Why Everyone Should Download the “Red Alert” App

We live in a terrible world where we never know when we will take our last breaths. Will I get shot at school or work? Will a plane hit my building? Will my car, bus, or building blow up? Will I get hit by a drunk driver? Will I be left in a car as a child? We just don’t know.

The “war on terror” has actually been going on for thousands of years. Countless peoples, countries, races, religions, and empires have fought each other. For more than sixty years, Israel, for example, has been under constant attack from all of the countries and peoples around them, and the country has continued to fight back and thrive.

Governments will always issue propaganda, and the media will always tell stories during such times of war, but people never know if they should believe what they hear because there has never been a way to see and hear when, for example, a missile is shot during a war.

Until now. The “Red Alert” app (iPhone / Android in Hebrew and here for English), developed by an Israeli teenager, sends a text alert – and an audio one, if desired – to a mobile device whenever air-raid sirens are blared anywhere in Israel. Each alert also states the location of the warnings (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and so on):

It is quite the amazing technology and an important live-saver. As Meredith Bennett-Smith notes in the Huffington Post, there is often only fifteen seconds from the time the siren airs to find shelter:

Israel has a sophisticated warning system in place with its Iron Dome anti-missile defense system and air raid sirens, but citizens working indoors don't always hear the warnings, according to CNN's Fred Pleitgen. The app gives some people a little more time to get to shelter. When a Color Red notification is detected, the app sounds an alert and displays the number of seconds since the missile warning siren, the Times reports.

Now, let’s take a step back and talk about how this app can teach the world what it is like to live in a place where thousands of rockets are being fired in an effort to kill innocent civilians (in the country that also supplies them with water, money, and electricity!).

Please do not judge Israelis unless you are living in their shoes, and do not judge anyone in a situation unless you have been in that same situation. Download the app (iPhone / Android in Hebrew and here for English) and feel the stress that Israelis are going through. In addition, the war in Israel is actually against Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Syria when one looks at the big picture.

I am an American Jew who holds American and Israel citizenship. I worked in Israel during the Second Intifada, and I was lucky several times to miss becoming a suicide-bombing victim by minutes. I lived in that fear. I moved to Israel for almost five years and continued to live in that fear. I understood what it is like to be fitted to a gas mask and to know that anything can happen.

Today, I have a company that operates in part in Israel, The Cline Group, and travel there many times each year. I have been there during the rockets, but they have never been close to me (so far). However, they are close to me after I leave. Still, I know that Israel is the safest place in the world to live – because they have the best military and lifesaving innovations such as the “Red Alert” app.

I will close with a story that Todd Wasserman tells at Mashable:

Last Friday, Benny Shaviv, an Israeli entrepreneur, picked up a birthday cake from a local bakery and was driving home with his soon-to-be 9-year-old son when he got an alert on his iPhone.

"We stopped on the side of the road and jumped into a ditch," he says. Shaviv and his son, Roy, were about 500 yards from the Iron Dome, Israel's anti-missile system on Route 4 near Tel Aviv.

"I said 'Look Roy, here's the Iron Dome. You know who built that? An engineer,'" Shaviv recalls. "He came home with a hell of an appreciation for what engineers do."

War, unfortunately, is where the “Startup Nation” comes from.

Josh Cline is President and CEO of The Cline Group, President and CEO of Cline Ventures, and General Partner of INE Ventures. You can see more of his thoughts here. Follow him on Twitter.