2010 New Ventures BC Competitor Echoecho got some great press in the Vancouver Sun today in an article by Gillian Shaw titled Vancouver startup fine-tunes geolocation with new app.
When Cea Person is looking for her husband Remy Kozak, she doesn’t have to call or text him. A click on an app on her iPhone and Kozak’s face appears on the screen, pinpointed to a location on a Google map. If he’s nearby, she might click on a coffee shop between them, with that location popping up on Kozak’s phone screen as a suggested meeting place. The connection is thanks to Echoecho, a mobile application created by Kozak and his co-founders in a Vancouver startup. The application is winning converts among users who want to share their whereabouts with friends and family with more precise control than that afforded by Foursquare, Facebook Places and other location-based services.
Kozak teamed up with cofounders Nick Bicanic, Andrew Wanliss-Orlebar and Davor Dubokovic to address a gap in location-based offerings and Echoecho was born. Launched last fall, there are already 100,000 people using the Echoecho app users. An update for the iPhone app has just been released and a further update in the Android market is due early next week. The app is also available for BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile smartphones.
According to the article, Kozac hopes to scale to one million users by the end of the summer and expects to close a seed round of financing soon to raise at least $500,000.