Tannoy announcements over cellular...idea #46/100...

I was thinking about my mobile as an alarm clock. As mentioned earlier, 60% of people take their mobiles to bed with them. Blogger "Digital Evangelist" brought to my attention some of the more sultry perils of this trend.

With push-to-talk allowing for "barge" calls, whereby an audio source (usually voice) can blurt out of the loudspeaker (if auto-answer is switched on), I thought about using this for announcements at wake-up time.

There are the usual suspects, like national news, but I'm more interested in the possibility of local announcements. For example, traffic news. Not the generic kind, but announced from a company who gets its more meaningful traffic reports from arriving employees, especially when accidents have caused blockages.

The other one is the local shop. Sometimes they offer special deals that are worth stopping-by for.

This made me think about the general benefits, or uses, of such broadcast announcements, like old-fashioned blasts from a tannoy. I wonder if we will see this emerge with the development of PTT, especially at the community (neighbourhood) level. For example, will I expect to see a PTT group name published in the local grocery store? Perhaps a variety of groups, such as the "sell-offs-at-the-end-of-the-day" group.

It seems such an easy way to reach a lot of people - a new kind of communications empowerment for communities. The wake-up call variation needs a slightly different approach, because the media needs to be timed to the wake-up period and not a live broadcast. This is just a storage and scheduling problem.

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