We’re a month away, and are very excited to reveal our workshops & judges for the upcoming NYC TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, taking place on May 19th & 20th.
This will be the second Hackathon TechCrunch has organized at Pier 94 in NYC. Last years event had over 300 developers and 100 teams present, and this years event promises to be even bigger and better.
But enough about the past, let’s chat about the future.
We’ve got a lot of really great sponsored API’s, prizes and contests including AT&T, Hatch, Mashery, City Grid, Spotify, The Echo Nest, Knodes, Mobli & more!
To make matters even better, we’ve released more tickets for the event. They’re going to go quickly, so get yours now at: http://tcdisruptny-hackathon2012.eventbrite.com/ If you’re a developer interested in participating, and are looking for people to work with, toss your hat in the collaboration ring at: http://bit.ly/nyc-disrupt-collab. If you’re a designer, we can help you find a match by having you fill out the form at http://bit.ly/nyc-disrupt-dt
We’ve got some great names presenting workshops & judging the competition, and here’s the scoop:
API Workshops
On Saturday, May 19th, we’ve got a big list of the industry’s best presenting 1/2 hour workshops detailing the inner-workings of their APIs.
2pm – foursquare
Presenter: Anoop Ranganath, lead iPhone developer @ foursquare
Anoop will be going over the ins & outs of the foursquare API.
Details regarding the API can be found at: http://developer.foursquare.com
2:30 – The Echo Nest
Presenter: Glenn McDonald, Senior Knowledge Engineer at The Echo Nest, responsible for the quality of the music data platform.
Doing anything with Music with Echo Nest
Search for and find tons of data about any artist or song in the world’s largest music database. Get the tempo of your favorite song and then beatmatch it automatically with a whole playlist. Mash up videos and music or make a game out of any song. Build your own Pandora using Spotify, Rdio or any number of our music partners. Fingerprint audio from your phone or find the most popular artist on twitter right now. The Echo Nest API is the best way to do anything with music and Glenn will run you through all the possibilities.
Details regarding The Echo Nest API can be found at http://developer.echonest.com/
3:00 – metaLayer
Presenter: Jon Gosier, Founder and Director of Product at metaLayer.
Contextual disambiguation using metaLayer’s Text and Image analysis REST APIs. metaLayer’s APIs allow users to process streams of text or images to extract contextual features where they don’t exist. For instance, extracting place names from tweets or articles using NLP to attempt to geolocate content makes it possible to then visualize where content is coming from or referencing on geospatial maps. With images, extracting text makes it possible to search words in photos or auto-categorize them based on the objects they contain.
Details regarding the metaLayer API can be found at: http://api.metalayer.com
3:30 – Twilio
Presenter: Jonathan Gottfried, Developer Evangelist at Twilio and a diehard hacker.
Twilio is the leading telephony platform for developers to extend and expand their applications with Voice and SMS communications. Our focus for this workshop will be to get an overview of the basic features and functionality of the Twilio platform; send, receive, and respond to SMS messages; place, receive, and respond to phone calls; and use Twilio Client to use your browser to place and receive phone calls.
Details regarding the Twilio API can be found at: http://www.twilio.com/docs
4:00 – bitly
Presenter: Matt LeMay, Platform manager at bitly, where he helps developers and ecosystem partners get the most out of bitly’s API.
I will be showing off the powers of the bitly API beyond simply shortening links. Our analytics API has grown much, much more robust in the past months, allowing developers to pull end-users’ entire link history, and retrieve powerful time-series analytics on both the link and the user level.
Details regarding the bitly API can be found at: http://dev.bitly.com
4:30 – Tumblr
Presenter: John Bunting, Developer Extraordinaire at Tumblr, working on the Tumblr API
The workshop will be an introduction to the Tumblr API, showing off a client or two. We’ll finish up with showing off some of the neater projects that people have come up with for inspiration!
Details regarding the Tumblr API can be found at: http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api/v2
5:00 – Knodes
Presenter: John Goodwin, CTO & Co-Founder, Knodes
Introducing the Knodes Context API. Knodes makes it simple and easy to augment your applications with powerful social integration and data analysis. We take your users’ social network credentials and provide a normalized, searchable index of their world. We integrate data from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn to create a unified “uber-graph” that maps the connections among people, places, content, schools, and companies in your users’ networks. Note this is a user utility, not ad-tech. Privacy and security are our top priority, and we don’t sell any data ever.
Details regarding the Knodes API can be found at: http://developer.knod.es/docs
5:30 – Spotify
Presenter: Andrew Mager, Hacker Advocate at Spotify
During this workshop, you will learn about Spotify Platform; including the Spotify Play Button, Spotify Apps API, and libspotify for iOS/Hardware. The workshop will focus on Spotify Apps API; which enables you to create an experience inside the Spotify Desktop client. Using JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3, you can control playback, interact with a user’s playlist, build beautiful interfaces that engage users, and make their music-listening experience the best it can be.
Details regarding the Spotify API can be found at: https://developer.spotify.com/
6:00pm – Mobli
Presenter: Moshe Hogeg, CEO of Mobli, a photo & video sharing community built to bring people together around common interests.
Mobli, the booming cross-platform photo & video sharing network is launching their API at TC Disrupt 2012! Hackthoners will be the first to have a crack at integrating Mobli into their products. Mobli is a photo & video sharing community built to bring people together around common interests. Photos and videos are captured with the app’s pro-level camera, beautified in Mobli’s all-purpose Darkroom, and then shared across multiple channels for maximum visibility. Each photo or video is placed in up to 3 themed Mobli Channels (e.g. fashion, sports, music, etc), and upon uploading, is pushed out to every “watcher” of those channels. Photos and videos are also simultaneously pushed out to a user’s Mobli “watchers”, his Facebook, and his Twitter. Mobli’s Live feed, which displays every photo or video uploaded from around the globe, in real-time; and Mobli’s Local feed, which displays photos and videos uploaded from within city limits – provide two more outlets for visual media to be discovered. Mobli’s unique multi-stream approach provides unmatched discovery potential and ensures visual media is only delivered to the most captive of audiences. Mobli is the premier place for making new friends, not just connecting with old ones.
Details regarding the Mobli API can be found at http://www.mobli.com/api
Judges
If you were impressed by our A-List of API workshops above, then our list of judges for the competition are likely to knock your nerdy socks off. Judging the 2012 NYC TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon will be our elite handpicked team, consisting of:
Nora Aboutsteit, Founder & CEO of Kollabora
Nora Abousteit is a “rare leader who can pull together technology, publishing, and fashion, and inspire people” (Fast Company). Nora recently founded Kollabora.com, an online craft supply market place with with multiple communities that offer fashion forward DIY projects in jewelry, knitting, and sewing. Before starting Kollabora, Nora reinvented an old sewing magazine into the DIY fashion community BurdaStyle.com, with over 700,000 members now an icon in the sewing community. She is part of the founding team of the DLD (Digital Life Design) conference. Nora is a published author and has been invited to share her experience at Picnic, FOO (Friends of O’Reilly Media), Parsons School of Design, Stream, the World Economic Forum Media Summit, and NY Forum. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, BusinessWeek, Women’s Wear Daily, and Fast Company. She was just elected to the board of the Craft and Hobby Association. Nora grew up in Germany, lives in Brooklyn, NY and holds a degree in Middle East Studies, Political Science, and Philosophy from the American University in Cairo.
You can find Nora on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/noraa and her personal site at http://www.noraabousteit.com
Dave Jagoda, Director of Technical Talent at Andreessen-Horowitz
Previously he has been a Director of Engineering, Engineering Manager, Support Engineer, Consulting Engineer, Sales Engineer, and a Software Developer. He has worked at HP, Opsware, Loudcloud, and Netscape. He studied Computer Science at Columbia. He is fascinated by computers, software, and the Internet.
You can find Dave on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/davejagoda and Andreessen-Horowitz online at: http://a16z.com/
Tarikh Korula, Co-founder and CEO, Mahaya
Tarikh is Co-founder and CEO of Mahaya. Mahaya organizes social media to help people see and understand their world.
In 2005, Tarikh Co-founded Uncommon Projects, a pioneering New York based hardware and software design studio. Uncommon Projects worked with Fortune 100 companies to research and develop myriad digital media products. Uncommon Projects was a winner at Yahoo’s first open Hack Day. Tarikh is a member of root at NYHacker and has helped organize or advise the TechCrunch hackathons.
Tarikh has lectured on hardware and software prototyping at the Web 2.0 conference, Maker Faire, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design program (IxD) and the Parsons Design Technology Program. Tarikh received his Masters from NYU/ITP.
You can find Tarikh on Twitter @ http://twitter.com/tarikh and his blog at http://unprojects.tumblr.com/
Dinesh Moorjani, Founder and CEO of Hatch Labs
Dinesh Moorjani is the Founder and CEO of Hatch Labs, a mobile technology innovation sandbox. Mr. Moorjani also serves as the Sr. Vice President of IAC Mobile, where he is responsible for building the mobile business across leading IAC Brands. Prior to starting IAC Mobile in 2007, Mr. Moorjani was the VP of Strategy & Corporate Development at Citysearch, now CityGrid Media. Previously, Mr. Moorjani built consumer technology products at Samsung Electronics and worked in Investment Management at Golden Sachs.
You can find Dinesh on Twitter here and his Hatch Labs website here.
David Tisch, Founder TechStars NYC and Managing Partner BoxGroup
David is the Managing Director of TechStars NYC. David is also the Managing Partner of Box Group, a New York City based seed-stage angel capital firm. David was named to NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s Advisory Council on Technology and serves on the Investor Board of Venture for America. Prior to joining TechStars, David served as Executive Vice President of Interactive Strategies at kgb, a global information services company. While at kgb, David founded and lead Knowmore.com, a social aggregation startup within kgb. David has a B.A. in American History from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from New York University School of Law. David was born and raised outside of NYC in Westchester. David likes wearing hoodies and over using ellipses…
You can find Dave on Twitter at http://twitter.com/davetisch and his personal site at http://www.davidtisch.com/
Kip Voytek, SVP, Director Digital Innovation | MDC Partners
As Director of Digital Innovation, Kip is responsible for leading the integration of creative technology and digital marketing with MDC agencies and their brands. Kip was SVP, ECD of Interaction Design at R/GA, providing creative leadership on the Nike, Nokia, SC Johnson, J&J, IBM and other accounts. Before marketing, Kip designed PC games based on licensed properties such as X-Men, Spiderman, Barbie, Clue, Scooby-Doo and Animaniacs.
You can find Kip on Twitter at http://twitter.com/kipbot and online at http://www.kipbot.com