After 9 Years, Major Tech Festival Won't Return To North Jersey This Year. Here's Why.

HOBOKEN, NJ — An annual business and entrepreneural festival that drew as many as 5,000 people to the Hoboken waterfront each year — the Propelify Innovation Festival — will not return this year. However, it may be back in the future.

The festival, which debuted in 2016, was run by a non-profit group, TechUnited. It was an outgrowth of the popular New Jersey tech meetups founded by entrepreneur Aaron Price starting in 2011.

Price said in an interview Wednesday that while the festival has run each year since 2016 — including virtually in 2020 — technology is changing, and his group wants to stay on top of it.

While Propelify may return to town next year, he said, the group is trying something different this year.

Price, who has lived in Hoboken for 20 years, said that he began holding casual tech meetups in 2011 because he found his jobs in technology a bit "isolating."

The meetups, held at the Stevens Institute of Technology, were wildly popular.

He began hosting Propelify, which drew speakers, demonstrations, and dozens of companies sharing their products and ideas.

But this year, his nonprofit group, TechUnited NJ, has been running monthly events at the Stevens Institute of Technology instead of the annual festival.

The topic has two initials: A.I.

Price said in an interview on Wednesday that the events are meant for anyone to discuss and demonstrate various types of artificial intelligence.

"We've always been focused on bringing together people who are investing in the future," he said. "We see [A.I.]. affecting every industry in most aspects of daily life. It's really revolutionizing everything."

He said that the meetups are open to anyone, and admission has been kept to $8. A future meetup will allow people to pay what they can afford. He said that a high school student from Newark has been coming regularly, sometimes bringing friends.

"For anyone interested in technology and innovations, it's running roughly monthly," he said. "We have featured speakers, presentations."

He added, ""I would encourage people to not let A.I. happen to them but to instead be part of how it evolves."

Upcoming A.I. Summit

The group also plans to host a major event, the "OverdriveAI Summit," at Nokia Bell Labs in Murray Hill in late October.

"We’re incredibly proud to have hosted the Propelify Innovation Festival in Hoboken for nine years, welcoming more than 40,000 people from around the world who propel ideas into action," Price said. "This year, we’re focused on launching OverdriveAI, hosted at Nokia Bell Labs,to highlight the explosive growth of AI and feature world-class speakers from OpenAI, CoreWeave, IBM, Perplexity, Bell Labs, the NJ AI Hub, and more."

He added, "We fully expect Propelify to return in the future. Hoboken is a strong tech community, and we continue to engage here through TechUnited's AI DemoNights at Stevens Institute of Technology and a variety of other private and curated events."

Find Out More

In the past, guest speakers at Propelify ranged from Al Roker to Bradley Tusk.

Read about a past Propelify festival and see photos on Patch here.

• Find out about the series of A.I. events and other TechUnited New Jersey updates here.
• Find out more about OverdriveAI Summit here.

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