Wildfire — Real-Time Safety Alerts
When an emergency situation happens near you, how do you hear about it?
Many times people go hours, days, or go without hearing about incidents that have occurred nearby. Whether it’s a mugging, a fire, or a shooting nearby, there aren’t any effective ways of notifying your local community, friends and family, and local police in real time.
We built Wildfire to solve this problem.
Our Story
One night Fall 2015, Hriday was walking home when two individuals wearing ski masks and gloves popped out from behind some nearby bushes with the intent to mug him. After avoiding the incident, he immediately called the campus police and stayed for half an hour in order to alert other students walking home that way. He went home and posted a PSA on a UC Berkeley Facebook group to warn other students. The most surprising takeaway from that night was that about 15 Cal students he had never met before messaged him and thanked him for alerting them, via the PSA post, so they could then find an alternative, safer path home that night.
Despite the hundreds who benefitted from Hriday’s post on Facebook, there were over 30,000 additional students who were completely unaware of what had happened that night, who may have had to walk home using that same path. Hriday quickly realized that restricted networks weren’t enough to alert others, and that there had to be a better, more effective way of spreading safety related information to those nearby.
In light of that incident, we built a new safety app, called Wildfire, with the hope that it not only would help students walk home safer at night, but that it would be beneficial in making communities safer.
Introducing Wildfire
What is Wildfire?
Wildfire is a mobile app that sends you alerts in real-time when safety related incidents occurs near your location. You can also view a feed and map of recent incidents based on your current location.
Additionally, you can follow other locations you’re not currently in and be notified of safety related incidents that occur there. We know there are many parents of students who have downloaded our app to stay informed about incidents near campus.
Lastly, you can follow friends, who receive an alert via SMS if an incident happens near you. They don’t even need the app downloaded!
Example of Wildfire in use
In the Spring of 2016, there was a shooting 3 blocks from UC Berkeley’s campus. Within minutes of the event, we had several students report it on our app, and we were able to alert over 4,000 students in a 1 mile radius. All of this happened, within minutes of the shooting occurring. We had over 2,000 new students download our app within the next 2 hours (hence our name, spreading like Wildfire).
Wildfire Promo video
App Store Screenshots
App Icon
Progress so far
We launched at UC Berkeley in the Fall of 2016, to tremendous support from students, and now have over 13,000 students (over 60%) of campus using Wildfire to stay informed about alerts near campus.
We were soon picked up by The Huffington Post, Berkeleyside, and The Daily Cal, and were accepted into the SkyDeck Accelerator.
🔥 What’s next?
After our stint at SkyDeck, we’ve joined The House, another accelerator at UC Berkeley and have received some funding to help spread Wildfire to more college campuses.
Our goal is to be the go-to safety app. We want to help students, parents, and anyone who feels unsafe to be better informed of what’s happening around them and to feel safer in the process.
Who made Wildfire?
We are 4 recent graduates of UC Berkeley (Go bears 🐻!). We are computer scientists, electrical engineers, and political science and public policy majors.
We’d love to hear what you think at team@wildfireapp.io!
Cheers,
Hriday, Vinay, Jay, and Tim
P.S. you can find all of the images above here.
