Kid's Week: The NORAD Tracks Santa program
Each day this week, we'll feature a special "kid's tech" pick for the holidays.
NEWSLINE360™, with its online-newsroom platform, helps to spread the news about Santa's journey as a NORAD Tracks Santa® Program Team Member.
Parents throughout North America have fond memories of tracking Santa Claus' sleigh on Christmas Eve, thanks to the NORAD Tracks Santa® program. For decades, NORAD (the North American Aerospace Defense Command) has been the primary media source of information about Santa's progress on his annual holiday sleigh ride. News about Santa will become even more robust and cutting edge this year with the help of a growing tech company, NEWSLINE360™, based in Chicago and Vancouver, BC. NEWSLINE360™ has been named an official NORAD Tracks Santa® Program Team Member, putting it in good company with other Program Team Members including Microsoft, HP, Verizon, OnStar, Office Depot/Office Max, iLink Systems and Zillow. NEWSLINE360™ has developed a state of the art content marketing platform that enables businesses to create advanced media-rich online newsrooms where all content can be followed by journalists, consumers and other key audiences and is automatically fed to the business' social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. NORAD will use the NEWSLINE360™ platform to share their latest news and information about Santa's whereabouts and to guide the public toward the entertaining NORAD Tracks Santa® website (http://www.noradsanta.org), which creatively presents a wide range of fun activities and educational information about Santa and about NORAD's mission. The NORAD Tracks Santa® online newsroom can be found at http://www.newsline360.com/noradsanta. If statistics from 2015 are any indication, NEWSLINE360™ will achieve significant visibility from its role as a NORAD Tracks Santa® Program Team Member. The site has more than 1.6M Facebook fans, 169,000 Twitter followers and 220K YouTube followers. Last year, their volunteers (1,500 of them over 23 hours) received 140,883 calls and answered 2,841 emails. "We are thrilled to be named a NORAD Tracks Santa® Program Official Licensee," said Michael Iwasaki, co-founder of NEWSLINE360™. "This program is a beloved institution across North America and beyond, and we look forward to energizing the Santa story as it reaches kids and parents alike." Other NEWSLINE360™ co-founders are Winson Tang and David Wong, both from Vancouver, BC, and Cindy Kurman and Lee Barrie from Chicago. The NORAD Tracks Santa® program had its beginning on December 24, 1955, when a young boy accidentally dialed a wrong number, which was unlisted, belonging to The Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) Ops Center in Colorado Springs, CO. The phone number was an advertisement misprint from a local business the boy was trying to call. The operations center director swiftly realized the error that occurred and promptly advised the boy that NORAD would ensure a safe journey from the North Pole for Santa. In 1958, this new tradition was adopted by NORAD, a United States and Canada bi-national organization charged with the mission of aerospace warning, aerospace control and maritime warning in the defense of North America. The program is traditionally known for reporting Santa Clause's whereabouts on Christmas Eve, but has evolved to provide entertainment and information for kids and their parents. Today, the official NORAD Tracks Santa ® website (http://www.noradsanta.org) is available in eight languages, includes 2D/3D training maps, Santa Camera videos, a countdown calendar and, of course, games.