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.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Totally off subject, but how do I contact Crimemapping! I watched all sorts of stuff going down the other day from my bay window, on HIgh street at 51st. Today they have my address as the place it went down. I don't like that, and can't figure out how to contact them. HELP!!!

Anonymous said...

When will the android update occur?

Tom Casady said...

2:27,

Crimemapping? You'll need to help me: what exactly are you looking at. I thought you might be referring to http://crimemapping.com, but I don't see any incident in your immediate area there. Contact me off-blog if you wish, tcasady@lincoln.ne.gov.

Tom Casady said...

6:27,

Not sure. I saw a post on PulsePoint's twitter feed this week about a new graphic design for the app that they are working on, which will be released for Android first. I suspect it will be soon.

Anonymous said...

Android update is out, thanks!

Stan said...

Maybe you could refresh some of us what the various terms mean, like structure fire and confirmed structure fire, etc. Also, I get fire reports, but not accidents. How about some basic training for the app.

Tom Casady said...

Stan,

I think you'll find some basic training in these previous posts:

October 8, 2015
October 12, 2015

Or go directly to this setup video.

Expanded vehicle accidents are those with multiple patients and/or high mechanism of injury. Confirmed structure fires are those with clear first-hand evidence.