Believe it or not, we’re just a week away from the start of the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon! As usual, TechCrunch will award a $5,000 to the winner of the Hackathon. And to whet your competitive appetites, we’ve partnered with some fantastic companies that have agreed to put up some great prizes for best use of their tools and technologies.
Atlantic.net
Host your next big idea in our cloud for a chance to win $5,000 cash. Your project must be hosted on Atlantic.Net SSD Cloud Hosting Servers to be eligible to win. Atlantic.Net will choose the winner based on originality, creativity, and boldness of vision. Sign up at https://www.atlantic.net and use promo code TECHCRUNCH25 for $25 of free credit!
Gimbal
Best demonstration of Gimbal SDK inside of a working application wins $1,000 cash plus 10 Series 21 beacons split between team members
IBM
IBM Bluemix is an open-standards, cloud platform for building, running, and managing applications. With Bluemix, developers can focus on building excellent user experiences with flexible compute options, choice of DevOps tooling, and a powerful set of IBM and third-party APIs and services, including Watson, IoT and Twilio. Register for free trial.
The winner of the IBM Bluemix category will receive:
- Office space in Grand Central Tech (GCT) where you will be surrounded by New York’s premier startups. GCT is a community of startups and strategic partners that breaks from the traditional accelerator model by providing an unparalleled value proposition. grandcentraltech.com
- 6 months of jKool’s “DataNerd” package which enables the user to stream up to 5 Million data points a month into the service. These data points can be retained for up to 30 days. jKool provides an API (nastel.github.io/JESL/) which can be used to stream data. jKool is a SaaS that provides real-time visualization and analytics for streaming time-series data. jkoolcloud.com
The winner will be judged on 3 categories:
- Best use of Bluemix APIs
- Innovation
- Community impact
Learn more about Bluemix APIs and services.
Layer
Layer is giving away a $1,000 cash prize as well as one year’s subscription to our Startup Plan ($300) value for a total of $1300 in value for “Best Use of the Layer SDKs.”
Layer is the open communications layer for the Internet, the full-stack building block for communications that enables app creators to build rich, native messaging into their products, transforming user experience and increasing engagement. In the short time since its launch, more than 12,000 developers have begun building communications experiences with the platform.
There are Layer developers on six of the seven continents and Layer-powered apps in all major app categories, including category-leading apps in dating, sports and photo sharing. For more information and to get started using Layer, please visit www.layer.com.
MasterCard
First Place: Up to $50,000* in Simplify Commerce processing within the first 6 months. $500 MasterCard card per teammate, up to five individuals.
Second Place: $250 MasterCard card per teammate, up to five individuals.
*To qualify for this prize, you must apply to become and be approved as a Simplify Commerce merchant by June 30, 2015, and actively transact via the Simplify Commerce gateway. “Actively transact” means conducting a sales transaction that results in Simplify Commerce making a deposit to the checking account you have linked to your Simplify Commerce merchant account. If you qualify, Simplify Commerce will rebate the 2.85% + 30¢ per transaction processing fee for your first $50,000 in sales through December 31, 2015. Should a transaction be refunded, it will not be eligible for a rebate. After you’ve reached $50,000 in sales, processing fees will be charged at the standard rate at that time (currently the rate is 2.85% + 30¢ per transaction).
Microsoft
Contacts, calendar, mail , groups, web hooks, and more – REST APIs for Outlook give you the flexibility to build delightful experiences for users around the content in mailboxes. And Outlook add-ins let you easily integrate right into Outlook, Outlook for Mac, Outlook Web App, or Outlook.com UI and customize it with your own functionality using HTML and JavaScript. Both the REST APIs and Outlook add-ins work with Outlook, Office 365, and soon Outlook.com. For more documentation, head over to http://dev.outlook.com or the Outlook.com booth.
There are two ways to be eligible for this contest. Build a compelling scenario:
1) Either by using Outlook REST APIs
2) Or by building an Outlook add-in
Submissions will be judged across several categories:
- Value to user. Submissions, which solve the biggest user problems and have broadest applicability will be ranked highest in this category. Bonus consideration will be given to solutions that are targeted at Outlook.com consumer scenarios.
- Feasibility. In this category, the more feasible the solution is to deploy broadly to users, the higher it will be ranked.
- Use of Outlook platform. The submissions, which use the REST APIs at the core, or which are building an add-in, will be considered top for this category.
If you would like to test your add-in in Outlook.com, please stop by our table and we’ll provide you with a developer preview account. Your own accounts will not work… yet!
We will give out 3 prizes:
- 1st place – $3,000
- 2nd place – $1,500
- 3rd place – $500
Nexmo
Best Use of Nexmo: XBox One + Kinect (max 3 per team)
Most Creative Use of Nexmo: Parrot Bebop (max 3 per team)
Twilio
Yammer
Zalando SE
Zalando is Europe’s leading online fashion platform for women, men and children–a publicly traded company doing business in 15 markets. Delivering first-class shopping experiences to our +14 million customers requires moving fast — with microservices, Agile processes, & autonomous teams — and using cutting-edge, open-source technologies such as Scala and Clojure.
Zalando’s public API offers programmers access to the Zalando web shop and allows operations such as searching for items, categories, filters and brands. It was designed to be a RESTful web service. The developer or team who builds the coolest new project using the Zalando API wins these three great prizes: a Go Pro camera, a Raspberry Pi 2 and a DJI Phantom Aerial UAV Drone Quadcopter for GoPro. A group of up to five hackers can win.
Have questions about the Zalando API, or just want to say hello before the hackathon? Ping them at @ZalandoTech on Twitter.
Did You Say Hardware?
Our friends at Hackaday are bringing Hardware to the menu of this year’s Hackathon. You have 20 hours to hack together some working electronics. Hackaday will provide the building blocks: development boards and sensors from Atmel, Freescale, Microchip and Texas Instruments, as well as a huge parts order from Mouser to help round out what you need to stitch everything together.
Hackaday is keeping its hardware events page up-to-date as they add equipment to the hackathon parts bin. Keep an eye on that page; research the equipment you want to use and set up the development environments on your laptop in advance. You may also bring your own parts, breakout boards, programmers, and tools if you wish but with one caveat: you need to build and code on site.
Hardware hacks are eligible for a multitude of prizes, including the $5,000 TechCrunch grand prize. But as you probably guessed, Hackaday is sweetening the deal with its own range of rewards just for hardware hackers.
Tickets!
We are also releasing another batch of hacker tickets, so get them here. They will go quickly, so make haste!