Oct
29
2003Groove in Iraq
29
2003
I’m glad news about Groove usage in Iraq is reaching the media… We are doing some AMAZING stuff over there — stuff that literally could not be done any other way. Here’s an excerpt from a recent San Antonio Express-News article. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be available online.
Teams of U.S. troops deployed to Iraqi cities assessed each town’s electrical, water and waste systems. There were 300 categories of information needed to complete the assessment. In each major city, a fleet of Humvees, all equipped with laptops, were sent to do the job.
Trouble was, [Groove Marketing VP David] Fowler said, there was no network for the soldiers to use. So the Groove-equipped laptops also were loaded with wireless networking capabilities.
As the team fanned out and made their individual reports, information leapfrogged from one vehicle to another, back and forth, crisscrossing town, so that all of the laptops were recording all of the data.
Each laptop held onto the data until a military satellite came into range. Then, during a brief window, each would upload the data and send it simultaneously to commanding officers, the U.S. State Department and humanitarian agencies working in the region.
“It’s astonishing,” [Industry observer Clay] Shirky said. “You couldn’t have done that any other way. No other software could’ve done it.”
If you’re one of the people who never “got” why Groove is different from “eRoom” or “WebEx”, do you get it now?