Posted: Oct 21, 2008
Brittany and Robbie Bergquiest were thirteen and twelve years old when they founded Cell Phones for Soldiers, with the $21 dollars they had in their piggy banks. The brother and sister had been touched by a news story about a soldier who was struggling to pay his cell phone bill in Iraq.
Posted: Jan 05, 2009
If it hadn’t been for his cell phone, Jim Suwal may not be alive today. Suwal had been hunting deer from a tree stand when he fell out of the tree into a swamp. When he regained consciousness almost five hours later, he was able to use his cell phone and call for help.
Posted: Dec 31, 2008
15-year-old Elizabeth Shoaf did everything right. Elizabeth was kidnapped and held captive in a booby-trapped bunker after being tricked on her way home from school. After several days in captivity, Shoaf convinced her captor to trust her enough to use his cell phone to play games. One day, when she was left alone, Elizabeth Shoaf was able to use the cell phone to send her mother a text message describing the booby-trapped bunker she was being held in and what her immediate surroundings looked like.
Posted: Dec 10, 2008
“Arrested.” That was all that the first message, James Karl Buck to micro-blogging service Twitter, had to say. Buck was in Mahalla, Egypt working on a project on Egypt’s new leftists and the blogosphere as part of his master’s thesis at the University of California-Berkeley when he and his translator were arrested at an anti-government protest.
Posted: Nov 26, 2008
Dr. David Nott isn’t a character on a television show like CSI, but like characters on the show he used technology to help save a life. In October of 2008, Dr. David Nott, a vascular surgeon with Doctors Without Borders was working in the war torn town of Rutshuru, Congo, which is embroiled in a civil war between rebel fighters and the Congolese army. A 16-year-old boy in a nearby town got caught in the middle of gunfire, was hit in the arm and knocked unconscious.
Posted: Nov 07, 2008
New York City Police Officer Jessica Trimoglie didn’t speak Spanish, and the weeping Hispanic woman on a dark street corner in Queens didn’t speak any English. Several years ago, this was a common problem for the New York City police department: a language barrier that prevented the police from being able to help the victim because they didn’t know what was wrong.
