A Hoboken tech firm plans to market an app that tells parents whether they're speeding and if they're using the phone at the time
HOBOKEN -- A Hoboken tech company has a question for parents: Do you know where your children are driving, and how fast?
Sfara, a company founded in 2013 by a former Mercedes-Benz safety executive, is developing an app it plans to take to market by year's end that would tell parents remotely what speed their children are driving, whether they're over the speed limit, and whether they're using the phone while behind the while.
The app, which is also known as Sfara, is already used commercially by operators of taxi and trucking fleets to monitor the performance and miles per hour of their drivers, said Sascha Simon, the company's founder and chief technology officer.
Now, Simon is adapting the technology to help parents keep their kids safe. And that includes his own son and daughter, who will be old enough to drive in just a few years.
"I think I've done a good job of getting them on the right track," Simon said of his own children's future driving habits. "But I'm more concerned about when they drive with their friends."
"We've seen these accidents on a Friday night when an entire car of four or five kids gets trashed," he added.
The app is able to use the phone's global positioning system to gauge a car's velocity independent of the speedometer, then send the data to the phone of the parent minding the driver's behavior. The GPS technology and highway and street databases also mean the phone knows what road it's on and what the speed limit is.
In addition, Simon said, the app takes advantage of the phone's magnetic field and motion sensors to determine where inside a car the bearer of the phone is located, for instance in the driver's seat or in a front or rear passenger seat. And, of course, the phone knows whether and how it's being used at the time, for talking, texting or otherwise.
The phone will automatically notify its user if and when he or she is speeding, texting while driving, or otherwise misbehaving behind the wheel.
Simon founded the company in 2013, after leaving Mercedes-Benz, where he worked at the company's former North American headquarters in Montvale overseeing built-in safety technology similar to the app he would later develop.
The German auto maker had wanted to send Simon back to Germany. But by then he was happily raising his family in Warwick, N.Y., just over the border from Sussex County. So, he decided to stay and help improve the safety of a much broader range of cars and drivers.
Simon said Hoboken offered the urban environment and proximity to New York that would attract Millennials to work at the new company, while still providing easy access to a variety of city, suburban and highway traffic conditions needed to test Sfara's products. The Mile-Square City is also a budding tech hub in its own right, exemplified by the Propelify tech festival held on the Hudson River waterfront for the past two years.
"So, Hoboken was perfect," he said, adding that the company now has 18 employees housed in offices near the Hoboken Terminal, with annual sales approaching $1 million.
Simon said parents should not worry that the app will be resented as a sign of mistrust by the young drivers it's supposed to be protecting -- and switched off. For one thing, he said, the app will provide what he would only describe as "an incentive," or phone-related reward, for teens who use it. And, he added, parents can tell children it isn't their driving they're worried about.
"'This is not about you,'" Simon said, assuming the role of concerned parent. "'This is for when you drive with friends and they do something stupid. You need to have a different friend with you that can tell you, this is how you're driving.'"
Steve Strunsky may be reached at sstrunsky@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveStrunsky. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
