DOers In Action: Ethan Gahng Hacks The Future

DOers In Action: Ethan Gahng Hacks The Future

Ethan Gahng is an entrepreneur and web developer originally from South Korea, who traveled to the Bay Area for the startup life and never looked back. We met Ethan at XHack, a hackathon also known as Hack To The Future put on by our friends at RadiumOne. Ethan took first place with his Twilio-powered app, Talk to the Future, which fit perfectly with the theme of the hackathon.

The app lets you schedule calls to send to your “future self” and record an audio mp3 message to save and hear later. Originally called Talk to the Future, the idea was so malleable that Ethan decided to give it a different name and take the app in a different direction. The rebranded app called WakeMyself.com, allows you to schedule a wake up call and “capture your dreams” by recording them to hear later. Ethan built this using the Twilio API, Heroku, Iron.io and PostMark.

Day Dreams into Real Products

To give you an idea of just how creative and talented Ethan is, he recently crafted a different application that distorts, and depending upon your preference, improves your virtual reality. His app called DayDream.fm, only three months old, lets you take a break from your lame apartment view and experience things like riding a bike in the city or cozying up to a fireplace.

When we talked to Ethan, he mentioned that he’s always enjoyed ambient music and when listening to an album called “Music for Airports” by Brian Eno, he wanted to add real footsteps to make it a full listening experience. From there he thought, everyone should be able to do this for their environments.

“I love sound. You can have an engaging experience without having to be engaged,” said Ethan.

Make sure to follow Ethan on Twitter @ethpressO as he works on DayDream.fm, WakeMyself.com and possibly winning the next hackathon near you.