I bet that ICE is acronym only few have heard. I personally stumbled upon it yesterday and took a valuable lesson. ICE stands for In Case of Emergency and it is a globally used acronym that helps rescue officials / emergency services to contact next of kin using mobile phone address book in case of emergency.

Taking ICE into use is really simple. Just open up your cell phones address book and add a new contact that begins with acronym ICE. And this will be the one number rescue officials will call if something happens to you. It is also possible to add multiple persons to ICE-list using ICE2,ICE3 etc. acronyms.

Currently for example Vodafone is having a campaign that encourages people to store emergency contact details in their mobile phones, but I do think that things need to evolve before ICE breaks the roof. So how to make ICE more widespread and well known?

• Adding ICE querydialog to new phones
  I guess this could be the most efficient way to make ICE widespread. A required ICE querydialog when taking new phone into usage. And to make it consistent, a check/reminder every 30-60 days…
• Adding ICE details when registering a new mobile account
  Mobile phone operators could easily do this kind of activity. Simply add two new fields to registration form and when opening an account send these details to customer phone.
• Insurance discounts
  People like to save money, and I think insurance companies could (and most likely already) provide various baits for people carrying ICE code in their mobile phones. After all, we are talking about an issue that can safe huge amounts of money from insurance companies. If you get an discount for an alarm system or annual health checks, this is fully comparable to those.

Anyhow, if your mobile phone address book doesn’t already contain ICE, add it. It can save your life some day, and in addition it can save you some money…