloads have been for iOS, 44% for Android.