On the day a Magnitude 9 earthquake and major Tsunami struck Japan, customers of MIR3 used the San Diego company’s automated notification system to transmit more than 650,000 real-time messages around the world.
“The minute it happened, I checked with engineering and our customers were using every modality of communications—SMS [text messaging], e-mail, phone calls,” CEO Amir Moussavian told me in a recent interview. MIR3 later determined its system had been used to deliver more than 346,000 e-mails; 167,000 automated phone messages; 137,000 text messages; 2,200 pager messages, 1,100 faxes, and even 291 BlackBerry PIN-to-PIN messages—sent mostly by U.S. companies to large numbers of their employees, customers, and partners.
Moussavian, who joined MIR3 in 2002, says it sometimes takes a tragedy for institutions to realize that how critically useful the Web-based messaging system can be. He says the company has been getting more inquiries about its blitz messaging service since the March 11 disaster in Japan—especially from companies and agencies in China.
Likewise, scores of U.S. colleges and universities rushed to sign up for MIR3’s software-as-a-service following a shooting rampage that killed 32 people at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. Five months later, when a disturbed gunman was arrested on the Queens campus of St. John’s University, school officials used the new MIR3 system for the first time to transmit the warning: “From public safety. Male was found on campus with a rifle. Please stay in your buildings until further notice. He is in custody, but please wait until the all-clear.”
Moussavian says the company was
