Response from: Martin Dooley

Its a good idea but obvious enough. The problem as we found in the UK - once an incident does happen, the airwaves are near full anyway (due mostly to emergency services communications), so sending on mass a text message to every phone could further impact on the problem.

Response from: Michael G

Hi, I work for another emergency notification service ( http://www.sendwordnow.com/ ) company called Send Word Now, and I completely agree that colleges all over the US are becoming more aware that an emergency notification solution is absolutely essential for any school. Sadly, the tragedy at Virginia Tech had to be the impetus for this, but at least in the future schools will be better prepared to deal with a crisis like this, as well as other issues such as hurricanes and school closures. Send Word Now has some leading universities as clients, and I think very soon emergency notification services will be ubiquitous across all colleges.