On Wednesday, University of California-Berkeley graduates remotely launched a safety mobile app at Duke that they hope will spread, as its name suggests, like wildfire.
Conceptualized as a platform that allows individuals to alert their communities of an emergency event near them, the Wildfire app has received funding to expand into college campuses across the United States, including Duke University. Wildfire’s founders said they hope that it will complement existing campus crime alerts in helping to keep students informed about emergency situations in real time.
“Wildfire is unique in that an individual student can alert their nearby community if they witness a dangerous situation, like a mugging or break-in,” business lead Vinay Ramesh wrote in an email.
Since it is a mobile app, Wildfire can send out alerts that are location-specific and feature more information and images, as opposed to text-only SMS messages and emails, the founders added.
Alerts on Wildfire come from user-submitted reports as well as verified and reputable newspapers and police departments. Content is moderated, with sources cited or marked as “unconfirmed” if they are pending validation. Posts result in an alert being distributed to users based on the timeliness, validity and severity of an incident.
In 2015, Wildfire's CEO Hriday Kemburu was almost mugged near a UC Berkeley campus library and posted a status in a university Facebook group to reach hundreds of students. That October, he co-created Wildfire with Ramesh and tech leads Jay Patel and Tim Hyon to replicate this effect campus-wide.
Most recently, Wildfire ensured that over 4,000 students within a one-mile radius were alerted to the presence of a shooting near UC Berkeley’s campus last Fall. In the two hours following that event, more than 2,000 new students downloaded the app. The application has since reached over 13,000 student users at Berkeley, which is 60 percent of the student population.
The application is free in order to encourage users to download it and maximize the reach of its emergency alerts, Ramesh noted.
Wildfire's expansion to Duke and other campuses is funded by a UC Berkeley accelerator, which offers support for startups.
“Hriday was born and raised in North Carolina and was a huge Duke basketball fan growing up,” Ramesh wrote. “He’s had several friends attend Duke who have suggested than an app like Wildfire could be useful for Duke students, which is why we chose Duke as one of our next colleges to launch at.”
Some students at Duke have raised concerns about DukeALERTs not being issued in a timely manner, in particular following an armed robbery on Central Campus in November. Other recent incidents reported through DukeALERT include a sexual assault and robbery on Swift Avenue in November and an armed robbery in the Duke Gardens in December.
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