After nearly 24 hours of fighting fatigue and crafting code, our Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon is finally drawing to a close. Not a moment too soon — I think some of our hackers are about ready to keel over at this point.
Nevertheless, we just got an eyeful of 92 projects that our wonderful hackers have been slaving away on through the night, but only three teams will be able to show off their work on the main Disrupt stage this Wednesday. → Read More
It’s been a long, caffeine-fueled ride for the hundreds of hackers who have set up at our big Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon, but the furious process of taking a wild idea and turning it into something real is finally winding down.
Projects were being finalized, UIs were being tweaked, last minute Red Bulls were being downed — it was a quite a sight to see everyone buckling down for those final few minutes before submissions were due. → Read More
No one ever called a limit on the number pivots a company can do, right? So here’s the latest at a company we’ve been watching for a while now. RAVN, an event planning and sharing app that itself was the product of a pivot from the developers behind “experiences marketplace” Skyara, has sent a letter out to its users telling them that the app is getting shut down at the end of this month. In RAVN’s place, the founders are starting up yet another business — their third — also loosely based around events but with a decidedly more commercial bent: a design flash sales site called Touch of Modern.
“After two years of building a new marketplace for experiences, we have decided that it is time to close down RAVN. The website and mobile app will completely stop working by the end of the month,” the RAVN team wrote in the note to users. → Read More
Fresh on the heels of its $1 million Series A, Triptrotting, a startup that aims to connect travelers with hosts, is relaunching its website with a number of changes. In addition to improved design and functionality, the website also introduces new features which aim to better connect travelers with each other as well as with their local hosts.
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Sure there are services to sell tickets to arenas and event spaces (not to mention parties and the like) but thus far there hasn’t been a good way to allow customers to pick their seats. TicketLeap, a ticketing website, has solved that problem.
Wedding planners don’t get too excited yet: the system is mostly for folks who run bigger event spaces like halls and arenas. You can lay out your space using TicketLeap’s browser-based tools and add various features like bathrooms, Wi-Fi points, and handicapped access spots.
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Just a reminder: today is the most important day of the year. It’s TC DC Mini Meet-up Night! We’re here in DC and we’re looking forward to meeting with you all at RFD (810 7th St NW) at 6pm for some networking, some fun, and some start-up talk.
I’ve been doing these things in the US and Europe for a few years now and my style is very laid back and very organic. This is a very informal event – we won’t be having speeches, panels, or wonkery. We’re here to hear pitches, talk tech, and discuss what you’ve been up to. Come along even if you have nothing to launch. After all, maybe you’ll meet your next start-up partner tonight.
As a special bonus, DC meet-up folks will get to meet our new co-editor, Eric Eldon, who is coming in from San Francisco and who will be in DC with us that evening. → Read More
timeRAZOR, the D.C.-area startup which raised $3.4 million pre-launch to build a better events finder, has arrived today on mobile. The new apps, available for both iOS and Android, work by using your phone’s geolocation features combined with a built-in recommendation engine to help suggest nearby events that you may have otherwise missed. It also integrates with your phone’s built-in calendar, to suggest events taking place near your out-of-office meetings and social appointments.
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Way back in 2009 there was no large event dedicated to technology startups in the UK. TechCrunch, under Mike Arrington, was busy trying to get its TechCrunch50/Disrupt programme going in the US, and outside of local meetups, the TC event juggernaut still had yet to arrive in Europe. My friend and colleague Robin Wauters was doing Plugg in Brussels, but there wasn’t a startup event in London. So I launched a personal project, an event I called GeeknRolla, the name for which I literally dreamt up in a London pub. Despite those amateurish beginnings, about 400 people turned up that year, and I ran it again for the next couple of years as a fun side project. But times move on and after running it single-handedly for three years in a row, I’m going to bring the GeeknRolla “mojo” to a new event (while we wait for the TC event machine to spin up in Europe, and more on that later so stay tuned).
Thus, GeeknRolla and the Dublin Web Summit, are merging to create the London Web Summit. It’ll be on March 19th in The Brewery Venue, in London’s “Tech City” area.
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Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that’d help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done.
Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small early adopter community and into critical, mainstream usage. While the initial launch and traction proved extremely exciting, it misled us into believing there was a larger market ready to adopt our product. This post-mortem is an attempt to describe the fundamental flaws in our product model and, in particular, the difficulties presented by events as a content type. → Read More
The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
We’re creatures of habit. We go where we’ve already gone. That’s why Facebook’s new Suggested Events feature I just discovered is so powerful — it knows where we’ve been thanks to our checkins. Replacing the old Friends’ Events sub-tab of the home page’s Events bookmark, Suggested Events helps you discover things to do that take place at venues you’ve checked in to, that friends are RSVP’d to, that are hosted by Pages you Like, or a combination. The feature could reduce the need third-party event discovery apps, and get more people out of their houses to attend concerts, club nights, and conferences. → Read More
We are gearing up for 2012 and getting ready to bring you some major events you will want to put on your calendars. Our dates are already locked in for the Crunchies, Disrupt NYC and SF, and our annual summer bash at August Capital. International events are also in the works.
The Crunchies—January 31
TechCrunch will kick off 2012 with The Crunchies along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat on Tuesday, January 31, 2012. The tech party to start the year will move to Davies Symphony Hall this year for both the awards ceremony and the famous after party. Nominations for the entrepreneurial spirited categories are in and being tabulated. Voting begins in early January.
Disrupt NYC—May 19-23
TechCrunch Disrupt will return to New York in 2012 with the pizza-and-caffeine-fueled Hackathon on May 19 – 20, 2012. The TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference will follow on May 21 – 23, 2012 where our fun loving friends at Shaker will pass the Disrupt Cup to the newest Startup Battlefield winner. → Read More
We’ll we’ve run a lot of TechCrunch meetups all over Europe since 2007, getting to most of the major European cities. But there’s one place we haven’t got a chance to hit and that’s the tiger economies of the Baltic states: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The latter is of course where, famously, Skype was largely developed. So we’re putting that right with an event in January, TechCrunch Baltics. It will be on February 9th, 2012, in the lovely city of Riga, Latvia. → Read More
This summer, Tandem Entrepreneurs raised a $40 million fund to continue investing in its incubator and capital fund, both focused exclusively on startups building solutions for the mobile space. One of the four companies (which includes JungleApps, GimmieWorld, and Flit) funded in Tandem’s most recent batch is coming out of private beta today to get young people off the couch and into the fray.
UpOut, as its name implies, is an online event discovery service that wants to get you involved in fun activities that are happening right now, in realtime. Founded by two young Babson College entrepreneurs, Martin Shen and William King, UpOut is intending to do for local events what Yelp has done for the local restaurant market, showing what’s nearby, what’s inexpensive, and what people like you are recommending. → Read More
Sometimes you want to go out, but aren’t sure what’s going on in your city that would interest you. SeatGeek, the ticket search engine for live events, is launching an event discovery engine today called Columbus that helps you find concerts, sporting events, and live shows in your area. It is a “Pandora for live events” says SeatGeek co-founder Jack Groetzinger.
You train Columbus by telling it 4 or 5 bands and sports teams you like then it produces a calendar of events filled with its recommendations. It is all tied to upcoming events in SeatGeek’s database, so the calendar keeps updating all the time. You can buy tickets as well. The recommendations get better over time as the algorithm learns more about your preferences. → Read More
The Europas, the European Tech Startup Awards, were held for the second time December 2010, in London, supported by TechCrunch Europe. It was the culmination of a month of online voting by the European tech startup industry for the finalists, where some 33,126 votes were cast, judges deliberated over the results and over 350 people joined the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs at a huge awards event. This year it’s getting bigger to get the community even more involved, create an even bigger event, and find the best startups in Europe. You can enter here and tickets are here. We are still taking sponsors for categories. For sponsorship opportunities please email Mike Butcher ( mike [@] mbites.com ) for further details or see here. Also follow the event on Twitter @TheEuropas and on Facebook. → Read More
Good startups often emerge from situations where the founder is attempting to solve a problem they themselves have. That was certainly the case with collegiate events site Fampus, created by 22-year old Brittany Brody, now a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As a new arrival to the university in 2008, Brody wanted to get involved on campus, but was frustrated by the lack of a dedicated site that listed both on-campus and nearby community events. So she created Fampus. → Read More
Our 6th annual summer August Capital Party is almost here! Today we are releasing our next set of 100 tickets. The August Capital Party will be held on the beautiful and sunny Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park on July 29th from 5:30 – 10:00pm, following our Mobile First CrunchUp. You will see an amazing mix of startup demos, giveaways, drinks and much more. Tickets are $40 and sell out very quickly. If you would like to come, please act fast. If you aren’t able to purchase tickets today, stay tuned as we will release more tickets next week. → Read More
We only have a couple more weeks left until our 6th annual summer party at August Capital. Our first two batches of 100 tickets sold out in under an hour. Today we are releasing 100 more. The party will follow our Mobile First CrunchUp on July 29th and will be held in Menlo Park from 5:30 – 10:00pm. There will be a mix of startup demos, drinks, giveaways, networking and fun on one of the prettiest roads in Silicon Valley. The tickets tend to sell out very fast, so be sure to act quickly if you would like to come. If you’re not able to get a ticket today, stay tuned for a ticket giveaway this weekend. We will also release our next set of tickets next week.
Tickets are now on sale here. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
