Commuter Spotlight
Name: Jason Alan Snyder
Route: Hoboken North to Pier 79 (and back again)
How long Have I been commuting?: 11 years
Favorite part of commuting with NYWW?:
The wind, water, sun and stars. In-between the concrete and glass of home and work my tiny voyage across the Hudson provides me with some much needed perspective and balance.
How long have you been living in the area?
My wife's family is from Hoboken for about a century. Her grandmother grew up in the same building as Frank Sinatra and his family. We lived in Manhattan and moved to Hoboken together after 9/11. We then moved away for about ten years to Philadelphia, DC and the Jersey Shore, and returned to Hoboken this past Spring.
What business/career are you in?
I am futurist, technologist and inventor. Currently, I hold about a dozen patents. For the past year or so, I have been developing a technology platform for a product called gopogo. gopogo is a new geo-location service for recording, discovering and connecting experiences. Today we have more information than ever before but we are also losing more than ever before. gopogo encourages people to create, share and follow experiences, opening up a whole new way of saving and sharing memories. More simply, gopogo is a system to crowdsource and archive fun. The site is in a closed Beta right now. We launch in NY and Los Angeles soon. People can register to participate kin the Beta here - http://www.gopogo.com
Prior to gopogo I also invented the technology known as JAGTAG. My original vision was to trigger events in both a synthetic and the physical world and have those events influence a single cumulative data profile.The first consumer expression of that work came as a ubiquitous messaging solution for mobile phones. There are 234 million mobile users in the U.S., but today only about 35% of them have a smartphone and even less use applications on a regular basis. I thought that no one should feel left out. So five years ago I invented a platform that allows both smartphone and standard phone user access to mobile content. JAGTAG was purchased by Augme this past year.
What do you like to do for fun?
Spend time with my family. Especially my son who is three and-a-half. We do lot's of science experiments together. He is very fond of chemistry and we do lot's of kitchen experimentation. We also build the occasional robot together which often times end up chasing the dog around. Also, I am a maniacal New York Red Bulls fan and am a proud season ticket holder.
However, my hobby is photography. I really enjoy it. And, in fact, one of may favorite things to do is document my commute on the ferry. The ferry is probably my favorite subject. I started taking photos of the NYWW about ten years ago when I first lived in Hoboken. Two of my favorite images from that time my wife and I made into large format color Ilfochromes (cibachromes) that hang in the living room of our home. I have included some of my recent photos from this fall here. Many times I post them to them to the NYWW Facebook page or Tweet them. My Twitter handle is @evil_robot
Other fun facts about you?
I left home at a young age and traveled quite a bit. I've lived and went to school in Switzerland, The Netherlands and France. I published my first commercial piece of software when I was 14. I have also succeeded in developing a number of commercial technology firsts. I was the architect and led the development team of the first global Web presence for IKEA. I also led the team that designed the Internet experience for the 2000 Sydney Paralympic Games. Setting a new precedent in webcasting, people could watch more than 100 hours of Paralympic competitions through live video streaming service on the Internet. People across 103 countries logged in to catch the webcast. The official Games website attracted an estimated 300 million hits during Games time. Which eleven years ago was a big deal and for many years was the largest web cast in history. For that event I also scanned the topography of Sydney harbor in a helicopter, and attached GPS receivers to the long distance wheelchair racers so people could see just where they were in real-time over the Internet. Nothing like that had ever been done before. I also led the team that produced the entire web presence for Coca-Cola's Sponsorship of the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. That was fun too.
