An avid iPhone user himself, Mahdavi cites the device's form factor as a reason why MIR3 chose to first release its new application on the iPhone.

"The iPhone is a notification machine," he says. "Though Apple didn't invent anything new [with the iPhone,] it brought in existing technologies and mashed them up into a very slick, very small profile device with a large, touch sensitive, high resolution screen. Just try to do some of the things the iPhone lets you do on a Palm Treo. You can't because you don't have enough real estate. Apple brought everything into a small form factor and you don't even need a stylus."

Systems for Business Continuity Calls

San Diego-Calif.-based MIR3 has been a player in the intelligent notification space since 1999. Various firms, government organizations, universities and non-profits, including 87 of the Global Fortune 100, the U.S. Air Force, Brown University and the American Red Cross, use MIR3 technologies for business continuity, disaster recovery, operations and facilities management, and end-user notifications.

MIR3 offers applications that "interactively" function with any text- or voice-based communication device. That interactivity includes what Mahdavi calls "actionable delivery," or the ability to communicate back and forth instead of simple one-way communication between an administrator and a notification recipient.

For instance, in an emergency management setting, IT administrators can use the MIR3 application to designate specific users or employees to a group, create a customized notification for that group and then send messages with specific questions like "Is everything all right in your office building?" Members of the group can then respond with preset commands like "yes," "no, we need help." Responses can then be employed to perform a number of automated tasks such as connecting recipients to a conference call or sending specific information based on their responses. And administrators can then immediately act on the information delivered to, say, send help to a particular location.

The new iPhone based application is different than MIR3's previous offerings because it not only enables IT administrators or other corporate executives to send and receive IT alerts or emergency communications using a mobile device, it also allows them to create and manage distribution of such notifications, as well as act on them, with a few taps of an iPhone or iPod touch.

"What we envision is this: An IT person is sitting watching movies at home when a corporate server goes down. Our Web-services API sends a notification saying the server is down, and then on an iPhone the IT employee opens up a portal, logs in and reboots the server," Mahdavi says. This scenario would replace an IT staffer having to fire up a PC and network management application to get the fallen server up and running again.