In the wake of this week's tragedy at Virginia Tech University, questions are being asked about whether something might have been done to warn students more quickly of the danger stalking their campus.

NY1 Tech beat reporter Adam Balkin says there are some relatively new technologies that developers claim could help.

Technology certainly could not have stopped the tragic events at Virginia Tech from ever happening, but some developers insist their high-tech creations might have been able to lessen the severity of the tragedy.

Take, for example, surveillance cameras that use sophisticated software to spot, on their own, when something's just not right. That technology is being offered by a few companies like Nice Systems, Inc.

“Ninety-eight-point-eight percent of all video is useless. It's that 1.2 percent that's critical that you need to know, but you don't know which 1.2 percent, so all of it has to be analyzed and looked at at all times. Human beings are not meant to just look at just rote staring at a screen,” said Ian Ehrenberg of NICE Systems, Inc. “Smart technology will look at a scene and determine what is considered normal, dwell or standard. From there, it will identify exceptions that you want to be detected and that will immediately be brought up in real time to make an assessment on.”

But just what is an exception?

“An exception might be an intrusion; it might be a dropped bag at a critical area; it could be abnormal behavior — the running or the chaotic movement within other movement,” says Ehrenberg.

After identifying an incident, the next crucial step is to contact people who need to know about that incident and to send a notification that will get to them as soon as possible no matter where they happen to be.

Several developers now offer services like Send Word Now, where you can send an alert to a group of people from anywhere — either type it in through a computer or your cell phone, or call it in. That message instantly gets sent to everyone on all their devices.

“To be able to make sure that time is condensed as much as possible, what you really want to do is provide multiple means and provide effective instantaneous means so the message can go out,” says Tom Shoemaker of Send Word Now. “So you’ll have their text message, you'll have their home phone, you’ll have their cell phone, you’ll have their email addresses. You can speak a message, you can type in a message. If you text it in, it'll be spoken.”

Those types of systems are increasingly catching on at universities and big corporations right now.

Same goes for smart surveillance which is also popping everywhere from airports to shopping malls.

— Adam Balkin