PANAMA CITY BEACH — Amid the concerts and beer pong games on the beach this month are aspiring technology entrepreneurs marketing products to their target demographic — the generation that lives with a smartphone glued to their hands.
“It’s our core user group,” said Hagen Lee, founder and CEO of “WeHUB,” a new open communication application for smartphones. “There are a quarter-million college kids here to have fun. These are the millennials.”
Lee and his team have spent the past few weeks in Panama City Beach testing the app’s features on spring breakers. The WeHUB tent set up on the beach behind The Summit Resort on Monday lured hundreds of college students with free koozies, T-shirts and other giveaways.
In their first three days in Panama City Beach, the application saw its daily active users increase 30 percent.
“I think all application companies should be here,” Lee said. “They’re in bikinis, but they’re all carrying cellphones.”
Lee, 34, has been working for the past three years to develop WeHUB, which provides similar features as other social media applications, but with several new extras. For example, the “DaVinci” feature allows users to encrypt messages, while “Recall” provides the opportunity to delete a message sent hastily or by accident.
“We were the first company in the U.S. to bring a feature called ‘Recall,’ ” Lee said. “We’ve all made that mistake. ... It’s embarrassing.”
Other features include “Look Around” to see users in close proximity, and “Whisper,” in which users can partake in secret conversations during group chats.
Lees said his development strategy included hundreds of interviews with college students and other young adults, where he learned what users really want in a communications application.
“Kids are getting tired of carrying seven, eight, nine social media apps,” Lee said. “We want messaging apps to mimic real-world communication.”
The WeHUB team was not the only tech startup represented on the beach Monday.
Officials with the smartphone application “Secret” provided some much-needed shade to spring breakers behind Spinnaker Beach Club, with a large tent complete with free cellphone charging stations and wireless Internet.
Secret, an anonymous social networking app, is similar to the popular app “Yik Yak,” but also allows users to send photos through its platform.
“It’s fairly new; we’re just trying to get our feet wet,” said Secret promotional manager Mika Gukharbakiyeva. “Spring Break is the perfect place to do this because we want them to go back to their schools and use it.”
Gukharbakiyeva and a team of Secret promoters encouraged spring breakers to get involved by offering prizes for those who download and use the application.
“Everybody is loving it,” Gukharbakiyeva said. “It’s more important what you say than who says it. ... There’s nothing else like it.”
