Andy Brett is a co-founder and CTO at Cake Health. He brings five years of experience in software engineering and the full stack of web technologies, from SASS files to makefiles. At TechCrunch, Andy was responsible for securing and improving performance of the high traffic site, in addition to implementing key features on CrunchBase including opening accounts to the public. Prior to moving to Silicon Valley, Andy worked at RecycleBank in New York City as a software engineer on RecycleBank’s online store and accounts system, as well as at Accenture, where he built accounting and procurement systems for the U.S Army and the City of New York.
Andy holds a degree in civil engineering and computer science from Princeton University.
Astute readers may have noticed a common thread between some of the apps that have been appearing on TechCrunch this past week – namely, that they were built in 48 hours. It’s not just a coincidence: those apps were just two out of nearly 200 that were built in 48 hours this past weekend during the fourth edition of the Rails Rumble coding competition.
Each team of up to four people was given a server from Linode and a private GitHub repository. From there, it entirely up to them what to create. There were 180 teams that made it through to the end of the coding session. From there, an expert panel of judges pared it down to 24 finalists who are currently being put through their paces by anyone who wants to head over and check them out. You can vote on your favorites and help determine who will win the grand prize – the Rails Rumble Championship Belt. No, really, it’s a belt. The winners also get a Chuck Norris autographed photo – though they might prefer a Ron Conway autographed term sheet instead. It might not be that far off – 38 of the projects from last year are still up and running, and some have even become pretty polished applications with revenue streams.
I’ve picked out five of my favorites below, but it was extremely hard to choose just five. Go check all of them out and vote for the winner before tomorrow at midnight. → Read More
This Saturday, hundreds of hackers, designers, and entrepreneurs are going to descend upon the San Francisco Design Center Concourse for the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. There will be pizza, caffeine, beer, and MacBook Pros as far as the eye can see. Most of the participants won’t leave (and many won’t sleep) until 11 am the next day, when each team will have 90 seconds to present what they’ve created to our expert panel of judges.
This demo session is free and open to the public, and it’s really something to see. An analogy: if the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt is “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, this demo session is “Jeopardy!”. No frills, no extras, no lifelines or waffling over whether to take the money, just pure unadulterated content. Wow us in a minute and a half and let’s move on to the next one. The winner gets a spot on stage at Disrupt. → Read More
The fall edition of TechCrunch Disrupt is fast approaching – less than three weeks to go before the conference kicks off on September 27th. As part of the New York event we held an overnight hackathon immediately beforehand, organized by hackers extraordinaire Daniel Raffel, Chad Dickerson, and Tarikh Korula, and it was, without a doubt, a smashing success. Over 300 participants built some really incredible projects: one team built a sword-wielding robot (Mr. Stabby as he was affectionately known); another team modified eye tracking software to let you play Mario Brothers with your eyes. One team kept building their idea after the Hackathon ended and has secured a nice chunk of money to turn it into a company.
Naturally, we’ll be doing this again at Disrupt San Francisco. We’ve got some great judges lined up, including Joshua Schachter, moot, and Dean Hovey. Tons of you have been emailing us asking when you could sign up for a slot – and we have good news. Signups are now open! Head on over now, and check out all the details below. → Read More
Over the weekend, over 200 teams of developers met up to participate in Node.js Knockout, a 48 hour coding competition with one basic rule: you *had* to use node.js to build your app. The deadline was midnight on Sunday, which means that the finished applications are currently being subjected to the scrutiny of the expert panel of judges and – perhaps even more terrifying – the general public. The winning team walks away with a whole bundle of prizes, including an iPad for each member.
So what is node.js? Without getting super technical, it’s a framework for JavaScript that allows developers to easily write programs that run on the server, rather than in the browser like JavaScript normally does. Node’s design takes advantage of this fact by using a novel approach to I/O that allows a lot of users to access the program at the same time. If that whets your appetite, Simon Willison gets into some more technical details. Side note: if you like to build things (especially under arbitrary deadlines), using node.js or anything else, you should come show us what you’ve got at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon on September 25-26 here in San Francisco.
Voting for the best application is open now through Thursday night at midnight, so head over and cast your vote. Here are our favorites: → Read More
GitHub, the source code hosting and collaboration service, has hit a major milestone tonight: the site is now hosting one million projects, confirmed Scott Chacon, VP of Research and Development at GitHub. Approximately 60 percent of these projects are full repositories – that is, shared folders with code spread across multiple files – while the remaining 40 percent are “gists”, or short code snippets contained in a single file, like this one, for example.
GitHub has seen rapid growth since it launched in February 2008, all despite the fact that the company has eschewed the traditional venture capital funding route. In an exchange that took place, appropriately enough, via the messaging system built into GitHub, Chacon stated that the company is still “funding free and very profitable” and that they are seeing “incredible growth for GitHub and Git usage in general.” In January 2009 they won a Crunchie for best bootstrapped startup. → Read More
The New York Times will begin publishing daily on the iPad, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper’s contents.
The New York Times on the iPad, as the electronic publication is known, contains most of the news and feature articles from the current day’s printed newspaper, classified advertising, reporting that does not appear in the newspaper, and interactive features including the newspaper’s crossword puzzle.
The iPad App (address: http:/www.nytimes.com) is part of a strategy to extend the readership of The Times and to create opportunities for the company in the electronic media industry, said Martin Nisenholtz, president of The New York Times Electronic Media Company. → Read More
We’re happy to announce the rollout of a mobile version of TechCrunch. We know how spotty wireless coverage can be, and how frustrating it can get to wait for a ton of extras to load while you’re staring at 2.5″ screen and can’t see them anyway. To that end, this version is stripped down to the bare essentials to ensure quick load times and ease of use. It’s based on the WPTouch theme by BraveNewCode.
It’s not an app – it works with any touch-enabled browser. You can, of course, add it to your home screen for easy access to the latest in technology news. Thank you to Bing, our launch partner for the mobile version.
To see the new mobile version, just go to techcrunch.com on any touch-screen mobile device. We’ll be adding full support for non-touchscreen models soon. → Read More
As some people noticed, at approximately 10:30 pm PST on Monday evening the main site in the TechCrunch Network – techcrunch.com – was hacked and redirected. The site was back up briefly at 11:30 pm but shortly went down again. As of 2:00 am, the site is back up and appears to be stable.
At this point we’re still gathering information on how the site was compromised, and will update this post with additional information. → Read More
Since the official launch of our integration between CrunchBase and Facebook Connect in November, we’ve seen 19% (5,087 out of 26,850) of our edits come from newly registered, non-anonymous users. Even after the predictable spike around the announcement, we’ve seen a sustained and growing percentage of our edits coming from these users (see figure below).
As they say, no good deed goes unpunished, so we thought it would be fun to give some credit to those users most actively involved in keeping CrunchBase up-to-date and accurate (apart from our internal team of course – it just wouldn’t be a contest). The top ten startup gurus are now highlighted in the right-hand column on the CrunchBase home page, and you can also view the full list to find out where you stack up. We’re planning to completely open up registration (without requiring Facebook Connect) in the near future as well to further broaden the field.
We’re also excited to announce a few new ways for you to keep up to date with the latest CrunchBase data. → Read More
For the past several weeks, we’ve been making improvements to CrunchBase to build a more engaging product for the people that drive it – which is to say, “everybody”. Since it was launched, Crunchbase has always been a freely editable repository of information about technology companies. Since February 2008, we’ve received over 100,000 edits from anonymous users in addition to the copious amounts of information that TechCrunch writers funnel to it on a regular basis.
We’re excited to announce that these contributions no longer have to remain unattributed. Starting today, anyone with a Facebook account can sign up for an account on CrunchBase by using Facebook Connect. Edits will still be moderated (after all, this is the Internet we’re talking about here), but users who prove themselves to be trustworthy will, with time, start to see additional privileges associated with their accounts.
All of these edits represent a treasure trove of information, so we’ve also been working on ways to better present the edits as they occur. Visitors to the CrunchBase homepage will now notice a list of recent milestones – a “stream,” if you will – that represents the most recent changes to the database. We’ve filtered out the more trivial edits in an effort to make this the kind of real-time information that even Paul Carr could love. These funding rounds, acquisitions, investments, IPOs, and other major milestones will now also appear on the individual pages that they relate to. → Read More
Ruby on Rails is well-known for being a powerful tool to help developers quickly turn ideas into working code. Rails Rumble harnesses that power and drives it to its only logical conclusion: a 48-hour programming competition pitting more than 200 teams of coders against one another for some pretty serious prizes. Each team of up to four people is provided with exactly the same thing: a virtual private server from Linode, a private repository on GitHub, and a really tight deadline. BYO caffeine.
The competition has ended and now that many of the contestants are awake again, it’s time for the public to kick the tires on these mini-applications and vote to decide who will take home the championship belt (and no, that’s not a figure of speech in this case. There really is a belt). The 22 finalists include something for everyone, whether you’re a developer working to nail down requirements, a boozehound trying to figure out what cocktails you can make with the leftovers from last night’s party, an old-school arcade nut looking to play multi-player Asteroid, or a hopeless romantic trying to employ Twitter to woo a crush. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
