Meet The Disrupt Europe: London Hackathon Judges

Comment

Image Credits:

The Disrupt Europe Hackathon kicks off this weekend at Old Billingsgate in London! Coders and designers will have precious few hours to hack a project together before presenting to our illustrious group of judges. And just who are these judges you may ask?

From developer geek to investor chic, these judges are ready for anything, and don’t think they’ll be holding back. They will assess hackathon participants on a scale of technical difficulty, usability, usefulness and creativity. In sum, aim for a “wow” factor and you’ll be in good shape.

The winning team gets a $5,000 prize from TechCrunch, but there are a multitude of sponsor prizes also up for grabs. As previously announced, only teams earning a score of 3 or above will receive two tickets to the conference.

Without further ado, this year’s Disrupt Europe Hackathon judges:

Camille Baldock 

Camille-smiling-headshot_square

 

Camille Baldock (@camille_) is a software engineer. She has spent the past years writing code and making APIs, web and mobile applications for a development agency, a startup and now works at the Government Digital Service. In her spare time, she coaches junior developers and is a 3D printing enthusiast.

Eric Brotto

brotto

Eric Brotto (@ericbrotto) is currently the Partner & Program Specialist for Startupbootcamp. Eric cut his teeth in the tech world as a iPhone App Creative Developer at the digital production studio Smile Machine where he built apps for brands such as Ford, Nike and Ubisoft. Today, Eric is the Co-Founder and Principal of Creative Bytes, a monthly networking and panel discussion which revolves around creative technology and digital marketing. He is also a Global Facilitator for Startup Weekend and Decoded.

Claudia De Antoni

photo (3)

Claudia De Antoni (@ClaudiaDeAnt) is an investor at Virgin Management, the family office of Sir Richard Branson, where she focuses on technology, media, telecom, education and health & wellness sectors.  Among other projects, she is currently supporting the development of the first Virgin-branded mobile application – expected to launch in 2015. Prior to Virgin, Claudia founded Popup Supper, an online marketplace for catering and entertainment services.

Tak Lo

taklo_1338158787_8

Tak Lo (@tak_lo) is a Director at Techstars. Previously, he spent over 5 years in the London and NYC startup communities, having founded and mentored several startups on both sides of the Atlantic. He was formerly a management consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, an investment banker at Nomura, and an US Army veteran. Tak dabbled at London Business School and the University of Chicago. He writes regularly at taklo.co

Melinda Seckington 

1144780

Melinda Seckington (@mseckington) is a developer at FutureLearn, a social learning platform offering free courses from a wide range of university partners and cultural institutions. She loves attending and hacking at Hackdays, BarCamps and other tech meet-ups, and since 2009 has been organising them at Geeks of London, including HACKED at the O2 last year. She also runs MissGeeky.com, a blog about all things geeky and girly.

 

More TechCrunch

The Series C funding, which brings its total raise to around $95 million, will go toward mass production of the startup’s inaugural products

AI chip startup DEEPX secures $80M Series C at a $529M valuation 

A dust-up between Evolve Bank & Trust, Mercury and Synapse has led TabaPay to abandon its acquisition plans of troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse.

Infighting among fintech players has caused TabaPay to ‘pull out’ from buying bankrupt Synapse

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

The Twitter for Android client was “a demo app that Google had created and gave to us,” says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.

Google built some of the first social apps for Android, including Twitter and others

WhatsApp is updating its mobile apps for a fresh and more streamlined look, while also introducing a new “darker dark mode,” the company announced on Thursday. The messaging app says…

WhatsApp’s latest update streamlines navigation and adds a ‘darker dark mode’

Plinky lets you solve the problem of saving and organizing links from anywhere with a focus on simplicity and customization.

Plinky is an app for you to collect and organize links easily

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: How to watch

For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives. But despite thousands of trials in the United States each year, only 3% to 5% of…

Triomics raises $15M Series A to automate cancer clinical trials matching

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tap, tap.…

Tesla drives Luminar lidar sales and Motional pauses robotaxi plans

The newly announced “Public Content Policy” will now join Reddit’s existing privacy policy and content policy to guide how Reddit’s data is being accessed and used by commercial entities and…

Reddit locks down its public data in new content policy, says use now requires a contract

Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention…

Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho will step back from the firm after its current fund is deployed

In a post on Werner Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open-source app he built to transcribe and summarize conference calls.

Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…

Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in’ but DST is

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect

Dating apps and other social friend-finders are being put on notice: Dating app giant Bumble is looking to make more acquisitions.

Bumble says it’s looking to M&A to drive growth

When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for…

Blackboard founder transforms Zoom add-on designed for teachers into business tool

Groww, an Indian investment app, has become one of the first startups from the country to shift its domicile back home.

Groww joins the first wave of Indian startups moving domiciles back home from US

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers’ names and physical addresses. In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people…

Dell discloses data breach of customers’ physical addresses

Featured Article

Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

The Israeli startup has raised $5.5M for its platform that uses “statistical AI” to generate synthetic data that it says is as good as the real thing.

18 hours ago
Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine maker, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also…

Rowing startup Hydrow acquires a majority stake in Speede Fitness as their CEO steps down

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…

Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…

TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI (unified payments interface) payments rail by one to two years, sources…

India likely to delay UPI market caps in win for PhonePe-Google Pay duopoly

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?