Business & Tech

Want to Know What's Happening In Hoboken? There's an App for That.

Hoboken resident Jason Scherr is one of the three masterminds behind Echo, an app that detects where you are and tells you more about what's going on.

If you're ever at Mulligans on a Friday night and want to communicate with other patrons — on your cell phone, of course — there's a new Hoboken-centric app that will help you do just that.

Echo, which zeroes in on a specific location and offers more information about it, was developed in Hoboken by three young entrepreneurs.

"It's a simple way to communicate with people who are in the same place," Jason Scherr, one of the three members of the Echo team, said late last week. 

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Echo, which is free in the app store, is based on "geofencing," Scherr explained, which means that it automatically detects where you are and creates a digital fence around that. So, rather than pulling in information from other nearby places like Jersey City and New York City, it'll only give you information about Hoboken.

When logged onto Echo — which currently is only possible through Facebook — the user can only post from his or her present location.

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The idea originated when Brian Donohue, Scherr's business partner, went to a Jets game last year. When signing into Foursquare on his phone, he noticed that hundreds of other people had done the same. There was just no way to communicate with them and get useful information about the place.

When Scherr met Donohue last year at a NJ Tech Meet Up event at Stevens Institute of Technology, the partnership was born. The third member of the team — which Scherr describes as a trio made up of "a hacker, a hipster and a hustler" — is Rocky Chiu, who is in charge of developing the app.

Scherr, who has lived in Hoboken for three years, said that Hoboken is the ideal location to use Echo, because of its relatively small size.

Scherr said he met with the Hoboken Chamber of Commerce and is looking to work with businesses in town to promote Echo.

"Our goal," Scherr, 28, said, "is to become the de-facto hyperlocal app for neighborhood news, events and businesses."


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