Remember when you had to wait to see if school was closed?
I remember as a kid how I excited I was when I woke up on a school day and discovered several inches of snow had fallen on the ground. The first thought that always hit me was, "I hope school is closed!"
In those days, there wasn't a whole lot of technology to announce school closings. In fact, the primary communication method was the radio. And the radio stations only announced the school delays and closings every 15 minutes so you really had to pay attention. And since they always made the announcement in alphabetical order and my school started with the letter "S" the anticipation waiting to see if my school was announced was brutal.
Fast forward 30 years
Now I have two kids of my own and things are a little different. Take this morning for example. At precisely 6:00 a.m., my cell phone beeped with a text message telling me that my sons' school was delayed 2 hours. At the same time, my wife received the same text message on her cell phone. Seconds later, my cell phone, my wife's cell phone and our home phone all rang at the same time with a pre-recorded message announcing the school delay. Out of curiosity I checked my email and sure enough I had an email with the transcribed text of the pre-recorded phone message.
And even if under some incredible set of circumstances I missed all of those messages, all of our local television stations run a continuous ticker at the bottom of the screen with a complete listing of school delays and closings. And because I have TiVo, if happen to alphabetically miss my sons' school and don't want to wait for the next go-round, I can just rewind the live broadcast until I find the information pertaining to my sons' school.
I kind of miss the old-school anticipation.
11 comments for this blog post so far...
December 17, 2008 at 10:59 am
Michelle Hartz
On a related note, did you catch any of the information about the businesses that came out of Indianapolis Startup Weekend? One of them (not the one I participated in) is Shout Now (http://www.shoutnow.com), a service that enables you to send a prerecorded message to a list of phone numbers for a very small fee. It seems like a service that would get a lot of use on days like this.
December 17, 2008 at 11:01 am
Patric Welch
@Michelle Funny, I just checked out their site yesterday. I stumbled on it from something I read on Twitter. I had no idea it was the result of the Startup Weekend. How cool!
December 17, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Brian
I was at startup weekend and had the pleasure of getting to know some of the ShoutNow folks.. great team!
Here is some video that I helped put together documenting everything… it was a great, but long weekend!
<object width="480" height="385"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/p/328444DD10C038F5" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>
December 17, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Brian
I should have known better than to drop that embed code in… here is a link.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=328444DD10C038F5
Brian
December 18, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Rita
How is ShoutNow different from Phonevite.com?
December 18, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Patric Welch
@Rita I’ll have to let the good folks from ShoutNow answer that one but from what I understand they are cheaper than their competitors and they do not have any contracts to get locked into. You pay as you go. Anyone from ShoutNow reading this want to verify that?
December 18, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Brian
I sent Molly a link, so hopefully she can chime in.
December 20, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Molly Butters
Patric is correct- ShoutNow does not require any contracts and the site is up and ready to go right now. Just enter your #, ShoutNow will call you to record your message, then enter the #s of your friends, family, etc.. and send your Shout. A basic 1 minute Shout can be sent to 10 people for $.99. We are working on capabilities that will allow you to sync to your Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo address books, etc.. and upload .csv and .xls spreadsheets. Look for those in early ‘09.
December 20, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Rita
I guess I don’t see how $0.99 is better than free:
http://www.phonevite.com/help/freevspremium.php
December 20, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Molly Butters
We hope to develop a freemium version when the resources become available. However, we hope to keep the simplicity of ShoutNow consistent regardless of whether you are sending it to 10 or 10,000 people. Phonevite may allow you to send a few free messages however once you’re ready to send more, the UI changes. Please keep in mind we are still early in our beta phase and expect rapid and significant changes in the coming months. Thank you for your interest and support!
December 21, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Michelle Hartz
I don’t think ShoutNow uses any ads either, where it looks like the free version of the other one does.
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