Two friends from the Inland Empire are on a mission to make it big with a mobile app they’ve designed to help people avoid long waits in line.

The “Walo” (pronounced way-low) app was conceived and created by co-founders Patrick Edgett, of Redlands, and David Langley of San Bernardino.

The pair met more than a decade ago when they were neighbors in San Bernardino and always knew they wanted to go into business. The pair are big Anaheim Angels fans. Walo is a nod to the “Halo” of the Angels logo. A monkey face next to the name on their business card is a nod to the Angels’ rally monkey.

With computer science skills they acquired in college, the two decided to develop an app to provide users with wait time information at places such as theme parks, hospital emergency rooms, sit-down restaurants and border crossings.

“Everybody wants to be able to plan out their time a little better,” Langley said. “Everybody wants to save their time. So how valuable is it to know how long the wait is before you get there. First of all, our app is the first one to accomplish this on a global scale.”

The app is free to users and is downloadable on the Google Play store and the Apple Store for Android smartphones and iPhones. The two co-founders, who quit their jobs last year to work on the app full time, say there are just under 10,000 users who have downloaded the app. About 100 new users download it every day, Langley said.

Two other employees, Jonathan and Andrew Hutchinson of Moreno Valley, code the app for iPhone and Android phones. Data is gathered from users, historical data available from other companies, and databases. Variables, such as weather, get tossed into the algorithm to calculate wait times.

Edgett and Langley have not received any investor money for their venture, save for funds from encouraging friends and family. They do hope to make money by providing their data to businesses and big data providers.

“We want to build it as a user-engagement tool for places like Disneyland, or Knott’s or Six Flags, who don’t have access to their customers and this could be a tool,” Edgett said. “Right now we do it for free as a means of getting the users, but if we can leverage those users in to relationships with these them parks or restaurants, then that’s part of it. The other part is just licensing the data.”

While the co-founders of Walo aim to take the guessing game out of waiting in line, it’s anyone’s guess when financial success will arrive for the company. They remain hopeful it will be soon.

“We think that by giving back to people some of the time, by empowering them with this information, we can give them a better quality of life experience, because by choosing how, when and where you want to spend your time, you become happier people, so to speak,” Edgett said.

Langley added, “most people value the proposition when you say here’s a way to save time; here’s a way to avoid lines.”

“Most people don’t believe there’s an app that can do that,” he said. “The actual greatest hurdle is to convince people the app is real with real data.”

Information: waloapp.com