Announcing The Disrupt SF Hackathon Judges And A Ton Of New Prizes (And The Very Last Batch Of Tickets!)

hax this way

The first batch of tickets for our Disrupt SF Hackathon (happening this weekend!) sold out so fast I thought something had gone wrong. We’ve released a few batches since, each bigger than the last… and yet, each one has sold out almost immediately.

This’ll be the very last batch of Hackathon tickets we release. If you don’t get in this time, you’re probably out of luck. We’re also releasing spectator-only tickets, so that your friends, family, and industry peers can watch as you debut your projects to the world.

If you’ve never been to one of our Hackathons, here’s the gist of it: take around about thousand coders and designers, give them a pretty much endless stream of pizza, and tell them they’ve got 24 hours to build the craziest thing they can think of. At the end of the day, every team gets 60 seconds to pitch their Frankenstein’d speed creation in a battle for $5,000 and an opportunity to present their work in front of the main Disrupt conference’s massive (and massively influential) audience.

You lot are clearly pretty damned excited about this thing, so we went ahead and made it even better.

Judges:

First up, we’re proud to announce the fantastic panel of judges we’ve enlisted to help us pick the winner. Here they are:

harris

Marci Harris

CEO, PopVox

Marci Harris is co-founder and CEO of POPVOX, a civic startup that connects people and elected officials to foster accountable, responsive governing. A lawyer and former Congressional staffer, Harris has been recognized as one of Fast Company magazine’s Top 100 Most Creative People in Business (2012), Tribeca Film Festival Awards for Creative Disruption (2012), DC’s Tech Titans by Washingtonian magazine (2013), and one of the 2013 “Fastcase 50.” She chairs the Entrepreneurship Subcommittee of LaunchTN, and mentors at the Code For America Civic Accelerator, Tennessee Tenn, and the Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Syracuse’s Newhouse School.

Underwood

April Underwood

Director of Product, Twitter

April Underwood (@aunder) is Director of Product at Twitter, where she is responsible for the Twitter advertising experience. April has held previous roles at Twitter in Product and Business Development focused on partnering with the world’s top web properties. Prior to Twitter, April worked at Google, where she was responsible for content acquisition and monetization of Google Maps, Gmail, Google News, and other Google consumer products. April holds an MBA from University of California at Berkeley (Haas) and a BBA in Management Information Systems from University of Texas at Austin.

brewster

Kent Brewster

Engineer/Evangelist, Pinterest

Kent Brewster is a front-end engineer, API agitator, and recovering technology evangelist. He was an early Hack Day winner at Yahoo; you may have heard him speak at SxSW or FluentJS about the mistakes he made building the Pin It button for Pinterest or Netflix for the iPhone, and some of his difficult-to-detect JavaScript may already be running on your site.

Screen Shot 2013-09-03 at 2.07.35 PM

Elias Bizannes

Founder, StartupHouse and StartupBus

Elias Bizannes is an entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. He is the founder of San Francisco incubator space “StartupHouse“, the international bootcamp “StartupBus” and also created Australia’s “silicon beach“. He previously worked at venture capital firm Charles River Ventures, search engine startup Vast.com, and professional services PwC

 

 

sakoda

Jon Sakoda

Partner, NEA

Jon Sakoda is a partner at NEA. Sakoda joined NEA in 2006 and focuses on investments in SaaS, Infrastructure Software, and Big Data Applications. His investments include Blue Jeans Network, Desire2Learn, Hearsay Social, OPOWER, ScienceLogic, Suniva, and WibiData. Sakoda also co-manages NEA’s seed investment program.
Prior to joining NEA, Jon was an entrepreneur and co-founder of
IMlogic (acquired by Symantec Corporation) and served as its Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Products.

Prizes:

Second: Prizes. Lots and lots of prizes. As we’ve previously announced, everyone who gets on stage and presents a completed hack will get a ticket to the Disrupt SF 2013 conference itself — tickets which generally go for around three thousand bucks. The top three teams will get to present their hacks during the conference, with the top team of the day taking home five thousand bucks to divvy up as they see fit.

But it doesn’t stop there. Some of our API sponsors have decided to crank things up a notch, offering their own prizes to the teams that best integrate that company’s API. With these additions, there’s thousands upon thousands of dollars in gear and cash on the line here:

Chevrolet: The team that builds the best Chevrolet in-vehicle app and the team that best use Chevrolet’s Remote API will each win $2,500
Clover: The most “Innovative or Useful” use of Clover’s Point Of Sale API or APK gets $5000
CrunchBase: The best use of the Crunchbase API gets a $1000 Amazon gift card.
Elance: Each Hackathon team that presents will get a $200 credit to hire freelancers on Elance. The Top 3 teams that “best leverage online talent in support of their hack” will split $5,000, as determined by Elance.
Mashery: One “Mashery Red” BIG Jambox
NewAer: Two $500 Apple gift cards for the best use of NewAer’s Proximity Platform SDK
Pearson: $1,000 for the best use of Pearson’s APIs.
Pioneer Electronics: Pioneer will pick two teams who best use their Zypr API in a way that’s compatible with their AppRadio platform. First place will get $2,000 and an AppRadio 3 car stereo. Second place will get $500 and an AppRadio 3 stereo.
RadiumOne: $1000 dollars cash for the app that makes the best use of RadiumOne’s photo effects, and $100 for any other team that uses the API.
SAP: Trip for 2 to Las Vegas (airfare/hotel/ meals), including tickets for SAP’s annual TechEd conference, for the best Mobile/Web app utilizing wearable computer (Fitbit) or Connected car (OpenXC) data on SAP’s HANA cloud data platform (valued at $7,500)
ShopStyle by POPSUGAR: The best use of ShopStyle’s API wins a $5,000 Visa gift card and a one hour chat with PopSugar CEO Brian Sugar
Twilio: Two Lego Mindstorm EV3 Kits for the best use of Twilio
WeatherUnderground: $500 for the best use of the Weather Underground API
Yammer: Two Xbox 360s and two Lumia 920 phones for the best use of Yammer’s API

(Note: In the cases where a company is giving away multiple/duplicate prizes, they may split them between teams)

Crazy, right?


Here’s what you need to know:

  • As long as you’re building something, participating is free. Interested sponsors, give us a shout.
  • After 24 hours of building, hackers present their projects to their peers and a panel of all-star judges (see above).
  • Every hacker who finishes their project and presents on stage gets a free pass to the entire conference, normally valued at around $2,000. Why? Because you’re awesome and we love you.
  • The team behind the best hack of the day takes home a cool $5,000, and the top three teams all get to present their projects to the Disrupt audience. There will also be a bunch of prizes awarded by the Hackathon sponsors (again, see above.)

The Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon runs September 7 and 8, and we’ve just released the very last batch of tickets. What are you waiting for?

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@beta.techcrunch.com.


Please note: There are two types of tickets here. Spectator tickets ONLY let you attend the Hackathon presentations on Sunday beginning at 11am AS A VIEWER. If you want to build/present in the Hackathon, you’ll need a Hacker ticket.