The winner of Big Idea North Platte has started a Kickstarter account to help take his Door Night Light from concept to reality.
 
North Platte Firefighter Casey Schiel won the competition in October, and hopes to raise enough funds to get the project moving into manufacturing and distribution. He has opened a Kickstarter page that offers folks the opportunity to contribute to the goal of getting his product out.
 
“It’s just at the beginning stages,” Schiel said. “But really what Kickstarter is built for is they are a platform to raise capital for a company like this to kickstart a company to move forward to the next stage.”
 
He said he entered the Big Idea as a wild card entry.
 
“Winning the Big Idea was really humbling and kind of exciting because it got the community involved,” Schiel said. “That kind of made me realize and everyone realize this could be possible to impact millions of lives across the United States.”
 
The idea for his fire safety invention came to him in April as he found the “Close before you doze” campaign on the UL Firefighter Safety Research Institute’s website. The information on the website shares data about how a closed door can delay the spread of a fire to give people more time to escape and for fire rescue units to arrive. Continue reading...