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She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More
Three days and 31 startup pitches later, the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2011 has been determined. Out of the 29 startups and two audience choice winners, we whittled the list down to seven finalists, which included Bitcasa, Cake Health, Farmigo, Prism Skylabs, Shaker, TalkTo, and Trello. The winner from this group receives the Disrupt Cup and $50,000, taking over possession from Disrupt New York winner Getaround. Without further ado, the runners-up is Prism Skylabs. And the winner is…Shaker! Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is an investor in Prism Skylabs and is a pending investor in Shaker.
Israeli startup Shaker essentially aims to turn Facebook into a bar via a social game. As we wrote in our review of the startup, Shaker is a mixture of Second Life, The Sims, and Turntable.fm all mixed together using your Facebook data and connections. Your Facebook profile becomes a walking avatar, your pictures are placed on an virtual wall, you can choose what music is playing in the room for everyone to hear and you can even buy people drinks.
Shaker takes basic social gaming a step further by allowing users to meet new people (as opposed to playing the game with existing friends), which replicates the experience of being in an actual bar. Shaker looks at profile information to show what else you may have in common with seemingly random people in the room. For example, you may have the same birthday as someone. Or you may both like the same movie or band. Other elements include proximity based chat, a Tweet wall, and a “smart phone” social discovery tool to look up information about people in the room.
The startup, which has raised $3 million in funding, is already seeing pretty good traction. The game received 80,000 MAUs in a matter of weeks, and had to block invitations. People were complaining that the bars are too crowded, and users were spending impressive amounts of time within the app. Without any PR, the game was able to attract attention and the startup had to shut down invites to 540 people.
Runner-up Prism Skylabs is a cloud-based service thats allow business owners to bring video feeds online, capture images from these feeds and share this data with consumers and the public. The startup allows a business to download a free software that detects cameras or video on a network, showcases a number of images of the space to the business. Similar to the way you can pull images from videos using a video editing software, Prism Skylabs pulls relevant images of your establishment and builds insightful visualizations from these photos, while protecting customer privacy. The company is backed by SV Angel, Yuri Milner, Eric Schmidt, Aaron Patzer, Brad Garlinghouse, the CrunchFund and others.
Winners Presentation
And I think we have some sponsor awards to [xx]. Heather, why don't you...
We do, and I'm gonna call up three friends, Peter Relan, Richard Kruger, Roland Friga, and Patrick Jung to help present our first set of awards.
And if your company is announced should they come up here?
Please, yes. So Peter Relan, Chairman of Siblings, is going to be presenting an award for best mobile game. Thank you. I'm, well, I've been introduced. I'm Peter. I'm the co-founder of a company called Siblings, which has developed a break-through new technology called Spaceport. You can check it out at Spaceport dot io.
And, basically, it let's you build a mobile game that runs either in an HTML 5 browser Or natively, on any app store; iOS or Android. Which means you have to build your game once in Spaceport, in javascript, and that's it. You can promote it on the rumored project Spartan. You can promote it in the Android marketplace.
You can promote it in the App Store, and you don't have to write these games in multiple places with multiple different technologies. And, the best part is that the HTML5 technology, which as you all know is sort of the new hot technology for the mobile web, is actually available on Spaceport.io so you can build these games.
We came to this conference to sponsor a hackathon last weekend. And we asked game developers and hackers to use Spaceport, and in twenty-four hours, create a game. And we are delighted to announce that a group of three developers led by Vikram Batlah [sp?], who's right there. In 24 hours, took Space Port and built a game called Fortune Planet, mind boggling that they were able to do it in a day and they have done a tremendous job.
We're really happy to see them use this tech to deploy on, as I said on the mobile web or Android or the App Store, in fact on all three if they want. Please give a hand to the three developers who built this game called Fortune Planet. And they get an award where we will plunk down up to a quarter million dollars of advertising once they have developed the game and are ready to roll.
So good luck and hope you'll have it ready for the holiday season. Thanks very much. Next Microstrategy's Richard Kruger and Roland Friga are going to present two different awards, one for best mobile app, and one for best use of social data.
All right. Disrupt San Francisco. Good to see you. I'm with Microstrategy. We're a leader in business intelligence software. We've been showing our new friendly intelligent applications all week here and speaking with a lot of developers about our new gateway Facebook application for developers.
It's amazing to me how much interest there is in social intelligence, and that's what we're applying our technology to now. When I was in school there were zero mobile phones, and today there are five billion of them. It's really become a smaller world, and today I'd like to present the award for best mobile app to...drum roll...to Beaucray, for their language translation application.
Great job, guys. And now I want to bring up my associate who is not Russell Crow - Roland.
Hi, I'm Roland. I wrote down the name of the winner in case, you know, I forget the names standing up here. Well, we do social intelligence and we thought about we want to give away the prize for the start-up with the best use of social data. We think that social data will be very important for enterprises in the future.
And we have this gateway for Facebook enables app developers to make full use of the social graph. Gain a lot of intelligence and information on the users of the apps. So we looked around and a lot of good ideas, a lot of good apps, but only very few app developers really have found an intelligent way to collect data in the right way.
Not too much, not too few. And we found this one very cool start-up, and we want to give away a MacBook Air to Wondershake. Is Wondershake here? Theo, we'll have a beer, and you'll get this directly. Thanks a lot.
Great. And our next award is the Audience Choice award. This is what you all voted for based on our mobile app as your favorite of our thirty one launching companies, and presenting will be Patrick Chung, partner at NEA, for us. Great. Thank you very much, Heather. First of all, can we all join me in congratulating all of the battlefield combatants on a fight very well fought, and congratulations and thanks as well to our judges.
So at NEA we probably see more pitches then other any venture firm out, but this year's Start-Up Battlefield has been a totally different contest. In the very first battle we saw Randy Zuckerberg sing this amazing show-tunes war horse, and then in the very last battle, we saw Israeli girls pick up graphic designers on a Facebook dance club.
Seeing spunk like that in a team is what really has made us get involved and join forces with companies like Groupon, like Beachmint, like Gilt Groupe, like Litro, like Pulse. But this award is not about us choosing which companies are best. This job goes to the most important people in the room who are all of you.
So, like a throng of cheering spectators in a Roman circus battle, the audience has spoken. And it is my honor to present on behalf on all of my partners at NEA, this year's audience choice award which goes to Vocray.
Will you come up? Will you come up to the stage and accept your reward? Wow, two awards. Excellent.
OK.
Guys, congratulations. Congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you very much. There you go. Thank you.
awesome. And as we get ready for the final count down to get to the Disrupt cup winner, we want to give you a preview of what Get Around has been doing With the cups since they won in New York. So we have a video that they prepared for us.
And if the seven finalist can gather up here in the meantime. All seven companies. become a tradition that the winner always does a video. It started with Saludo so whoever wins this time will have to, have to do a video. So if we can have all seven companies come up on stage. So again, just come up on stage.
Bitcasa Cake Health, Farmigo, Prism Sky Labs, Shake, Trello, and Talk To. Everybody come on. There's plenty of room. All right. Do we have the check also? This is the fun part. I get to give away fifty thousand dollars. And Heather, where is Heather? Tell her to be up here with me. I got to say, this group of finalists...every Disrupt, I'm more and more impressed.
And, you know, the judges concurred. Every one of you was a solid company and we had a great discussion backstage. And, unfortunately, not...there can only be one winner. So what I'd like to do is, I'm going...first of all, everyone give these guys a round of applause! They killed it! Right? They killed it.
All right, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna announce two companies in alphabetical order. Okay? And those are...those two companies will be the winner and the runner-up. And then I want all the other companies to to leave the stage, okay. So in alphabetical order: Prism Sky Labs, and Shaker. So everybody else give a round of applause to everybody else - CakeHealth, Bitcasa, Farmigo, [xx], Talk to.
I hope I didn't forget anyone. Okay, where's Heather. Now we have a surprise. We have a Disrupt Cup which you see here, but the runner up from New York suggested that we have a runner-up award, BillGuard... and we created a runner up award, which is down there. Can someone bring the runner up award and place it right next to the, right there.
No..place it next to the cup. It's a running shoe with a TC logo. Pretty cool. Ok, is Heather here? Where's Heather? Who's got the check? Oh, you can't show it yet. Ok. So pretty exciting. All right, I'm going to name the runner up, and you'll know who the winner is. The runner up for Disrupt San Fransisco 2011 is Prism Sky Lab.
The winner Congratulations! Do we have the check please? Come out here. Come here, let's have a picture. Who wants to open that up? All right, congratulations. Congratulations.Very good. That's it, right? That's a rap. There's a...is there a party?
Tonight's after party's at Mighty's.
Mighty. After party at Mighty's. Let's see there...I know these guys are gonna be there. Okay. Thank you very much for having a wonderful three days with us and sharing this with our start-up. And until Beijing, which is like a month away. That's it for Disrupt. Thank you very much. Tech Crunch Disrupt.
In addition to the Disrupt Cup, some special awards were also given:
The audience choice winner, which is presented by NEA partner Patrick Chung, is Vocre, which is a translation app. Vocre allows you to speak into the app while your iPhone is vertical, flip the phone horizontal and the phone’s accelerometer cues the app to translate and speak what you’ve said into the language of the people you’re speaking with, and they then can respond, rinse, and repeat.
Peter Relan, chairman of Sibblingz, presented an award for best mobile game to Fortune Planet, a project created at the Hackathon a few days ago.
MicroStrategy distributed two awards: The best mobile app went to Vocre and best use of social data went to Wondershake.
Shaker brings social networks to life by allowing people to interact in real time in a shared environment, making the online social experience of hanging out with friends and meeting new people, feel natural finally.
