Meet Some Of The Hackers At TechCrunch Disrupt SF

They’ve worked through the night and are just about to present on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Meet some of this year’s bleary-eyed (but still enthusiastic) hackers and learn about their projects.

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Brett Stateham, part of the Microsoft hacking team

Part of the Microsoft hacking team, working on a project called Notifly.

“We tried to drive Twitter hashtags into launching a rocket, and then we thought why not make it broader, why can’t it be Instagram or Facebook likes, so you can monitor when you meet your goals and it will notify you through multiple channels when that occurs. So you can get an SMS notification, but also activate a device. So we’re going to fire our compressor rocket on stage.”

“There are five people on the team. I was able to bring in hardware that I was lucky enough to have, we have people working on the front tend and Steven is our Node.js wizard. So because of that we were able to build a pretty complete solution in a short amount of time. We worked all through the night, none of us slept.”

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Andree Barzeau

Working on a Web app called Divorce-Disrupt based on the work of John Gottman, a psychologist best known for his research into relationship and marital stability.

“I’ve been working with two partners and what we did was a Web application that will evaluate a couple’s relationship based on a video they take of them when they discuss a specific topic or argue. Then we use an API that will return the emotions seen during the video, so we can see them, emotions like fear. So we evaluate that and then we compare both videos of the two arguing with each other. Then we come up with a value of how often they were happy compared to how often they were not happy. So we get a result from the algorithm if the couple is in a good mood or should be working on personal stuff.”

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Jason Liu and Arthur Chen

“The pain point at least for me is that I really love rice and eat it every day,” says Liu. “I get off work at different times and if I get off work and make rice then, it takes 45 minutes. But Rice.io will let me turn on the rice cooker right when I get off work and then I set in traffic and it’s ready.

“We went to UCLA together. I work at Qualcomm in San Diego and [Arthur] is at Altera, so we did hardware and them some software stuff on the side.”

“My tech hero is Elon Musk, I wish he would do the Hyperloop that he drafted out because I work in SoCal and I would love to test it out.”

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Ina Yosun Chang and Fren Heintz

“We did something called Venture Chess. The tagline is basically not all strategy is market. Basically, we built a virtual reality chest game that people can play with their followers on Twitter or also people who aren’t currently in their network on Crunchbase, so we utilize the API sponsors here and hacked together a new kind of social network that’s based on chess. The idea is that traditional social networks and ways of meeting people are not as personal as playing a game of chess and you haven’t met a lot of your Twitter followers. So you can play chess with them and it’s kind of personal and a conversation, and you can also see how they think. It’s especially interesting to play chess with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.”

“We’re right next to the Bay and the temperature at night was in the thirties. Some guy left a hammock, so I crashed in the hammock at night-time. It’s a great view of the bay and we saw the sunside from this side of SOMA.”