New York City | April 27 - May 1, 2013
SideCar co-founder and CEO Sunil Paul was part of what may have been the most spirited and feisty panel at our Disrupt NY conference earlier this month. Sharing the stage with Hailo CEO Jay Bregman (I’ll be posting an interview with Bregman later) and NY TLC Deputy Commissioner Ashwini Chhabra, Paul positioned his ridesharing startup as an organization standing up for innovation and choice in the… → Read More
Everlane has built a really unique business that straddles the tech and consumer spaces, by using technology to provide luxury quality apparel at much lower prices than traditional high-end designers. But with that success has also come copycats — particularly abroad, where Everlane has not yet expanded its business (at the moment the company is operating only in the United States and Canada.) → Read More
Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon has been a big part of the New York City scene for years — and finance has long been a dominant industry in the city. So when talking about the ascent of Bitcoin onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Dixon directly addressed corruption in Wall Street, we thought it’d be interesting to follow up and hear more. → Read More
Investor Chamath Palihapitiya’s skeptical comments about the current wave of tech startups (comments that included a not-too-veiled dig at Snapchat), ended up fueling plenty of discussion at our Disrupt NY conference earlier this week. In fact, when I interviewed Sequoia Capital partner Aaref Hilaly backstage, Palihapitiya’s remarks provided a springboard for Hilaly’s take on messaging apps… → Read More
Buy it in a store, laser scan it at home, upload it to the web, print it anywhere. 3D printing is poised for the mainstream, but what happens when one person’s finely hand-crafted designs can be pirated and reproduced by anyone? Will 3D printing piracy social networks arise? And how will manufacturers lobby to stop them? → Read More
A funny thing has happened in tech in recent years. It used to be that you could expect a venture-backed company to file for an IPO soon after a few rounds of funding — after, say, its Series C or Series D raise. But now we’re seeing companies’ venture capital investment go well into the hundreds of millions, and valuations cross over into the 10-figure range, with no S-1 filing in sight. Sequoia… → Read More
The quick adoption of Mailbox only came after the team behind it spent years developing and iterating on a productivity app called Orchestra. In a conversation backstage at Disrupt NY 2013 earlier this week, co-founder Gentry Underwood walked me through how Mailbox came to be. → Read More
Chef Sleeve has been selling its iPad-protecting plastic sleeves since 2011 to keep kitchen gunk off the iPad you’re using while you cook. They also make a chopping board with a built in iPad stand. But Chef Sleeve’s grand plan is to create a range of connected devices for the kitchen that link up with an iPad app to let people track their nutrition in a highly granular yet low hassle way. → Read More
Ron Conway, David Lee, and Brian Pokorny meet new startup founders practically every day as investors at renowned angel funding firm SV Angel. So when they came backstage at this week’s Disrupt NYC event after their on-stage talk with Michael Arrington, I asked them to talk about the most inspiring up-and-coming founders they’ve met with lately — people who may be flying a little more under the… → Read More
Meet Lumu: a digital light meter for photographers that plugs into the iPhone’s headphone jack as a smaller and smarter replacement for traditional analogue light meters. It’s used in conjunction with Lumu’s app — being demoed in prototype here at hardware alley at Disrupt NY — to help photographers figure out the best camera settings for their current location. → Read More
Vox Media has very quickly become a huge force in online media. The owner of websites like SB Nation and the Verge is seeking to create a whole new generation of premium properties online, as a way to attract big advertisers. One way it’s doing that is by extending its home-grown technology to brand marketers. → Read More
The champagne bottles are empty. The startups are packing up. TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 is a wrap, and it was a hell of a show. Enigma won the Startup Battlefield, taking home $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup. Ryan Lawler’s Urban Transportation panel was somehow more rowdy than Josh Constine’s talk with Rap Genius. Ashton Kutcher showed up and proved yet again his value as a Silicon Valley… → Read More
I don’t want to awaken the ire of any committed pet owners but I would be lying if I said I didn’t cringe a little bit when I hear about extreme pet products and services like doggie treadmills, pet psychiatrists or pet fitness centers.
Still, I came across FitBark on the floor at TechCrunch Disrupt and while it could, at first, seem “extreme” I found that after hearing the creators’… → Read More
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. This year’s crop of Disrupt NY Battlefield startups has been one of our strongest yet, but out of the 30 that entered the fray only seven would go on to the final round. HealthyOut, Enigma, Floored, Glide, HAN:DLE, SupplyShift, and Zenefits emerged from the pack as our seven finalists, and their respective teams were faced with another challenge. They… → Read More
A lot of people don’t carry cameras anymore, now that they have smartphones. But that means that you could miss opportunities to capture great moments, especially when you’re missing out on the great optical zoom available on some more expensive or specialized dedicated camera devices. That’s what Snapzoom hopes to fix with its binocular mount for smartphone cameras, and the best part is that it’s… → Read More
Dogs, drones, and digital controllers, oh my! This year’s Disrupt conference in New York was full of amazing webs services and software, but Hardware Alley brought out the best in hardware startups and showed the world that hardware is finally serious business. → Read More
Brian Pokorny, who recently rejoined SV Angel as a general partner, weighed in this afternoon on the future of a number of high-profile companies — Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo.
Pokorny was interviewed at Disrupt NY, where he was joined onstage by his partners David Lee and Ron Conway. When TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington asked them how they felt about Facebook and whether it was going… → Read More
Kickstarter-funded Bitponics was showing off its finished product at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Hardware Alley today in New York, which is shipping out to backers in the next few weeks according to company cofounder Michael Zick Doherty. The Bitponics system is a cloud-based hydroponic garden manager, complete with a web-based dashboard that’s accessible anywhere and can control every aspect crucial… → Read More
Michael Arrington began moderating a panel at Disrupt NY today with Ron Conway, David Lee, and Brian Pokorny of SV Angel by noting that he was “pissed off” by investor Chamath Palipitiya’s comments on Monday that startup quality is at an “all time low.”
“I don’t agree,” Lee said, explaining that he thinks the ideas in the last 12-18 months have been bigger and bolder than those before them. → Read More
The team at Siminars has developed what they call an “online platform with all the tools you need to build, publish and distribute highly effective courses.”
It means that rather than just using a written text to teach a concept, Siminars’ web platform lets a teacher of a subject tie together many different media types into one unified experience that steps a learner through the learning of a… → Read More
How could a site for explaining rap lyrics make good on its $15 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz? Because it’s also a collaborative text-annotation platform that enterprises are asking for. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, the Rap Genius founders told me they plan to monetize by building private installations of their service for big companies and government agencies. Biz Genius is coming. → Read More
For some of us, hanging out with our parents is something best relegated to off-work hours and holidays. But Kenneth Lerer and Ben Lerer have had some big successes working together at Lerer Ventures, the New York City venture capital firm whose portfolio includes BuzzFeed, Warby Parker, Everlane, FancyHands, and many others. → Read More
There’s a long-held notion that China should be the go-to place for those in need of inexpensive manufactured products, but some prominent makers don’t buy it. Our own John Biggs sat down with Adafruit Industries founder Limor Fried (perhaps better known as Lady Ada) for a chat on the Disrupt Ny stage that quickly turned to deal with the benefits of manufacturing hardware close to home. → Read More
One of the common themes that we’re hearing from investors during Disrupt NYC has been that the areas that are ready to be disrupted might not be anywhere close to the sometimes sexier-appearing consumer space. Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies and current partner at Formation 8, discussed some of his thoughts on what will be and should be disrupted by way of technology. The… → Read More
Recently consumer electronics have tended to be more about closing things down then opening them up, but New York-based Adafruit is working to help reverse that trend, and to make it so that people aren’t afraid of what’s inside their devices, and instead become more comfortable with electronics components and the concepts behind how gadgets actually work. Adafruit founder and CEO Limor Fried was… → Read More
Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Ashton Kutcher took the stage with Guy Oseary to talk about their A-Grade fund. Arrington started right away about a rumor that the fund is raising money at a $100 million valuation. The two partners confirm the rumors, saying that they are raising “enough money.” It means that financial institutions and companies will invest a certain amount of money in… → Read More
Today at Disrupt NY, Ken Lerer and Ben Lerer took the stage to talk about Lerer Ventures and their respective entrepreneur stories. One thing that caught the attention of the audience is when Ken Lerer talked about gun control and a new StopTheNRA.com website. “We are going to launch StopTheNRA.com,” Ken Lerer said. The site should be up in about two weeks. They already own the domain… → Read More
While you are riding into work on your bike commute, why not charge your phone? There’s a bit more to it than that, but ultimately that is exactly what the Siva Cycle Atom does. A brilliant idea.
Reaching their KickStarter goal of $85,000 after only a week, the newly funded Atom is on display on the floor of Hardware Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. → Read More
The founders of lyric website Rap Genius revealed today that they’re starting to move into annotating news content too, under the name News Genius.
They were onstage at Disrupt NY, where they gave a surreal, joke-y interview without too much detail about what News Genius actually is. Co-founder Mahbod Moghadam mostly told the audience to follow the Twitter account and asked, “When is Obama… → Read More
“The TLC protects the taxi industry. And I don’t think anyone in their right mind can deny that fact,” Sidecar co-founder Sunil Paul said to applause at Disrupy NY today.
Paul argued back and forth with New York Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) Deputy Commisioner of Policy and Programs Ashwini Chhabra, with Hailo’s Jay Bregman hopping in to discuss innovation in the New York taxi… → Read More
