textOK.com sends "I'm OK" SMS during disaster
The idea for textOK.com came in response to the London bombings, when it suddenly became obvious that people were instinctively turning to their cellphones in times of crisis. It's the brainchild of marketing company Refresh Media, and is a solution for British mobile users to let all their contacts know they're safe by sending an "OK" SMS via shortcode 60999. It costs 25p/45 cents to use the service, and all proceeds go the Cancer Research, Friends of the Earth, and NCH — they're aiming to raise £100,000/$178,000 for those causes. A couple of things about this make us leery about this over something like the recently-proposed ICE system ("in case of emergency"): you have to register all your contact names online (with a marketing firm…), and isn't a little odd to set a monetary goal that's predicated on the occurrence of disastrous events?
