Chat With Anyone, Anywhere.

Imagine the following situation. You're in a crowded room. You could be at concert, airport, meeting, lecture, museum, or anywhere there is a large group of people in one place. Now pick someone you don't know on the other side of the room. How do you talk to that person?

A big problem with how we communicate today is that everything is network based. If you're not friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, or lucky enough to have a person's phone number, it's impossible to talk with someone new. Sure you could walk over, introduce yourself, and strike up a conversation but that means talking to a few people at best. What about the rest of the room? So much potential dialog or colaborative energy is lost becuase there's no easy way to engage the people aroun you unless there is already some connection.

Echo is designed to fix this problem. By using location based chat rooms Echo makes it possible to start talking with people standing right next to you. Echo uses your location to automaticlly orders the list of chats so the nearest room always shows up first. In a crowded room this means that if one person makes a chat room, every other person in that room can find it quickly and easily.

Echo expands how we communicate beyond existing contacts to live, every changing, location based networks. Problem solved.

Chatting > Checking In

Over the last few years location based mobile communication has latched on to a check in based model. Whether that means using Facebook Places, Foursquare, or a geocentric tweet, the goal is always the same - broadcast your location to your existing network. The problem is this is a one way street. Check ins just tell people where you are. They don't foster interaction beyond that. Echo chats are live. This means real interaction, not an update via wall post or news feed but an opportunity to talk with real people that are near by.

But sometimes you may not want to talk with random people. Don't feel like joining a public chat? You can always create a private chat room as well. Private chats do not show up on the location sorted list and can be joined by invite only. Make a chat room about whatever you want and invite your friends. You can easily invite friends from your contact list by pressing the button in the top right corner of any chat room.

See Who's There Before You're There

Echo lets you scope out an area before you ever show up. Users are displayed as different colors depening on your relationship to them. Green pins represent your friends while red pins are other users that you have not yet added to your contact list.

Going to an event? Purple pins indicate when a group is present at that location. Touch the pin to pull up a list of who's already there. You can then chat with those users if you like to check out the scene. With Echo, there's no need to ever show up to lame party again.

You can also interact with users right from the map. Touching a pin will bring up a pop up displaying that users profile picture and status. You can click through to view their profile, send a friend request, initiate a private chat, or block them if there's a problem. Users who are not online are notified about chat requests via push notification, so you know they will get the message when they sign back on. Perfect for those times when you're in and out of cell reception or wifi.