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Flooding is a very common source of disaster and it occurs somewhat frequently around coastal areas. If your home is close to the coast or you are in some other flood-prone areas, it is in your best interest to get prepared for eventualities. Torrential rain can also be the source of the flood. Never wait for the flood to occur before you get set to deal with it. How best can you do this? By getting helpful information that will teach you what to do, like you are already doing by reading this write up. Such information will help to limit the level of damage you suffer as a result of flooding. They are also simple enough to follow. If you are seeking for a DIY flood cleanup guide, then this is it. Otherwise, look here for professional flood/water damage services in San Diego.

Salvage your valuables

If the flooding is not the exceptionally huge type that reaches the height of the building, you should make attempt to salvage any of your valuables in the home. Remove your furniture and other items, both those floating and those already submerged. Remove everything you can lay your hands on to ensure their safety. Your rug too must not be left in the flood. In the sun you need to spread them to make them dry. If you have very important paper documents that are soaked already with water, lay them out in the sun to dry, with one separated from the other. If the weather is kind enough to permit a full glare of the sun, it is a question of time before these items get dried and back to normalcy.

Salvage your home

Get rid of the water and get rid of the mud that accumulates as a result of the flooding. Never allow the water to stay for too long to curtail their damaging effects. Never allow the mud too to stay glued to your floor, your walls or furniture for too long, else they become very difficult to remove. Get rid of them on time and make sure it is done appropriately. The water can be removed using pump and the mud can be shoveled off. If the shovel cannot remove all the mud, make use of a hose to get rid of the any leftover mud to make the home clean again.

The mud and the flood water must have brought all sorts of things into the home, including possible infectious agents. The next thing to do after salvaging your valuables and removing the water and the mud is to disinfect the home. This is a very important aspect of the DIY flood cleanup and it must be done to make the home livable again. Wash or clean up the walls and the floor using disinfectants. Scrub the furniture with disinfectants too. The rug must be spread to dry under the sun. The sun can help kill some of the germs, but the rug must be properly disinfected after it has dried up. Clean up the interior of the home and discard everything that is already damaged by the flood.

Read more about Mold Remediation Services in San Diego, CA

The FCC’s NOI lists hundreds of questions and areas of investigation considered by the FCC to support the development of a nationwide broadband strategy.

The scope of the questions offered in the NOI are breath taking.  Even the discussion of how to define broadband is complex.  As a first step the questions,

…the Commission currently uses the terms “advanced telecommunications capability,” “broadband,” and “high-speed Internet.” Should these definitions be unified, or should they have separate meanings for different purposes, keeping in mind that current and future broadband platforms will increasingly support “high-speed Internet” as one of several offered services including voice, video, private data applications, and the like?

and these

…should a different set of standards be used to identify mobile broadband services which allow mobility or portability but may have lower throughputs – and fixed broadband services? Should the definitions vary depending on whether the broadband service is used to serve residential or business customers and if so, how?

hint the complexity of ensuring semantic precision as required for rule making or regulation. Most of us have a shared understanding based upon common knowledge or perhaps marketing definitions of what is meant by broadband or high-speed Internet.  Of course, no one will go to court over the phrases used in various articles or conservations.

The Plan lists 12 policy goals of a national strategy.

1. Advancing Consumer Welfare
2. Civic Participation
3. Public Safety and Homeland Securtiy
4. Community Development
5. Health Care Delivery
6. Energy Independence and Efficiency
7. Education
8. Worker Training
9. Private Sector Investment
10. Entrepreneurial Activity
11. Job Creation and Economic Growth
12. Other National Purposes

Beyond the policy goals the NOI addresses various network technologies including  satellite, WiMAX, LTE, and fiber along with the availability of the new white spaces spectrum.  The focus of questions concerning specific technologies and this new spectrum availability is the role these networks can play in “ensuring access” to broadband for rural areas or areas where competition is limited.

The FCC also announces in the NOI plans for a comprehensive data collection effort to assess the true availability of broadband in the US. Previous and current data relies upon service providers to provide the FCC with self-determined metrics on the availability of broadband and high-speed Internet access. The methods used by ISPs to measure access has come under fire from a number of consumer and public interest groups.  It is critical that astroturf organizations like Connected Nation are balanced by response and data efforts which are independent. Connected Nation is campaigning through the comments process at both the FCC and the NTIA which is responsible for a large portion of the $7.2 billion broadband stimulus outlay.

There are so many areas to contribute through the FCC’s comment process that everyone – especially those in the technology industry and the new media industry must participate.  Independents and entrepreneurs have a direct stake in helping the FCC meet it’s goals to provide Congress with a National Broadband Plan that recognizes new economic realities of innovation coming from the network’s edge rather than just being broadcast out to the edge. The Plan recognizes this in part by covering “Entrepreneurial Activity as one of the commission’s policy goals.

Below are examples of comments to the FCC.  Simple position statements like “We must have Net Neutrality” while can achieve weight is received from tens of thousands of individuals likely wouldn’t receive the same level of attention and consideration from the commissioners as a thoughtful and substantive response.  This point was made clear in a recent interview with Kevin Werbach who has been a recipient of these communications when he served at the FCC in the mid 1990s.

The full interview with Werbach will be posted as a podcast on mobilejones.com this weekend.  Other interviews are also coming from those with a unique perspective on the importance of the FCC’s work to establish the National Broadband Plan.

FCC Comment

Organization: New America Foundation

Leadership:  Eric Schmidt, CEO Google

Comments on Rural Broadband Strategy

FCC Comment

Organization: Connected Nation

Leadership: ATT, National Cable and Telecommunications Assoc., CTIA – The Wireless Assoc., United States Telecom Assoc., Verizon, Comcast and others.

Comments on Rural Broadband Strategy

It hardly seems like a week has elapsed since TechCrunch 50 brought together 50 (actually 52) of the best and brightest technology starups the internets have to offer, yet here we are 7 days after everything wrapped up and still information is trickling out.One piece of particular interest is the latest from MOPocket creater Justin Oberman, a mobile application called FlyScreen which allows users to add their favorite web services to their phone’s sleep screen.The basic idea is that all that time your phone spends in “idle” mode could be better put to use displaying dynamic content of your choosing, providing zero click access to the content accessed most. Widgets are added via myflyscreen.com and displayed in sequence on the screen when it would otherwise be displaying a clock, animation or some other battery wasting triviality.Widgets are built specifically for the platform. The key advantage is that developers would only need “web level” programming knowledge rather than native calls for each device. FlyScreen is currently only available for Symbianplatforms, but a Blackberry version is in the works as is a version for Android once the platform isactually available.So what does the business opportunity look like? Widgets have been hashed and re-hashed numerous times over, normally with the biggest issue being how to actually monetize content.  In the case of FlyScreen, Justin is not looking just to branding opportunities as already used by numerous other widget producers, but has also included the equivalent of Google AdWords unobtrusively located at the top of the widgets displayed. Given the huge number of Symbian devices currently in use, the market is there to be seized.The company also has plans to license their idle screen technology as an alternative to advertising which is likely to be a more compelling business model for users and investors. FlyScreen is currently in private alpha, but mobilejones.com will provide a hands-on review of the application soon.

winner of the TechCrunch50 were to be chosed on audience cheers alone, Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera would certainly have won by a mile.The Tokyo-based company started as they meant to go on – with much enthusiasm, much gloss and a whole lot of stuff that makes little sense outside of the Akihabara district.The presenter (whose name we never really found out) started with a strong assertion – “Look Up, Not Down!!!”. He then ran a video demo and read the remainder of the presentation in heavily fragmented English, explaining the core ideas and technologies behind the “Sekai Camera”.The Sekai Camera is an application for the iPhone which correlates information about your geographical location, proximity to others and tags which have been added by other users to create a faux-augmented reality which encourages you to wander around with the phone thrust straight out in front of you. It’s not certain what effect this will have on your chances of getting a date.  All roads do lead to Rome, afterall.The greatest issue faced by Tonchidot is how to deal with the ever-changing world around us. As soon a someone has tagged a location with information (for example a favorite store), you can be assured that something will change. Most likely the shop will go out of business and be replaced by something else. When asked how they will deal with this, the response from Tonchidot was “We have a patent” to the delight of audience who erupted in laughter.Many have written with great doubt that the world envisioned by Tonchidot is just around the corner.  While Sekai Camera is boldly ambitious, the technology for realizing immersive real world interaction does exist and has been deployed in limited applications. The illusion is likely that the camera actually contributes little to the information displayed.Another company Earthmine founded in 2006, Berkeley, CA is delivering a platform upon which a product like Sekai Camera might be based.  The video below demonstrates one of two products from Earthmine called Flash Viewer API. A second API, DirectData API, from Earthmine provides the street-level imagery and 3D data required for a “virtual camera to the world.”    Earthmine APIs are available through a private beta and an application is available on their site for developers interested in testing the platform.Less fantastic than those of the web-centric and less mobile savvy audience at TC50 might believe, I’m with Tonchidot and will echo their reply to the judges who could not imagine such an application. “Join us!”

Some may think that GoMo News on Wheels! would be enough activity for one conference, but who could resist participation with a talented group of mobilists and colleagues.  Not me.

Tuesday April 1st I’ll join a few of the Mobile Messaging 2.0 bloggers to lead a Roundtable on the topic:

Web 2.0 comes to Handsets — New Issues and Upside for Monetizing the Mobile Web

Below is a sampling of the participants involved in discussing mobile advertising.   Read more about the event at Mobile Messaging 2.0.
BREAKOUT GROUP FACILITATORS:

Debi Jones, Founder of MobileJones and Managing Editor: Mobile Messaging 2.0, US Editor: GoMo News
Paul Ruppert, Founder, Global Point View Ltd, and contributor to industry blog, Mobile Messaging 2.0
Oliver Starr, Editor-in-Chief GTDTimes and Founding Editor Mobile Crunch
Peggy Anne Salz, Publisher and Analyst, msearchgroove.com

ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS AS OF 3.25.08 –

Steve Bratt, CEO, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
Kaj Hagros, VP of Market Development, Airwide Solutions
Dom Tolli, VP New Services, Virgin Mobile *
Laura Marriott, President of the Mobile Marketing Association
John Styers, CEO of Mobilco, former MD for Sprint Media Networks
Nick Lane, Informa
Roger Cheng, Dow Jones Reporter
Mickey Alam Khan, Mobile Marketer
Andy Miller, CEO, Quattro Wireless
DeWayne A. Nelon, CEO, Avot Media
Rob Adler, CEO, Go2Media
Pared Reitzen, CEO Mobile Storm
Bob Bilbruck, MD, Mobiltain
Ameen Ahmad, VP, SnapTell
Darlene McNeill, Founder of DarlaMack.com and contributor at Mobile Messaging 2.0
Linda Barrabee, Yankee Group
Monica Allevan, Wireless Week
Jack Philbin, Vibes Media President and Co-founder
Jonathan Steuer, VP & GM of Media/Entertainment and Technology of Inococulture
Johan Van Mielo, Mobilityminded
Alli Seo, Aving
Li Coffee, Aving
Debra Wayne, TelecomWeb
Glenn Kiladis, Digit Wireless
Alice Cuneo, Advertising Age
John Puterbaugh, Nellymoser
Tony Rizzo, 451 Group*
James Brehm, Frost & Sullivan*

* new additions