Facebook, Twitter, and other places people gather, socialize and share, have turned out to be ideal app platforms. At TechCrunch Disrupt, we’re taking this trend offline. Disrupt is our media and technology conference starting tomorrow. Check out our amazing agenda. And yes, we will sell tickets at the door. Disrupt-as-platform started yesterday with our developer-packed Hack Day and Scrapyard Challenge, whose winners—including a team that built an app to play Super Mario Brothers by blinking—will be returning to Disrupt to demo to the 1,500-strong (and still growing) crowd on Wednesday.
Disrupt will continue as a platform tomorrow during the show, with a load of interactive apps and experiences designed to engage our guests—from apps to help the audience vote for the best startups onstage and in the Startup Alley to geo-mobile games based that can only be played by attendees . I’m going to call out the sponsors specifically who’ve thrown a lot of energy, talent and moolah at making Disrupt their platform.
SecondMarket is turning our audience into a quasi-secondary market for a few hours each day during our Startup Battlefield competiton. They’ve created an audience-voting app that will tabulate real-time voting by simulating a marketplace. If you like the startup you see, you buy their stock. If you don’t, you sell it. Prices rise and fall based on audience action. At the end of each round of demos, the results determine the audience-choice vote. Cool, huh?
SCVNGR is using their geo-mobile game to turn Disrupt into a treasure hunt of sorts. If you complete enough challenges, you win a TC Disrupt badge—and one winners gets an iPad. It will be interesting to see whether this transforms the usual coffee-swilling, networking vibe into a dash for points.
Twilio is setting up an SMS-based system to vote for your favorite startup, from among the early-stage startups exhibiting throughout the venue in Startup Alley. The crowd’s favorite joins our onstage Battlefield.
Friends Around has a mobile app that combines their ‘Nearby’ and ‘Chat’ features to help you meet people at the conference, identify a secret code and be entered into a raffle for a grand prize. For more info go here and download the app here.
Knight News Challenge is fishing for innovative folks shaking up the news business at Disrupt. They are hosting an interactive lunch entrepreneurs in media, news, publishing and related fields. And they’re distributing $25 million to the top news innovators.
uGallery is turning our venue, a gutted Merrill Lynch office, into an art gallery of sorts with cool and edgy NYC-themed canvasses. The chic-but-affordable art startup will be onsite, in case your startup needs transformation from a cubicle farm into, well, a cubicle farm with nice art.
See you at Disrupt!