Vrban Wins The Disrupt NY 2014 Hackathon Grand Prize, Indulge And MixTape Are Runners Up

Yesterday, hundreds of hackers convened at the Manhattan Center for the Disrupt NY Hackathon. They have worked tirelessly for the past 24 hours. After a long night, the 96 teams all took the stage to present a short and sweet one-minute demo to impress our judges and audience of talented hackers.

Only one team could take home the grand prize. So, without further ado, meet the Disrupt NY 2014 Hackathon winner.

Winner: Vrban

Vrban allows users to explore urban environments using the Oculus Rift. It’s particularly useful for seeing what a proposed building would look like in a particular urban environment. You can vary settings such as sunlight, point of view and location. This allows the user with the Oculus to observe the impact of different decisions in an urban plan, while his or her teammates collaboratively work on the plan by tweaking settings.

Backstage Interview

Runner-up #1: Indulge

Backstage Interview

Indulge makes your nail salon visits more enjoyable, organized and fun. Just follow the four steps: mark your place, scan your nail polish’s barcode, snap a photo of your manicure and share with friends to inspire. Read more about Indulge here.

Runner-up #2: MixTape

Backstage Interview

MixTape is a web app which lets you host the playlists for your party online. Your guests can join and help create the playlist. They will also have the ability to vote for existing songs in the playlist to influence the playing order. The judges particularly appreciated the execution of the team.

These three teams will also take the stage once again on Wednesday to demo their projects on the main Disrupt stage — the winner will also get $5,000. But that’s not all — other hacks took home some generous prizes from our API sponsors. Hackathon sponsors include ChallengePost, Concur, CrunchBase, DigitalOcean, Evernote, Hired, Mailjet, Microsoft Ventures, Pearson, UX Awards, Yammer, Yodlee, Alphonso, Esri, Facebook, IsaaCloud, RetailMeNot, Weather Underground and Domain.com have also graciously doled out prizes of their own for the most innovative and interesting uses of their APIs and services.

Our judges this time around were BoxGroup partner Adam Rothenberg, NY Tech Meetup executive director Jessica Lawrence, Razorfish VP of user experience Bryan Hamilton, Clothia founder Elena Silenok, and Brooklyn Bridge Ventures partner and founder Charlie O’Donnell.

They also insisted on three hacks that didn’t quite make it to the top three teams, but delivered a funny demo on stage. These three hacks were Wisconsin, Disrupt Taco Bell and It Gon Rain. With It Gon Rain, you enter your zip code and Ollie Williams from Family Guy will read you the forecast. Wisconsin lets you pretend that you are in Wisconsin by creating a digital footprint in… Wisconsin. Disrupt Taco Bell lets you maximize the calorie per dollar ratio. Read more about this hack in our separate post.

And that’s a wrap for our Hackathon. Congratulations to all the Hackathon participants. Disrupt NY conference starts tomorrow.

Tickets to Disrupt are still available and can be purchased here.