The Media Future Now is an informal and dedicated group that aims to generate conversations for Washington DC area professionals, focused on finding ways to keep media-centric businesses agile, innovative and future-focused. Looking at the meet up focused on mobile media, Andrew Mirsky asks two questions related to the emergence and usefulness of mobile media applications and social networks:

• What is the true community utility of mobile technology?

• If mobile technology increasingly enables non-traditional communications behavior and non-traditional media consumption, are we in the middle of or looking at the end-product of where is this going?

I think I can try to add to the debate around the topics looking at some of my personal use, and then at some of the ramifications that disaster prevention and response are offering.

The fourth Monday of July marks the traditional start of hurricane season in the Virgin Islands. Hurricane Supplication Day is in fact celebrated as an official holiday in the U.S. part of the archipelago with dedicated services and praying around the idea of hurricanes landing on the islands. Deeply interwoven with religion, the day helps to ingrain a common notion of risk, and a community desire to be avoid the damages that a hurricane may carry. In short, the holiday may operate as a popular day in disaster preparedness.

InterAction and USAID have launched the Pandemic Preparedness Capacity Project to help prevent and understand pandemic disease outbreaks, in particular bird flu. The project platform has been crafted by Development Seed over open source technology with a great range of functionality for system administrators to access and manage data. The project offers a tremendous departing point to build up a platform to share knowledge and resources in order to prepare for pandemics. The bigger challenge remains in generating the needed conversation to see the effort grow to its full potential.

A new system to alert of domestic accidents for the elderly and disabled looks to self-sufficient digital monitoring, linked to SMS warnings. "Eldercare" has been developed by a team at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos of Madrid, which proposes to use artificial vision to detect falls or fainting when the elderly are alone at the residence. Automatic detection triggers an alarm for the system to send SMS-MMS to relatives or a healthcare emergency center. The system aims to shorten response times eliminating the risk associated with slow reactions. Such a solution poses technological, access, and severe privacy related challenges, which will require careful attention.

A disputed failure in the service of Euskaltel - the leading phone provider in the Basque Country - leaves users out of coverage for well over 7 hours. Besides the effect on private communications, and the problems associated with that lack of capacity, the most critical problem lies elsewhere. The collapse also affected the access to SOS Deiak, the local emergency number.

The Spanish Ministry of Health has announced their public campaign to help prevent a possible heat wave this summer, and protect in particular those more vulnerable, such as children and the elderly. The initiative has been too quickly labeled as a very innovative effort to prevent the worst effects of heat waves, in particular around the main idea of using SMS notifications for weather alerts. However, on this occasion the emphasis on a misguided use of mobile communications may gloss over the actual limitations of the campaign.

One of the common challenges for building damage assessments is not only how to make them efficiently but most important how to make them meaningful after a catastrophic event. Lack of coordination between different groups, and little or no interest in gathering the data for post damage evaluation, leave communities short of lessons learned, and citizens ill prepared to access and use the knowledge produced during these efforts. The use of Short Message Sytems (SMS) between mobile devices may offer a simple, relatively cheap and efficient way to enhance current practices.

Shock catastrophic events are treated popularly as the highlight of disasters, making them attractive to media, and easy to be embedded in the collective mind. They are easy to sell, and easy to forget. The "hard" part of the cycle that maintains interest on the disaster is short. It is well known for instance how important it is to target fund raising efforts at that time, or generate a momentum to change policy that will help with the recovery and will prepare to avoid similar circumstances. Soft disasters most often do not even have the privilege of this peak of media attention. They are "soft" not in their severity, with the opposite often being true, but soft in lacking a shock impact to be aware of them. They are soft in being typically persistent, where the disgrace grows bigger and bigger over a prolonged period of time, to the point that it would seem that they are difficult to look at. Droughts, heatwaves, and epidemics are the type of soft disasters that unless create a gruesome event or fact, seem to become secondary. The situation in Somalia is unfortunately too good an example.

The image above shows a partial snapshot of the Managing News dashboard, shortly after having established the first groups for tracking disasters news worldwide with an emphasis on the recent Cyclone Nargis that swept Myanmar and the Sichuan Earthquake in China. While the map represented the disproportionate nature of these events next to other relatively reoccurring disasters of smaller scale, the selected headlines by the system were predominantly dedicated to regional USA events of little media impact outside its borders.

A 6.1 quake was reported hitting Iceland some 30 miles from the capital Reykjavik at 15.45PM local time. A few specialized news outlets picked up the event, which I reached some two hours after it happened. Minimal reference to the event was received in mainstream media outlets, and while not enormous a 6+ level event typically qualifies as strong with the potential to severely damage population and structures in a 100KM radius. It would only be much later that a brief snippet of the event would clarify the "minimal" effect of the damage. Two critical factors played an important role in giving it such a low profile: small population, and high wealth. The trouble is that relatively small poor populations may also be as a result of their size outside of the alert systems, something only fixable through proactive local preparedness.