FireChat to launch natural disaster alerts — FT.com

Christophe Daligault, chief marketing officer at Open Garden, said the company had been working on the project for about nine months with organisations including the International Committee of the Red Cross and two government agencies in the Philippines. He added that users first started to adopt the app themselves to spread news ahead of earthquakes and floods. “We saw jumps in usage pretty much every time there was a massive disaster in the world, happening or threatening: floods in Kashmir, in Chennai, Hurricane Patricia in Mexico,” he said. “We realised there was a need to evolve our technology to enable disaster proofing for organisations.” Open Garden will license its technology to non-government organisations and governments so they can include it in their own apps, rather than relying on citizens to have downloaded FireChat before disaster strikes. FireChat was designed for people to use in areas with no mobile phone reception, from underground trains to busy festivals where telecoms towers become overloaded. But it was quickly adopted by protesters trying to circumvent government-imposed restrictions on the internet.

The new FireChat alerts will expire after an hour or two to ensure out-of-date information is not spreading in fast-moving situations, and will be restricted to certain geographical areas. The company has also created a desktop system so organisations’ headquarters can send alerts over the internet which will be received by people at the edge of an affected zone, before leapfrogging around smartphones to the worst-hit areas.