Riordan Web Security Issues

A Cause for Twitter: Hurricane Irene

In the wake of this week’s earthquake and with Hurricane Irene barreling toward the Maryland coastline, state and county emergency management offices are on high alert to get important information out to the public.

Armed with social media tools such as  Facebook and  Twitter , government officials across the state are reaching out to people like never before while also sticking to traditional media outlets to get their messages out.

“One of the bedrock functions of Emergency Management is being able to communicate with the public,” said Mark Hubbard, director of the Baltimore County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management . “There are so many options available— We’ve got to push out messages through as many different channels as possible so that there is something for everyone.”

Hubbard said that the agency’s Internet posts and its  Twitter feed , which has 1,000 followers, are meant to reach a broad audience.

However, information is also simultaneously being broadcast through traditional media outlets like cable TV.

“The media has done a phenomenal job with getting information out quickly,” Hubbard said. “That helps to reduce the burden on the system in terms of people calling 911 to call and ask, ‘Hey, what was that?’”

In addition to Baltimore County, similar social networking activities are being utilized by the Howard County Executive’s Office; other Maryland counties have also posted emergency preparedness information along with headlines about the quake and the storm on their county websites.

Edward McDonough, spokesman for the  Maryland Emergency Management Agency , says that each county has its own formula for getting out information to the public.

Meanwhile, MEMA has its own Facebook page along with a news feed on its website and a  Twitter account with nearly 2,000 followers.

One of most recent agency Tweets announced that Gov. Martin O’Malley declared the hurricane conditions a state of emergency.

Mobile Advertising – Mobile Applications And Its Future Trends

Research giant Gartner published in the recent report that in the coming trends for mobile applications, money transfer would top the list of priorities while others were Mobile Payment, Near Field Communication and Location based Services. Mobile Search followed soon after followed by Mobile Internet and browsing, Health checkup through mobile, Advertising, SMS and instant messaging and music. There are trends related search engine optimization which are backed up by some other reports as an identifiable trend with marketers. Over the years, the picture of the mobile market is going to change drastically as virtually mobiles nowadays sport dual core processors as hardware which came up just 2-3 years back for laptops!

Mobile to enterprise software is also a good trend which will come up drastically, as mobile workers seek to sync their sales orders with enterprise ERP systems. Most product companies who provide CMS or other applications also feature a version which is compatible with a smartphone. Emails are probably the most popular applications today in a mobile. A new class of apps is in the reckoning which will be compatible and connected with ERP to CRM solution to HR modules.

Mobile devices are nowadays morphed using cloud and virtualization. A single device will soon be used as a mobile phone, still/video camera, credit card, location device, gaming device, music player etc. Cloud infrastructure coupled with virtualization is necessary for morphing. Form factor is also needed.

Mobile games are also in demand and there are many types of games coming up and will become more and more complex and chances are that there would be many multiplayer games being played by many people in real time. Mobile personal assistants are PDAs in a new avatar. There would be multiple digital interfaces, and diverse security mechanisms. Chances are that it would be very difficult to remember and manage so many disparate set of systems. A new class of mobile applications will come and go every month and there would be different concepts in play too.

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