News

Rikei Corporation (Head Office: Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo; President & CEO: Tetsuo Kuroda: hereafter “Rikei”) would like to announce Takahagi City Municipal Government (Mayor: Yoshio Kazama) has decided to adopt a new “Integrated Area Mail & Emergency Alert E-Mail Distribution System, which makes it possible to automatically distribute J-ALERT’s (*1) instantaneous voice information.

Background for the Adoption

Located in the northern part of Ibaragi Prefecture, Takahagi City suffered huge damages caused by the 2011 East Japan Great Earthquake &Tsunami disasters. Even today, the municipal government is still working in a makeshift office. With a key word of “must advance from recovery to reconstruction,” they are tackling challenges such as reconstruction of the city hall, improvements of disaster prevention facilities and other facilities and multiplexing information transmissions as a part of disaster prevention measures. As a part of such efforts, the city has decided to adopt a new “Integrated Area Mail & Emergency Alert E-Mail Distribution System” for use for information distribution to the three major cell-phone carriers (NTT DoCoMo, KDDI (au) and SoftBank Mobile).

With this adoption of the new E-Mail Distribution System, Takahagi City now can automatically distribute J-ALERT’s civil protection information as Area Mail (*2) and Emergency Alert E-Mail (*3) to citizens living in the city, and can also do automatic distribution of evacuation information, which the city issues, and the like to the three major cell-phone carriers with a single operation, greatly shortening the time needed for information transmission at the time of emergency.

Outline of this new product

This product is an integrated type of “Area Mail & Emergency Alert E-Mail Distribution System” which is designed to automatically link with information (including “instantaneous voice synthesis information” and “advance voice overwrite information” of citizen protection information) which is designated from among various pieces of J-ALERT’s information (such as citizen protection information, earthquake information, tsunami information, volcano information, weather information).

Up to now, sending an email to cell-phones of the three major cell-phone carriers required manually entering a message into the respective systems of the three carriers. This new integrated Area Mail & Emergency Alert E-Mail System has made it possible to do such work with a single operation, thus shortening the time needed for information transmission. And by using this system during disaster prevention drills, it is possible to let people know well about this new system.

Features

• Broadcast distribution of any emergency alert “Area Mail” and any Emergency Alert Mail of the three major cell phone carriers.
• Linkable with the Citizen Protection Information issued by the J-ALERT System (instantaneous voice synthesis method, and advance voice replacement method).
• High-speed processing has been realized in order to send the information from the J-ALERT System directly to the three carriers.
• Linkable with the Area One Seg(ment) System (which provides broadcasting services for a specific area) and with L-type Telop System.
• Linkable with external devices such as the Digital Signage System, and products by disaster relief vendors (such as automatic vending machines).
• As for weather information, this system can work by responding to variable information such as headline information of the telegraphic message issued from Japan Meteorological Agency.
• Other maker’s receiver can be used together this system as long as it is specially designed and made as a receiver for the J-ALERT System.

Optional Functions

• Ability to link with Area One-Seg(ment) or L-type Telop
• Ability to confirm the voice message of the J-ALERT System by using a PC or a cell phone (when fixed sentences are supported, and when the output is limited to E-Mail)
• Automatic text linkage with Twitter and FaceBook is also available.

Rikei’s Future Plans

Using the delivery of the new system to Takahagi City as a leverage, we’ll continue our utmost efforts to promote and sell this new system to local governments across Japan to help them have better systems for distributing their disaster-related information.

We believe you vividly remember the scene in which staff members of local governments were risking their life to provide a tsunami warning to as many residents as possible at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake which occurred on March 11, 2011. We believe it is our company’s very important mission to urgently develop products and systems, by fully using our accumulated experiences and expertise, which will ensure the safety of residents and reduce the burden of staff members of various local governments across Japan.

Our Future Plan

Because of our mission explained above, we will continue our best efforts to supply this product to local governments across Japan based on our experiences in selling JAK-1000 and JAK-1500.

*1: The “J-ALERT System” is a system designed to transmit emergency information from the central Government to local governments via a satellite at the time of emergency which must be sent urgently, including tsunami warning, urgent earthquake information, ballistic missile information. As for weather information, including tsunami, Japan Meteorological Agency is to check its contents, and as for information about armed attacks from other country (countries), the Cabinet Office is to determine the contents, and then, such information is to be conveyed immediately to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, which will be broadcast to local governments across Japan via a communications satellite (SUPERBIRD B2).

*2: The original Japanese-language wording Area Mail” is NTT DoCoMo’s registered trademark.

*3 The original Japanese-language wording “Emergency Alert Mail” is the service name of KDDI (au) and SoftBank Mobile.

Other product names and company manes appearing above are trademarks or registered trademarks of respective companies.

About Rikei Corporation