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.

You don’t need to have stayed overnight or even have participated in the Hackathon to come and see the results on Sunday. Here’s all you need to know:

Where: San Francisco Design Center Concourse
When: Sunday, September 26th at 11:00 am
No signup required. Free and open to the public.

If you do come check it out, you’ll be in good company and might even meet some of our expert judges:

Cyan Bannister
Brett Bullington
Rebekah Cox
Chris Dixon
Bradley Horowitz
Dean Hovey
Michael Marquez
Christopher Poole
Joshua Schachter
Mike Schroepfer

And of course, if you’re not really the spectator type, there are still a few slots left to actually participate in the Hackathon, so sign up here for your shot at presenting on stage at Disrupt.

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!

So if you think you’ve got what it takes, sign up now to compete for a spot on stage at Disrupt! If you have an idea for something cool but need some help on the execution, post it to the Ideas page on the Hackathon wiki and start scheming with your co-conspirators. In addition to providing your team with space to hack, pizza, and caffeine, there will also be a number of workshops where you can learn more about APIs from companies like Groupon, Microsoft/BizSpark, BitTorrent, and Google. These APIs are key when you have less than 24 hours to put something together.

We’ve posted all the information you could ever want on the event page as well as the Hackathon wiki. But if you have questions, let us know in the comments. We’re also taking suggestions for the last couple of judging slots. Who would you like to see?

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:

Swarmation – This multi-player game reduces each participant to a single pixel. Players must work together (or not) to move their pixels to form patterns that are chosen by a Tetris-like unseen overlord. Gameplay is super smooth and it gets very interesting to watch the strategies employed by each player. Huge time sink potential.

Drawbridge – This one has some serious potential to turn into a revenue-generating business.
Multiple people can share a sketchpad to draw out quick notes, ideas, whatever. It can be tough to control using a trackpad, but a mouse is better. The real win would be if the team can get it to work on the iPad – unfortunately it doesn’t right now, but that’s definitely an app I would pay for.

Jackalope – You’ll want to open two windows for this one: the admin pane and the demo site. As you mouse and click around on the demo, you can watch all of your actions reflected in real time on the admin page. Now imagine getting this data from all the visitors to your site, in real time. Another one that has a clear potential for revenue.

Salamander – Multi-player snake. Eat the apples to grow – trap your opponents in the corners of the board. Similar to Swarmation in that it’s a simple concept, easy and fast to control, interesting to watch player behavior, and (of course) a massive time sink.

Tweet Quest – This one is actually really fun. You’re a knight in shining armor with nothing but your wits and your sword (at first) to help you make your way through a rat-infested dungeon. Hook it up to your twitter account and it imports the avatars of the people you follow – and photoshops them onto the bodies of the rats that you must destroy. That doesn’t sound like much but it really is what makes the game what it is – seeing the alerts that I had defeated both Heather Harde and Paul Graham pretty much made my night.

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.

The profit comes from the paid plans that GitHub offers for those developers and companies who want to host their repositories privately. GitHub offers essentially unlimited hosting to anyone who is willing to make their code open source, but charges based on the number of private repositories and the number of contributors for other projects. This profitability has spurred the launch of a number of new features of late, such as Organizations, which offers more advanced workflow tools for projects with multiple contributors and varying permissions, and support for fifteen new languages.

GitHub is a key part of the software development ecosystem, hosting a number of notable code bases, including Ruby on Rails, the jQuery JavaScript library and the Linux kernel. Git, the distributed version control software that GitHub is based on, was in fact built by Linus Torvalds, the lead developer and maintainer of the Linux kernel, and the source code for Git itself is also hosted on GitHub. TechCrunch hosts a number of repositories using the service, including some that are open source, and Twitter has recently been publishing the source for several of their gems and other code, using GitHub to do so. Ruby and JavaScript are the most popular languages on GitHub, with 19 and 17 percent of the hosted code respectively, but there are currently projects in over 50 languages on the service: everything from Visual Basic to Go.

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.

The company, formed in 1995 to develop products for the rapidly growing field of digital publishing, is a wholly owned subsidiary of The New York Times Company, and also produces the times service on America Online Inc.

Mr. Nisenholtz reports to Russell T. Lewis, the president and general manager of The New York Times, and to Joseph Lelyveld, the newspaper’s executive editor.

The iPad-based Times is the newest of dozens of papers available to a global audience on the Internet’s fastest-growing service, which lets iPad users see electronic publications consisting of text, pictures and, in some cases, video and sound.

A selection of the day’s news, discussion forums and other material from The Times has been available through the @times service since the spring of 1994 on America Online.

The iPad’s global audience means a larger potential readership than that of @times, which is limited to America Online’s subscribers, currently more than four million. The new site also offers new products and services.

“Our iPad App is designed to take full advantage of the evolving capabilities offered by the Internet,” said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The Times. “We see our role on the iPad as being similar to our traditional print role — to act as a thoughtful, unbiased filter and to provide our customers with information they need and can trust.”

The iPad will also offer access to much of what the newspaper has published the previous week and access to feature articles from as far back as 1980.

Mr. Nisenholtz said that initially, at least, no subscription or access fee would be charged for readers in the United States and that the iPad App would generate revenue from advertising. Readers who connect to the iPad App from outside the country will be offered a 30-day trial without charge, but will eventually face a subscription fee.

Advertisers that have already announced participation on the iPad App include Toyota Motor Corporate Services, Chemical Bank and the Northeast real estate concern Douglas Elliman.

Subscribers will have limited access to archives of Times articles and features dating to 1980, and will be able to copy articles to their own iPads for $1.95 each, Mr. Nisenholtz said.

The new service will also offer, for a fee, a customized clipping service that delivers to a subscriber’s electronic mailbox articles gleaned from each day’s editions of the newspaper, based on key words the subscriber selects.

With its entry on the iPad, The Times is hoping to become a primary information provider in the computer age and to cut costs for newsprint, delivery and labor. Companies that have established iPad-based information sites include television networks, computer companies, on-line information services, magazines and even individuals creating electronic newspapers of their own.

“The New York Times name will get people to look at the product once or maybe twice, and the fact that The New York Times has the kind of reach and credibility it does may persuade people to look three or four times,” said John F. Kelsey 3d, president of the Kelsey Group, a consultancy running a conference on iPad Apps next month.

“The market is booming for newspapers on the iPad,” Mr. Kelsey said.

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.

We’ll be improving on the design in the coming weeks, so tell us your thoughts in the comments.

At this point we’re still gathering information on how the site was compromised, and will update this post with additional information.

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. First, there are now two Twitter feeds that are updated with funding rounds and acquisitions as they are added to CrunchBase; just follow @CB_fundings and @CB_acquisitions on Twitter. We’ll be adding more feeds in the future – suggestions about which ones you would find most useful are welcome. If you’d like to keep visitors to your site advised of the most recent happenings in the startup world, we suggest that you embed the Twitter widget by pasting the following code in the location of your choice: Acquisitions; Funding Rounds.

If RSS is more your style, you now have the ability to create a custom RSS feed based on pages on CrunchBase that interest you – maybe the Nexus One, for example. Every page in CrunchBase has a “Follow” button that will add all major milestones for that person, product, or company to your custom RSS feed. The feed will appear on your account page (you’ll need to create an account) and you can import it to the reader of your choice as well. Just don’t tell Steve Gillmor.


Your customized feed, on your CrunchBase home page or in your RSS inbox:

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.

Lastly, since it’s always better to let individuals choose what news they care about, we’re providing a way for people who sign up for a CrunchBase account to see a summary of these milestones only from the products, people and companies that are interesting to them. Logged-in users now have the ability to follow entries in the database and have relevant updates appear on their home page (sound familiar?).

If you are a developer and want to use CrunchBase data, we’ve got a very open and flexible API. And make sure to let us know when you build an app that uses CrunchBase data, we like to highlight them.

We hope you enjoy the new features, and are always taking suggestions for ways to make CrunchBase better. You can keep up to date with the latest features on the CrunchBase blog. And if you like what we’re doing, by all means, be our friend.

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.

Even the teams that don’t come away with any material prizes will have gained some very valuable feedback on whether their idea might have any legs in the long run. Fifteen of the entries from the 2008 competition are still active and available to users, including all of the prize-winning applications.

So head on over and check out the applications, leave some feedback, and vote for your favorite(s). Voting ends tomorrow, Sunday, at 5 pm PST. You’ll be deciding a grand prize that includes a netbook for each team member and a bottle of 12 year Pappy Van Winkle Whiskey (from GitHub – I knew those guys were classy), not to mention year-long bragging rights.