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Located at the intersection of the hottest cultural trends — food, social networking and app design — Recco draws on the ingredients of Twitter, Yelp, Facebook and Foursquare to create what Mr. Cortez and his team hope will be the newest killer app. Since its debut in March at South by Southwest’s interactive-media conference, the free iPhone version of the app has gained more than 2,000 users. (An Android version is in development.) Mr. Cortez, a 42-year-old digital entrepreneur living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is fixing bugs, adding features and reinventing the product daily.

“I am a kid at heart, and I love making things,” Mr. Cortez said the other day over Sicilian red wine and pistachio crostini at D.O.C. Wine Bar in Williamsburg. (He recommends the pasta.) “As a human being, that doesn’t get old.”

Mr. Cortez, a former art director at SS&K, a marketing and communications agency, is part of a new class of aspiring tech moguls mining for gold in the app world.

“It’s exciting because it’s a new market, and it’s expanding so quickly,” said Jason Culbertson, 37, another of Recco’s founders who lives in Williamsburg. “Every brand wants to be part of it. I feel like we’re where the Web was 10 years ago.”

New York City now is a technology boomtown, home to more than 300,000 media and tech workers, representing about $30 billion in corporate revenue, according to the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Although technology venture investments in New York have surged to $1.6 billion since 2009, Recco is not among the recipients. Mr. Cortez said he and his partners had financed it themselves, contributing less than $40,000.

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