Summer is here and our 6th annual August Capital Party is just around the corner. Last week we released 100 tickets, all of which sold out in under an hour. Today we are releasing our next set of 100 tickets. The August Capital Party will be held on the gorgeous Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park on July 29th from 5:30 – 10:00pm, preceding our Mobile First CrunchUp. This party is a great way to see an amazing mix of startup demos, network, enter into giveaways, have some drinks and some fun in the sun. Tickets are $40 and tend to sell out very quickly. If you would like to come, please act fast. If you aren’t able to purchase tickets today, stay tuned – we will have a ticket giveaway this Friday and will release more tickets next week.
Tickets are on sale here. → Read More
Now that we’ve finally caught our breath from Disrupt in New York City, it’s time to to bring Disrupt back home to San Francisco. (We like to keep things moving around here). To get things rolling, we are accepting applications for startups to launch at the Disrupt Startup Battlefield in San Francisco, September 12-14, 2011. So what are you waiting for? Applications for the Startup Battlefield can be submitted starting today.
Do you think your startup can be the next Getaround, Qwiki, or Soluto—and make it through the judges gauntlet to claim the top prize of $50,000, the “Disrupt Cup” and accolades of the crowd? Sure it can. But you’ll never know unless you apply. → Read More
We have just announced our Mobile First CrunchUp and 6th Annual Summer Party at August Capital! Tickets for both events are on sale now and are currently going very fast. For today, we are giving away 2 free tickets to our summer party at August Capital. We will have a great mix of startup demos, fun giveaways, drinks and more. The party will be in Menlo Park on the best deck in all of Sand Hill Road on July 29th. You can read more about the details and directions here. → Read More
“Mobile first.” It’s a mantra we’ve been hearing increasingly. For many developers and startup founders, they start with a mobile product first, and web second, if at all. We are seeing this across games, social, photo, payment, group messaging, media consumption, local deal apps and more. It’s just the way things are done.
On July 29, we’ll explore all of these issues and what it takes to go mobile first during a half-day CrunchUp in Palo Alto, preceding our 6th annual summer party at August Capital. We are selling tickets right now for $150. It will be an intimate affair with 250 people. A ticket gets you into the summer party at August Capital afterwards as well. We are also opening up 150 of those summer party tickets for $40 each. → Read More
On Thursday night, 60,000 people will fill up Central Park to watch the Black Eyed Peas in concert. Tickets are sold out, but you can watch it here streamed live in glorious 360-degree vision at 7PM ET. The Black Eyed Peas first used the 360-degree cameras in their iPhone app that puts you inside a music video, but this will be the first time they will try it live. The concert will be filmed and streamed using 360-degree cameras from Immersive Media. This will be the first time a major music concert is streamed live in 360-degrees.
The cameras used are an advanced version of what Google uses to capture its Street View, except this shoots video instead of still photos. They use 11 cameras built into a sphere, shooting simultaneously, and stitching together all the different shots, encoding it, and streaming it with a 2-second latency. Viewers will be able to pan around and control the angle. → Read More
After 30 startups launching on stage at Disrupt NYC, it all culminated in the final battle between six finalists: Getaround, BillGuard, Sonar, Do@, ccLoop, and InvoiceASAP. What made this final battle so fascinating to watch was not only the quality of the startups, but the quality of the judges: Fred Wilson, Ron Conway, Marisa Mayer, Roelof Botha, and Josh Kopelman.
We put together the entire final battle in the embedded video player above. Each demo is a separate video, and you can skip around by hovering over the video and hitting the channel button once it starts to play. Individual videos for all of Disrupt can also be found here. And below are links to our original writeups for each company with videos showing their first demos that got them to the final round. → Read More
I am still recovering from Disrupt NYC. It was our biggest event ever, and we’ll be posting more videos and highlights throughout the next few days. But here are a couple of charts that give a snapshot of the activity around the event as measured by Tweets with the event hashtag #TCDisrupt (thanks for the charts, Simply Measured).
In the chart above you can see the distribution of Tweets across the three days. That spike on Day three was related to an iPad giveaway linked to people Tweeting out the hashtag, which was Tweeted out 18,177 times (and that doesn’t include tweets that used other hashtags such as #disrupt or simply mentioned Disrupt without a hashtag).
But I particularly like the chart below, which shows the distribution of Tweets with the #TCDisrupt hashtag which also mentioned the names of the six Battlefield finalists. → Read More
In case you missed it, hackers were busy building new ideas and products at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Hackathon in New York last night. Fueled by RedBull, coffee, and massive quantities of junk food, hackers burned the midnight oil last night, preparing to show off their designs to the judges, who included VC Jeff Clavier and Canv.as founder Christopher Poole, and Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz.
We had a chance to sit down with the event’s youngest hacker; fourteen-year-old Jake Essman. Essman, a New York native, teamed up with fellow engineers Jesse Leone, William Li, and Feliks Beygel to create buyby, a shopping search engine. BuyBy is fairly simple—you use the site to find where a product is located at a store. So you could search for a ‘white t-shirt’ and the search engine will not only show you a list of online stores that have that product, but it will also show you stores that sell the product nearby your location. → Read More
It’s been a whirlwind twenty-four hours: yesterday, hundreds of talented coders poured into New York City’s Pier 94 for a marathon session of coding that ran through the night. At 9:30 AM this morning, they pushed their last lines of code. And beginning at 10:30 AM, each of them took the stage for a rapid-fire series of quick pitches showcasing what they’d built. Now it’s time to announce the winners.
The top four teams will each get a chance to show off their app during the third day of TechCrunch Disrupt (there are also two honorable mentions). Congratulations to the winners, and to all of the extremely talented hackers who made it through the night and built some very cool apps.
The Winners
We’re midway through the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon (which, by the way, you should be watching live here), and the range of stuff that the hackers have managed to throw together in a mere 24 hours is astounding. Some are trying to find their big payday — others are going for the cool factor or a quick laugh. Some, however, spent their weekend trying to change the world for the better.
It’s the job hunter’s biggest conundrum: the more you need a job, the harder it is to get a job. Lose your job, and you’ll run low on cash. Run low on cash, and you can’t pay for your cell phone — but once you’ve ditched your cell phone, it’s a whole lot harder for potential employers to get in touch. Hackathon group Joinable is trying to solve this problem by providing non-profit organizations with manageable voicemail boxes which they can give out to their patrons/beneficiaries for free. → Read More
At the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon today, local hackers Bill Magnuson and Jon Hyman presented an e-commerce plugin for flash sales site Gilt.com that is worth a look. Called Gilt-ii, the bookmarklet allows Gilt members to auction their items in their shopping cart during the actual buying process.
So here’s the basic premise behind Gilt-ii. Everyday at noon ET, Gilt releases daily price cuts on luxury goods. There are limited quantities of these goods, and most of these items become unavailable within in minutes fo the sale opening. That’s why many shoppers on the site put things in their cart, where they have ten minutes to decide if they want to purchase the item, even if they aren’t necessarily sold on the idea of buying the item. → Read More
Around 500 hackers participated from late last night to early today morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in New York, building in teams and waking up or popping enough Redbull this am in order to show off their hacks to notables including VC Jeff Clavier and Canv.as, VP of Product Bradley Horowitz and Canv.as founder Christopher Poole.
This year’s NYC Hackathon was our largest showing ever, and what the hack teams came up with are about to be judged, American Idol style, on stage with each team given 60 seconds to present. In case you taking part in this is no biggie, one of last year’s participants, GroupMe ended up received $10.6 million in funding. → Read More
Jerry Lee Lewis would have been proud. Even as the clock ticked past midnight at Pier 94 in Hell’s Kitchen, there was a whole lotta hackin’ goin’ on. Beginning around noon on Saturday, hackers filed into the spacious room at the site of Disrupt NYC to begin networking and scheming in earnest. As the day wore on, groups solidified, team names were chosen, and at the height of activity, we estimate that more than 500 hackers were huddled around tables, bent over screens with headphones on — doing their thing.
By midnight, Chinese food had been consumed, much Red Bull downed, and most teams had moved past the brainstorming and napkin-doodling stage to full-fledged hacking and aggressive coding. Ideas were beginning to come to life. One hacker Tweeted around 1 am that the even “Twilio cake is looking pretty good right now”. By 2 am, all the beanbag chairs had been accounted for, some were napping, and the crowd had started to thin. → Read More
The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is taking place in NYC this weekend and is shaping up to be our biggest and best yet. We’ll be hosting hundreds of hackers all weekend long. Come hang out with them, or watch their presentations in person at Pier94 in NYC on Sunday, May 22nd starting at 10:30 am! We’re thrilled to have Bradley Horowitz (Google), Amanda Peyton (MessageParty), Jeff Clavier (SoftTech), Christopher Poole (Canvas) and more helping us judge the event.
Over twice the number of hackers as last year have signed up to spend the weekend prototyping new products so they can blow you away. Due to the overwhelming demand we have had to close the hacker signup form. However, if you’re a potential hacker who didn’t get a confirmation email from us and still want to hack with us this weekend just show up at Pier94 on Saturday, May 21st starting at 12:30 pm. There’s limited availability for walkup signups but we’ll do our absolute best to make sure you get in. Or you can just come to the Sunday Demos and watch the awesomeness. (Click through for details and logistics) → Read More
One of many things that make Y Combinator special: They hold regular “office hours” with startups where entrepreneurs can get advice on any topic, from business strategy to design issues.
What we talk about at office hours also depends on the startup and where we are in the cycle. Usually we talk about whatever is the most urgent question right now. Sometimes, especially early on, the most urgent question is to figure out what the most urgent question should be. That’s less trivial than it sounds; we spend a lot of time telling founders what not to worry about.
(About 10% of the time we talk not about immediate problems but about the big vision for the company. You don’t have to be bound by this, but it’s good to have one. Some startups arrive with a big vision already, but most don’t. It’s a useful exercise to spend some time thinking about what the path would be from what a startup is doing now to a giant company, even if that’s not the current goal of the founders. Helping founders come up with these big visions is one of our strengths, because we’ve explored so much of the space of startup ideas that we know what’s over each hill.) → Read More
Square, the startup that put the sexy back into payments, has a major product announcement coming up next Monday, May 23. That happens to be the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt in New York as well.
What’s the announcement? I don’t know, but founder Jack Dorsey says it’s a big one. So we’ve added the announcement to our agenda. During the lunch break on Monday the Square event will be streamed onto the main stage screen. And we’ll also add it to our free live stream of the entire event so that everyone can watch at home. → Read More
Ashton Kutcher will be on stage next week at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. The actor, entrepreneur and investor will talk with Charlie Rose on Tuesday morning, and joins what is clearly our most impressive list of speakers at any TechCrunch event to date.
His talk with Rose will be entirely focused on his new job starring in CBS’s Two and a half Men.
Ok, hopefully not really. → Read More
In about a week, Disrupt NYC will begin. We will launch over two dozen new startups in our Startup Battlefield and bring together the smartest people in tech to discuss how the Internet is disrupting industry after industry—from media (print, TV, music, gaming) and social commerce to payments and transportation.
We’ve steered away from unwieldy panels, and instead tried to pair up interesting speakers to foster deeper conversations. Fred Wilson, Dennis Crowley, Arianna Huffington, and Ron Conway will kick things off in a series of talks on Monday morning. Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan and Kleiner Perkins VC Aileen Lee will delve into the shifting world of social commerce. Charlie Rose will interview Paul Graham on Tuesday. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick (who recently launched News.me) will talk tablet publishing. We’ve already announced many of the speakers, but the full agenda is below. You can still buy tickets, or try to win one. → Read More
At Disrupt NYC, we’re all about startups. We’ve culled two dozen of the hottest startups from over 500 applicants to launch at the event (which starts May 23, get tickets here). We are also bringing startups well on their way to disrupting existing markets onstage to share their experiences.
Two sessions I am particularly excited about will bring the founders of Airbnb, Uber, and Quora to Disrupt NYC. Quora founder Charlie Cheever will be interviewed by Hunch founder Chris Dixon in a live session of his TCTV show Founder Stories. Quora, which was founded by Facebook expats Cheever and Adam D’Angelo, takes a unique social approach to Q&A and general knowledge discovery. Cheever will talk about their approach to designing their product, fostering a community that can provide the best answers on the Web, and how Quora plans to expand to new areas of knowledge and expertise. → Read More
Brands may be pouring money back into online display advertising, but that doesn’t mean that display advertising works or won’t be replaced by something else in the next few years. Will it be social, mobile, or something else? At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, we’ll get into this debate with three of the best operators in online advertising: Facebook’s new VP of Global Advertising Carolyn Everson, Medialets CEO Eric Litman, and Right Media founder Mike Walrath.
Media companies and brands still don’t understand the power of social advertising, and Everson is going to explain it to them. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
