If you’re an old-school Cop Block supporter, you surely remember Cell 411. It was a killer app that allowed the user to send GPS-based emergency alerts out to friends and family and also allowed for live streaming video from the scene, among other useful features for police accountability activists.
For instance, a Cop Blocker could be getting pulled over, send an alert to a “cell” including other Cop Blockers in the area, and then others would know the sender’s location and what was happening, and could mobilize to the scene to provide support. Meanwhile, the Cop Blocker who sent the alert could also stream live video from the pullover that his cohorts could watch while they were en route.
The app also had alerts for other categories such as fire, medical emergency, breakdown, and others. The idea being that when something bad is happening in your life, it’s better to have friends respond instead of armed psychopaths who might shoot you, your family, or your dog. In case you’re not already familiar with Cell 411, here’s a video that Cop Block’s co-founder Pete Eyre made showing the app’s various features several years ago:
Unfortunately, after years of useful service, Cell 411 fell into disrepair due to its founder falling on hard times due to some family difficulties. He reached out to me and the Shire Free Church took over the project in 2020, but by that time the software was essentially broken.
The first thing I wanted to do was open source Cell 411’s programming, which we have done. The project’s new head programmer, “Nobody”, is an old-school Cop Blocker and has spent the last few years – minus six months in jail when he was targeted by the feds for selling bitcoin – trying to refactor and improve the code. However, he needs help. It’s more than a one-man project and he’s getting burned out and needs some people with programming experience for Android and iOS who are willing to help make Cell 411 great again.
If you don’t know how to program, you can still help us test the app.
If you’re willing to help, please join our Matrix or Telegram support chats to get connected, and introduce yourself. You can also find our code at our Gitlab here.
Please share this story if you value Cell 411. Thank you.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Preparation is the key to success. Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today. Many oft-quoted phrases underscore the benefits that can stem from acting in the now. In maximizing your time today, so that your tomorrow will be more productive.
Yesterday, I needed a ride. Looking to test Cell 411’s new “ride hailing” feature, I requested a ride across town, expecting to sit on my hands for the next two hours.
I set the request radius to 15 miles. According to the app, there were 100 drivers within 15 miles.
Within a couple minutes, I received a driver’s offer. It’s a reasonable price, but I don’t immediately accept it.
A minute after that, my neighbor (who lives in my building, across the hallway) undercut that price by $1.
A couple minutes after that, my friend sent a Facebook message: His girlfriend saw my request. She’s not available to drive, but he is. Even though he hadn’t set up the app, he became part of Cell 411’s ride hailing experiment. I got the ride, paid my friend and I even tipped him with a double almond milk latte.
Have you tried hailing a ride with Cell 411 in your area? You may be surprised with the results.
Originally launched in August of 2015, Cell 411 has since been installed 85,000 times, worldwide. Its primary purpose is to connect people with their friends, family, and neighbors in any emergency situation, from being pulled over, to a fire, to medical emergency. At that it’s been an incredible success, and it’s free to use. Now, by adding ride sharing, Cell 411 has gone to the next level. They’ve decentralized ride sharing even moreso than UBER and Lyft and Cell 411 did it without a single dollar from investors or publicity in advance. For those who have been watching Arcade City – Cell 411 has accomplished AC’s original vision while Arcade City’s app doesn’t even have ride sharing yet.
I’ve been a longtime supporter of Arcade City. Arcade City’s founder, Christopher David gave a great keynote speech at the 2015 Keenevention and is a blogger here at Free Keene. In its early days and through the summer I promoted AC on my radio show and became one of the top recruiters. However with the early September release of the current software, I was pretty bummed that ride-sharing was not included, and instead it was just a “game” involving earning and giving “karma points” to other people in the network. It didn’t make sense, especially since Arcade City already had ride-scheduling in their early 2016 app. Obviously the code from the first app could have been included in the September 2016 release and allowed drivers to get started giving people rides immediately.
Good-bye UBER, Cell 411 is here.
Arcade City had succeeded and building incredible buzz by moving operations to Austin, TX after the city council there drove UBER and Lyft out of town with their control-freak regulations. They made a facebook group, (since their old app had been pulled from the Android and Apple stores at this point in anticipation of the September-released app) and attracted 30,000+ participants into the group! The Austin facebook group garnered a bunch of media and even a police raid of the Arcade City offices.
Drivers of UBER and Lyft were understandably interested in Arcade City, which promised an app that would truly decentralize ride sharing. The original vision Chris David had was to cut the corporations out of the picture. No longer would UBER and Lyft (and their imitators) be able to control the drivers. Drivers would be able to set their own rates as well as accepted payment methods – cash, bitcoin, credit card, silver, or whatever. This vision would bring a new level of competition to the transportation business, while making it even harder for governments to target those involved with regulation. (more…)
Don’t call 911 during emergencies, call your trusted friends instead, using Cell 411, the decentralized emergency alerting and response platform. Cell 411 is a powerful smartphone app that allows you to stream content and notify people in your cell(s) during police interactions and things like medical emergencies, car troubles and fire.
