Paidpiper launched at Disrupt NY today, aiming to make your physical wallet, and presence, less necessary — in a good way.
Paidpiper aims to solve that problem with its consumer-facing app, Ok’d. Using Ok’d, you can walk into a store, snap a picture of a product, and send it to a friend, parent, employer, etc. and ask them to pay for it. → Read More
With a plan of making product ratings social, Greentape is launching a new app that they hope will bring in-store product reviews to consumers while (hopefully) spawning more product purchases for merchants. The team is demoing this new app at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. → Read More
Man. These guys are going to make so, so, so much money.
Zenefits, the free, YC-backed “set-it-and-forget-it” service thats helps small businesses worry less about employee benefits, made a pair of announcements at Disrupt NY 2013 this morning: They’ll now be able to handle payroll duties, and they’re expanding the service to New York. → Read More
During their work with patients, doctors will frequently contact colleagues with questions, to trade horror stories, or converse about treatment methods. There isn’t really a technological solution to streamline this daily back and forth, but that’s what SharePractice aims to bring.
Founders Dr. Andrew Brandeis and Benoit Carrier built an easy to use the mobile app to serve as a sort of… → Read More
Today at Disrupt NY 2013, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said that publishers are facing a huge reduction in ad revenues. Publishers have seen revenues go from dollars in print, to dimes on the web, to pennies on mobile. According to McCue, a lot of the reason for that is the way that content is packaged and ads are displayed. → Read More
Flipboard CEO Mike McCue took the stage at Disrupt NY 2013 today to talk about his company and the changing nature of media and publishing, and he revealed updated stats about user adoption of his company’s platform. Since the version 2.0 launch in March, it has added 6 million new users, which is up 3 million from just over two weeks ago. That rate of growth means Flipboard is growing much faster… → Read More
Helsinki, Finland-based Ovelin is in the business of teaching people music using fun, easy games. The company is at Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley this year, demoing their latest game, GuitarBots, which is getting its full official launch after a soft launch earlier this year and a period of public beta testing. The game is like Guitar Hero, but will actually impart real skill, and runs in your… → Read More
Betaworks is a fairly unique entity, as a holding company that creates, acquires and invests in a wide variety of startups and products, including most recently Marco Arment’s Instapaper. Betaworks founder and CEO John Borthwick took the Disrupt stage today to talk about his company and its investments, as well as the products it has created in-house like Giphy. → Read More
Kevin Ryan, appearing onstage at Disrupt NY with longtime investment partner Dwight Merriman, said it is possible they may launch one or two new startups by September through AlleyCorp, the umbrella company for the network of companies they have started. Ryan was broad and general, citing financial services, healthcare and e-commerce as possible areas of investment. He said he has three groups… → Read More
It was just last week that betaworks announced it had acquired a majority stake in fan-favorite reading service Instapaper, and today on the Disrupt NY stage betaworks CEO John Borthwick shed some new light on the process of striking a deal with Instapaper creator Marco Arment. → Read More
Purchext, a new app/service that increases communication between parents, their youngsters and the purchases their youngsters make, is on display at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. The concept behind the startup is a way for parents to approve purchases their kids are making. In reality, it works more like a way for kids to submit expense reports to their parents. For each purchase a dependent minor… → Read More
The head of Mark Zuckerberg’s enigmatic political lobby took the stage of TechCrunch’s Disrupt New York conference. “It’s incumbent on us to make the knowledge economy as inclusive as possible,” said FWD.us head Joe Green. FWD.us joins a crowded landscape of politically aggressive trade associations pressing Silicon Valley’s agenda on Capitol Hill. Since the… → Read More
Vox Media, publishers of the SBNation, Verge and Polygon blogs, is getting down to business with monetizing its content with the launch of Vox Creative, a new division of the company that will act as an in-house service to create marketing and advertising to run alongside its other content services. The announcement was made today on stage by CEO Jim Bankoff at TCDisrupt as he extolled the virtues… → Read More
The Social+Capital Founder, early Facebook employee and owner of the Golden State Warriors, Chamath Palihapitiya, joined us onstage at Disrupt NY and gave some brutally honest answers to questions as to why we’re seeing a lull in innovation. I had a chance to talk to Palihapitiya back stage and we dove deeper into the fact that the Valley should “be ashamed of itself” over the… → Read More
I took a few minutes to sit down with Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed, at TechCrunch Disrupt NY today. I wanted to ask him about how we, as humans, were changing due to new pressures on our brains and bodies associated with hanging out too much on sites like BuzzFeed. → Read More
I want to marry Jonah Peretti. Why? Because he just found a way to rationalize why we look at hundreds of pictures of kittens each day on the Internet during his keynote at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. “Cats on the web aren’t about the cats,” said Peretti. “It’s about being human.” Pictures of kittens, and dogs on their hind legs, and baby monkeys and teacup… → Read More
During our Disrupt event today, New York City company Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley spoke about how people are talking about the company these days. One of the interesting things about the company is its strategy to be the “location layer” of the Internet. For four years, the company has been trapping all of this location data, tips and social graph information. On its… → Read More
In a world of Facebook and social sharing, having heart is more important than being smart, according to BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti. Today at Disrupt NY 2013, Peretti discussed the difference between activity that exists on social sites like Facebook versus what people are searching for in non-social situations. → Read More
Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and founder of investment firm The Social+Capital Partnership, said today that the tech world should be “utterly ashamed,” because “we are at an absolute minimum in terms of things that are being started.”
Palihapitiya was interviewed on-stage at our Disrupt NY conference. He argued that in contrast to past decades, where tech entrepreneurs were… → Read More
Today at Disrupt NY 2013, Benchmark partner Bill Gurley shared an interesting fact about Uber. “Uber is growing faster than eBay did,” Gurley said. In 1997, Benchmark invested $6.7 million in eBay. It was worth more than $5 billion less than two years later. Benchmark is also an investor in Uber. “Uber is probably the fastest growing company that we’ve ever had,” Gurley… → Read More
Chris Dixon, the entrepreneur-turned angel investor-turned general partner at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, today said that he believes the 3D printing movement has the potential to revolutionize manufacturing and that it is an area where he would like to make multiple investments in the future. In contrast, he described startups in areas like social networking facing “general fatigue”. Earlier… → Read More
Chris Dixon joined our co-editor Eric Eldon this morning at Disrupt NY 2013 to discuss his move out to San Francisco for a job at Andreessen Horowitz. One of the areas that interests him the most is the much-hyped Bitcoin space. The reason why Dixon is so interested is because it solves many problems for those who have tried to start a financial company in the past. He said: “There’s… → Read More
The Hackathon has come and gone, and it’s time for the main event. TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 begins now. If you’ve been a fan of Disrupt in the past, you’re in for a huge treat this beautiful April morning. We’ll be live streaming the entire event from start to finish, with today’s live stream starting at 8:45am ET and ending around 6pm each night. In the morning… → Read More
If you’re an Iron Man fan, you already know about Jarvis, Tony Stark’s personal assistant (who’s either a human or a virtual AI, depending on how long you’ve been following the comic). Jarvis is the glue that keeps Stark’s business, personal and super hero lives running smoothly. → Read More
The past 24 hours have just flown by for the hundreds of hackers here at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, but the sun is finally up and it’s time to pass judgment on their caffeine-fueled projects. As it turns out, there’s a ton of them here — with 164 registered projects this is our biggest Hackathon yet, and each presenter only had 60 seconds to wow our judges (not to mention the rest… → Read More
Carson Britt and Matthew Drake convinced everyone with their onstage demo of Laser Mountain at the Disrupt NY Hackathon. They attached Android phones to the Nerf guns (that TechCrunch gave away yesterday) to recreate a laser tag game with a real-time score server. After receiving the Nerf guns, they started working right away on Laser Mountain. “We already had the domain name… → Read More
Financial advisory services often aren’t targeted at the people at the lower end of the economic spectrum — and arguably, those are the folks who really need money advice the most.
That’s where Scaffold, an app built over the past 24 hours at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Hackathon, wants to help out. Scaffold aims to be a financial advisory platform that can give actionable insights to lower… → Read More
After 24 hours of hard work at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, Michael Kolodny, Jingen Lin and Ricardo Falletti demoed us HangoutLater, a nifty hack built on top of the Foursquare API. When you check in and a friend is close to you, it will ask you if you want to hang out later. Then, it will automatically find you a central location to meet. Kolodny and Lin already knew each other before the event. → Read More
Disrupt NY 2013′s Hackathon took place over roughly the last 24 hours, and now the teams are ready to present. Watch along as we live stream all 164 hacks built during the event, each of which gets just under a minute to demo what they’ve built on stage in order to try to convince the judges they’re worthy of the sponsor prizes. 164 is a lot of hacks for just under a day, and in fact it’s a record… → Read More
It’s after 1am on a Saturday night in Manhattan, and there are still hundreds of people at our Disrupt NY Hackathon. The dedication of the attendees trying to build a cool product in less than 24 hours is both impressive and slightly disturbing.
To capture some of the energy, Drew Olanoff and I took a walk around the venue at around 11pm, as the pizza and beer arrived to give the teams a… → Read More
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