Did you ever ask yourself whether or not you will be informed early enough when an earthquake took place in the pacific? Just imagine you are living in LA or San Francisco and that earthquake is causing a Tsunami… I would want to know that – right now! Finally, there is a solution for this called DisasterAlert for BlackBerry!

DisasterAlert is a brand new application which has just been published by Skylab Mobilesystems. They are well known for mobile GPS and mapping applications (see BlackBerry and GPS for more).

DisasterAlert is available as a subscription based BlackBerry app which somehow shows a global disaster report of disasters that take place right now. It lists these disasters by date and time their information was last updated. By utilizing the BlackBerry’s internal GPS receiver (or an external Bluetooth GPS dongle if your device does not have a built-in GPS) DisasterAlert also shows the distance to each disaster! This allows us to quickly figure whether or not we might be affected by it.

Disaster Types Supported: Floods, Earthquakes, Tropical Cyclones and more.

Like you can see in the screen shot below, DisasterAlert can also show these disasters on a map which give a visual feedback on the location. An image is so much better than just plain numbers, right

      

When you are in the map view DisasterAlert actually uses BlackBerry Maps. However, if you open the menu and click on “Details”, while the disaster is in focus, you will see further details about it. For example, it will tell you the type of disaster, name, category, country and even the count of people that might be affected by it. I got to get this! DisasterAlert is definitely in the app category: “It is better to have it and not need it, than to need and not have it!”

Compatibility: DisasterAlert is compatible with all current BlackBerry devices no matter with or w/o GPS. This includes the brand new Storm2 and Storm, Bold, Curve, Tour and so on.

The application and service is available for $29.99 per 6 months (which makes just $4.99 per month) and it comes with free lifetime updates. The 12-month plan lets you even save 17% compared to the 6-month plan. So it might be worth looking into that out too.

Check it out: DisasterAlert Website

Over the past months we were following the ActionPad beta program and reported about nearly any change in the app. The reason for that is: from the beginning ActionPad was an awesome product which jut hit my nerve. It is very easy to use, has shit loads of features and even allows me to protect my confidential memos with a password. The memo protection is surprisingly strong as it uses something called AES/MD5 encryption which is certified by the NSA for US government confidential data. Well … not everyone needs that though. Therefore, memo protection is disabled by default. As long as you don’t activate it, you will not see anything about that

Anyway, the official note can be found below. I just love the app and therefore, I thought you guys might want to take a look at it as well.

ActionPad for BlackBerry® is the best memo management software available for BlackBerry® Wireless Handheld devices. ActionPad is available for all current BlackBerry® Smartphone models and is full touch-screen compatible. A program download (OTA and Desktop) can be obtained from all major mobile content websites such as BlackBerry App World, Handango, MobiReach, MobileSoftMarket.

ActionPad Core Features

	Title & Content Search		Memo Encryption
	1-Click Category Switch		BlackBerry® Integration
	Hotkeys		Desktop Synchronization
	Share Memos		Enterprise Synchronization

More Information: ActionPad Product Page »
Presentation: ActionPad Video »

The new beta version 6 of LiveTracker has just been published. The new cool feature – in my eyes – is the remote control thing where you can activate and deactivate GPS tracking of the LiveTracker on your BlackBerry by sending an SMS. This might be extremely useful when your device was stolen!

Besides that, you can share your current GPS location by SMS, email and even Twitter.

This is the full and original list of changes that took place for beta 6:

A new version of LiveTracker Beta is available now. The following has changed:

• Version: 0.4.0
• Remote tracking control via SMS.
• Auto start tracking on device (re)boot can now be activated.
• Start/stop tracking manually via button.
• Help screen with description of functions and FAQ-like support.
• User interface polish.
• Bug fix: Twitter connection uses BES/BIS too – if activated.
• Minor bug fixes.

And this is how it looks like when you see your device walking around somewhere in Waterloo

Free and Open Beta Download: LiveTracker for BlackBerry