Save Lives, quickly. We built an Alert Hub, a way for FIA to communicate with authorities and the rest of us in real time during an emergency. It’s a fault tolerant, fully autonomous system to ensure that alerts are delivered to the most relevant populations even during the worse of natural disasters – even when communications are severed, organizations are still in full contact with one another regardless of difficulties accessing the outside world.

Since FIA is non-competitive, we brought together global media agencies, companies, NGOs, non-profits and alerting authorities to unite and leverage their collective capabilities, resources and expertise to share critical information immediately, anywhere in the world.

The speed of the FIA Alert Hub makes it the link to enhancing existing alerting mechanisms (TV, radio, SMS message), and often FIA the only protocol that keeps all the alerts active.

Ad tech does saves lives. Within a second of receiving notification of an emergency, FIA extracts relevant information - then generates a dynamic ad unit. The ad units are formatted across all devices and sizes delivered instantaneously. We purposefully keep the ads simple, with the same look and feel so it’s recognized as an alert.

The Alert Hub streams alerts to the closest geographical datacenter. Data is organized and distributed into a Redis-cluster backed by an Aurora database. Filters organize and cache incoming alerts to identify relevant messages. When an alert matches a desired pattern, it’s disseminated to subscribers of FIA in 40 milliseconds. Subscribers such as media companies, ad-networks and publishers cover the last mile by delivering a creative ad-unit to web banners, mobile devices and billboards.

Components: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), Redis Cluster, Aurora database, Laravel and node.js, AWS Lambda.

Served during global disasters: 800+ million alert impressions and 10+ million tornado warnings have been sent through the Alert Hub with geographic penetration into 100+ million devices – as dynamic ad units. FIA’s alerts have also assisted in the rescue and return of 794 children.

The Alert Hub aims to help local communities build more resilient cities, consistent with the United Nations initiative to support Private Sector Reliance for Disaster Resilient Societies (ARISE).

The Alert Hub was designed specifically to scale the aggregation and dissemination of emergency messaging globally, regardless of technological, geographic and language barriers.

FIA uses ad technology and the global cloud to save lives – real lives, not statistics. FIA receives and disseminates emergency alerts with an “Alert Hub” for child abductions and during natural disasters. The Hub is an open-source service, made possible by support of the largest global cloud infrastructure, software developed by ad tech engineers, and a common code called Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). The result is authorities across the world are leveraging a common technological bond between them – the internet and advertising creative to save lives at the local, community level.

The internet had few laws for how emergency alerts were disseminated and regulate its use. FIA is relentless to unify a technical protocol to change that to save communities from disaster.

The FIA Alert Hub is the product of the systems that also serve advertising from media companies – including load balancers, ad queuing systems, cloud infrastructure, data centers and server-less data processing – integrated to leverage the internet’s global reach. The Alert Hub’s activation of these technologies with the code of the Common Alerting Protocol – results in a system that can rapidly and uniformly receive data, and automatically send life-saving information globally – as creative ad units.