Crime & Safety

Former Glenview-ite Makes Texting 911 Possible

Jay Malin's Northbrook company also works with ComEd, city of Chicago and the Canadian government.

If you’ve ever sent a text to ComEd to report an electrical outage, or messaged the City of Chicago to find out, say, where your car was towed, you’ve used something designed by Jay Malin. 

The 42-year-old Northbrook resident is co-founder and managing director of AGENT511, a company that creates mobile messaging systems for municipalities, hospitals and other public service agencies around the country and even in Canada. Locally, AGENT511 is the force behind the City of Chicago’s text-message version of 311, called “ChiTEXT,” as well as an outage alert system for ComEd.

“There are more cell phones in the U.S. than there are people,” says Malin, who grew up in Glenview. “It is almost literally a one-to-one ratio.”

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Malin co-founded the Northbrook-based company  in 2007 to take advantage of the demand for text-message based services. Following some early work with real estate agents, AGENT511 landed a contract with ComEd to create a text-message based outage alert system. Once users sign up for the service, they receive messages specific to outages in their neighborhood, letting them know when an outage has been detected, when a crew is on the way, when a crew has arrived and when power has been restored.   

Work with ComEd led to a contract with the City of Chicago, which, like the utility’s program, is designed to provide information specific to a user’s location. It answers questions such as, “Who is my alderman?” or “Where has my car been towed?” Malin explains. It also opens the city’s 311 line up to those who feel more comfortable texting or simply don’t want to wait on hold.  

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“We’re seeing a broader level of engagement across demographic sectors,” he says.

Another program Malin worked on for the city of Chicago enables 911 callers who've seen an accident or witnessed a crime to share photos with the city via text message. Those photos are sent through a secure line and can be valuable to police who are investigating an incident

Contracted by the Canadian government, Malin's latest project also involves 911 communications. He’s currently building a text-messaging program for the deaf and speech-impaired community that will allow them to interact with a 911 operator entirely via text. The system is now being deployed for the first time as a test run in four cities, Malin says. 

Another recent project was done for a hospital network in Louisville, KY. By texting “ERWAIT” to a special number, users of the service can see how long the wait is for an emergency room at six different hospitals in the area.

“Whether you are seeking care for yourself, a child or an aging parent, knowing an approximate wait time can help make a trip to the ER a more positive experience for everyone,” says Dr. Brenden Wetherton, an emergency medical physician with Jewish Hospital and St. Mary’s HealthCare in Louisville.

In a way, text messaging is one of the most democratic ways to communicate, Malin points out. While users of “smart” phones can use the internet’s search features or voice-activated programs like the iPhone’s “Siri,” to find information, a system that relies simply on text messaging is available to almost everyone—regardless how fast the internet works on your phone.  

“We get a little spoiled. We live in the North Shore, it’s like no place on earth,” Malin says. “In smaller communities, though, the speed is just not there.” 

Personally, Malin says he has always been an early adopter of new technologies. He owned an Apple IIC, the brand’s earliest portable computer, when it first came out in 1984, and bought a cell phone long before most people did. He was also among the earliest groups of people to use e-mail while working in his first job with Texas Instruments, a company that manufactures products using digital semiconductors—perhaps most notably, the graphing calculators students use in calculus. 

Today, Malin admits he owns four or five cell phones, including an Android he just purchased because his old Blackberry’s camera didn’t pass muster for the frequent photos he snaps of his two young sons. Although Malin says he doesn’t spend a lot of time sending text message himself, he’s noticed how much members of his family rely on communicating that way—including his parents, who have just recently begun doing so. It’s a pattern that has fundamentally changed the traditional telephone conversation, where two people rely on the nuances of one another’s intonations to gather information.

“I can’t say if it it’s for better or worse,” says Malin.

Either way, the use of text messaging seems sure to continue rising. According to Malin, the number of people text messaging grew almost 25 percent between 2008 and 2009. He just hopes his company is poised to ride the wave.


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