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Gary Shapiro, Contributor
President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association
Learning your child has gone missing must be one of the worst feelings a parent can experience. A few weeks ago, I saw a posting on my Facebook page from a friend who was passing along an alert that a girl had just been abducted. Turns out, my friend had been duped and the posting was a hoax. Nevertheless, the episode reveals how social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter provide parents with a powerful tool if the unthinkable happens and their child goes missing.
For one, you can quickly and easily inform your friends and neighbors what has just happened. As law enforcement will tell you, finding a missing child depends on quick action. The longer the child stays missing, the colder the trail gets. Also, social-networking sites - as the hoax exploits - can lead to a viral effect, alerting complete strangers who might be in a better position to help. The one major flaw with social-networking sites is that it all depends on your network. What if most of your "friends" or "followers" aren't in your geographical location?
Fortunately, innovation has provided concerned parents with better alternatives. Recently, my friend Gabe's family was in South Carolina on vacation. While Gabe was on a business trip, he received a call from his distraught wife that their dog, Shirley, had run away during a storm.
Luckily, Gabe is a telecommunications entrepreneur and IT genius. He had developed a way of using recording and telecommunications technology to contact almost everyone in any geographic area instantaneously.
This "Artificial Intelligence Call" (AIC) solution (owned by ccAdvertising) allows thousands of landline and mobile phones in any area to be called almost simultaneously, then ask questions of respondents and understand the spoken answers provided. Thus, Gabe quickly called thousands of South Carolina neighbors and in an hour had 12 neighbors who called a number provided on the recording to say they had seen Shirley, the missing dog. The positive hits allowed Shirley's family to geo-track the direction the dog had wandered and resulted in her being found within hours. What a happy ending!
Imagine the power of this technology in a missing child case. Instead of contacting friends who may or may not be able to help, you're instantly informing people in the vicinity. Or what if you could send a text message to everyone in your neighborhood? At a recent business conference, I listened to Barbara Pantuso, who is the co-founder and CEO of Hey Neighbor, talk about how her site allows users to create a social network from only those in their neighborhood.
And how about pairing all this technology with a new free app the FBI is releasing for the iPhone? Called ChildID, the app lets parents gather information on their children, including recent photos, identifying marks and other physical identifiers. This can be used to transmit the children's information from distraught parents immediately after abduction to the local law enforcement. This type of free app can save lives, especially because parents missing a child are not always clear thinking and may have trouble providing this information.
Indeed, the American Football Coaches Association and retired FBI agent association are promoting a complimentary app from the company Nuvel Inc. that can be added to any child's smart phone. The button icon - which has to be held for three seconds so as not to produce false alarms - can be pressed by the child, or anyone for that matter, to get a response voice or text from a 24-hour service center. The child can then respond with the problem: They are being followed, he or she is in an accident or abducted, or their parents are in trouble.
Once activated, the person's specific information - health, physical characteristics, and medical information - and precise GPS location information is sent to GEOS International Emergency Response Center which then notifies the appropriate emergency agency for the region. The software will also send out notification automatically to five people the individual designates - mom, dad, guardian, police, doctor, etc. The ultimate goal is to protect the 75 million children in this country.
Yes, we have Amber Alerts but innovation enables so much more these days. When it comes to our children, there's no excuse not to deploy every technology we have to protect them.
Gary Shapiro is president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the U.S. trade association representing more than 2,000 consumer electronics companies, and author of the New York Times bestselling book, "The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream."
Shapiro, Gary. "How Innovation Is Protecting Children and Families - Forbes." Information for the World's Business Leaders - Forbes.com. Forbes, 14 Sept. 2011. Web. 15 Sept. 2011. http://www.forbes.com/sites/garyshapiro/2011/09/14/how-innovation-is-protecting-children-and-families/.
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