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February 27, 2003
XML for First Responders
Earlier, I wrote about XML for criminal justice. Today I found a reference to XML for first responders (they say emergency management). Here are some of the initiatives that look interesting:
- Common Alerting Protocol which is billed as a standard method should be developed to collect and relay instantaneously and automatically all types of hazard warnings and reports locally, regionally and nationally for input into a wide variety of dissemination systems.
- Automatic Crash Notification Initiative which would be used in a system like OnStar so that your car can notify the police when its been in an accident.
- Emergency XML which would create an open XML-based standard for emergency management data exchange.
There are more listed, but these were the most interesting to me right now. These sorts of initiatives are going to make a difference because in the past, even though the technology was there to exchange this information, no one could solve the political questions of what format. Now the world (thanks to XML) is forcing people to develop standard interchange formats. The other side of the job is transport and while that has to be done well and right, its not nearly as political.
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Our Network is for Selling Mops
I was telling this story to someone the other day and they suggested that I ought to write it down, so I decided it might make a good blog article.
In 1994, a friend of mine, Steve Fulling, was in Oregon building a
statewide, high-speed network to connect the state's engineering
schools at DS3 speeds (for you youngsters that was pretty fast in
1994). The project was called NeroNet. Steve talks about how they'd
sit around the conference room hypothesizing things that people might
do with a high-speed network. They came up with lots of lofty ideas:
exchanging x-rays, doing weather simulations, doing physics
experiments, distributed computations, etc.
At the same time, I was in Utah build an eCommerce site called iMALL.com with another friend named Ross Jardine. One of our first ideas was to create something we called "Deals of the Day." There was a company in Orem Utah that was kind of a 1980's version of an Overstock.com: they bought distressed merchandise and then liquidated it. But since there was no Internet, they did it by sending out faxes to thousands of small merchants who paid a monthly subscription fee to get access to the deals. We signed up to get the fax for few dollars a day and then put them on the net. Within months we were the company's largest distributor by far and Deals of the Day was off to a multi-year run as an iMALL.com staple.
That's where these two stories come together. In the beginning of October 1994, iMALL.com went live and Deals of the Day featured its first deal: a case of six Wonder Mops. I called Steve with some excitement and told him we were live and that he could now buy something on the Internet. It so happens, that he was just going into one of these brainstorming sessions on what to do with all the bandwidth NeroNet would deliver to the engineering schools of Oregon. He walked in, pulled up iMALL.com in Mosaic (bonus points if you know what that is) and told the assembled group of academics, "I know what our network is going to be used for: selling mops."
Of course, there were the expected guffaws and then they all pitched in and bought a case of mops---iMALL.com's first sale. If I remember right, the price for a case of mops was $36. Now, I don't know for sure that these mops were the first credit card purchase of a consumer good on the Internet, but if it wasn't the first, it was darn close. We've still got one of those mops (courtesy of Steve) and I've shown it off many times as the beginning of eCommerce.