Let’s say you are an emergency coordinator dealing with a chemical spill and need to notify all police, fire, medical, and rescue professionals within a 50-mile radius. Send a message with the alert, and only those in that radius are asked to respond. Even residents of an area can subscribe to the service to receive alerts from officials should there be a disaster or other emergency.

Or you may be a retailer that has excess inventory to move in a certain store. You want all of your customers that happen to be in downtown Des Moines to know that there is a big sale going on at your store there. You don’t want to bother anyone else because the sale is local. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to send a message advertising the sale, and only people in or near downtown Des Moines get it?

SquareLoop is an emerging company that provides such services – the ability to send people messages based on where they are. The Reston, Virginia based firm today announced that Sprint is the first carrier to deploy its service, called Mobile Alert Network. Also announced is that Contra Costa County in California is the first jurisdiction to offer the company’s alerting service to its residents. I recently talked with Joe Walsh, Chief Operating Officer, and Brad Wills, Wills & Associates, representatives of the company.

A SquareLoop is an aerial acrobatic maneuver. One of the company’s early founders was an aviation buff and owned the URL. When they were thinking of a company name, he suggested it, thinking that one can draw a square or a loop on a map and send a message to everyone inside.

SquareLoop also recently landed $1 million in funding which it plans to use for sales and marketing. With technology based on patents licensed from the large government contractor Mitre ($1025.2 million revenue in FY 2006), SquareLoop spent the last three years building a solution from scratch and running pilots of the critical communications capability in cities such as Baton Rouge, LA and Manassas, VA.

The service offers features pilot customers have requested including sender-defined alert tones and vibration cadences, native language delivery, message authentication, and encryption. According to the company, unlike other services, all of this works while protecting the location privacy of the targeted individuals.

This is an exciting technology and service. The ability to target messages to mobile device users based on where they are opens up a rich set of applications. Emergency managers should find the service indispensable for times they need to inform people from multiple agencies, departments, and organizations but only need to reach those in a certain area.

For marketing to mobile devices, location provides an important filter that should greatly improve conversion rates and improve customer loyalty. The ability to deliver content based on location is also applicable to other high-demand applications such as weather and traffic.

The SquareLoop public safety applications should catch on rapidly. Communications between first responders, for example, have been a major issue in providing adequate and timely help. SquareLoop’s alert service provides a stronger mechanism than traditional methods because its messages are location-targeted; location of first responders is a critical filter in an emergency. In addition, jurisdictions can mandate use of certain technologies, ensuring more complete participation and coverage.

On the consumer side, since consumers need to proactively choose which services to put on their phones or other mobile devices, uptake might be slower, especially if people assume they will be tracked by the service. However, if SquareLoop can show people the benefits and that they will not be tracked, people should come around because the benefits are indisputable. Furthermore, the gradual opening of carrier networks to new applications should accelerate consumer uptake.

In summary, SquareLoop has tremendous potential. Its messaging-by-location service fills a void and opens up many opportunities. SquareLoop will reach its potential, in part by expanding carrier partnerships and also becoming more involved in the emergency planning efforts of the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), two organizations focusing much effort on the standards and other issues around using geospatial information and mobile technologies in emergency management.