Sunday, December 24, 2006

This morning around 6AM my wife woke me up as she has felt an earthquake. Accodring to her the appartment building was swaying which was fairly scary. I couldn't feel anything in my sleep so I was actually wondering if it was only a dream. However, just few minutes later I got an SMS "Moderate earthquake (M5.7) occured on 24-Dec 05:59:47 (WIB/GMT+7) 52km (SW) from Labuhan (West Java), 148km (SSE) from Bandar Lampung.". It was an SMS from Earthquake Information Service offered by one of the local companies - I subscribed to it sometime ago. It is a really useful service which informs about important earthquakes within South-East Asia region, often long time before you even hear about it in radio.

If you wish to subscribe just send SMS with content "REG EARTHQUAKE" to 6768 (works with all Indonesian operators i.e. Telkomsel, XL, Flexi, Mobile 8 etc.) - costs Rp1000 per received SMS (US$0.1). Anyway, this just shows how useful mobilephones can be in informing/alerting people about all sort of threats, thus I believe few years from now mobile phones will not only be used as a communication device, but also help to save our lives by providing all sort of threat warnings and information to citizens.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i think more people should know about this service because, well, i just know about this service now.
I feel so left behind

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