Meet Tara, the New Crowd Alerts Mascot!

Hi there! Welcome to our first dev blog of 2022. We have a lot of cool things planned for the Crowd Alerts app this year. While we aren’t ready to share these updates with you yet, we would like to introduce you to the official mascot of Crowd Alerts: Tara the tarsier!

How Tara Was Created

One day during a team meeting, an idea sprung up: what if Crowd Alerts had a mascot? Immediately we all hunkered down to find the perfect animal that would best represent the app. After going through a whole slew of choices, we finally settled on a tarsier.

History of the Tarsier

Tarsiers can be found within Southeast Asia, primarily in the Philippines. They’re in the same suborder group as apes and monkeys, but they’re actually more closely related to lemurs! They’re about 5 inches tall and weigh only 4 oz.

Tarsier Fun Facts

Did you know that:

  • Tarsiers are nocturnal creatures
  • They love to eat bugs
  • Their suborder name Haplorhini means “dry nose”
  • They’re very shy
  • They’re sensitive to loud noises and bright lights

Tara and Crowd Alerts

Tarsiers are cute and all, but how do they relate to Crowd Alerts? We chose tarsiers because we felt that their unique behavior represented what we hoped to achieve with Crowd Alerts: increasing your awareness of your surroundings. Tarsiers communicate in ultrasound frequencies, which helps them tune out jungle noise and alert one another of potential dangers. Since Crowd Alerts aims to keep communities informed about their shared surroundings, we thought a tarsier was the perfect mascot for the app. 

The creation of Tara also helped us in our goal of gamifying the Crowd Alerts app. In the future, Crowd Alerts will have gameplay features such as unlocking achievements, completing challenges, and leaderboard rankings. Tara will be there to congratulate you for all your accomplishments!

Tara will be your new traveling companion whenever you use the Crowd Alerts app. When the other new app updates are rolled in, Tara will be with you every step of the way. 

Thank you for using Crowd Alerts!

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