At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
My son came
running into my office yesterday saying that the police had sent him an
SMS text message. I told him not to worry because I got one too. In
fact 3 million mobile phone owners across the state of Victoria got a
message warning them of impending danger.
Unless you've been living under a rock, you would know that
Victoria is still in the grips of the worst bush fire disaster in
Australia's history.
More than 200 people have died in tragic
circumstances and thousands of homes have been lost. Today, with
forecast high temperatures and high winds already howling across the
state, authorities have warned that this could be a particularly nasty
day on the fire fronts.
To date, warnings have been issued on
radio and TV. However, for the first time, the state Government through
the Victorian police force has mobilised the major mobile phone
networks in the first ever initiative to reach the wider population
with an emergency message.
The message read: "Msg from Vic
Police Extreme weather in Vic expected Mon night & Tues High fire
risk Listen to local ABC Radio for emergency updates Do not reply to
this"
While the SMS messaging system has obviously been very effective in
raising public awareness of the danger, its technology limitations were
exposed by the fact that the messages were received at widely varying
times - some many hours apart.
Unfortunately, the combined SMS networks are currently only capable of
sending a few hundred thousand messages an hour. However, there is
theoretically no reason that this could not be changed in future as the
SMS service uses such a miniscule portion of the mobile networks'
bandwidth.
Michelle Thomas
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