Witness Wins The Disrupt NY 2015 Hackathon Grand Prize, Picorico And MoolahMe Are Runners Up
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It’s been a long night at the Manhattan Center. Yesterday, we welcomed hundreds of hackers for my favorite spring tradition — the Disrupt NY Hackathon. Some of them were participating in our event for the first time, while others were regular hackers. Their challenge was to come up with a neat, funny and smart hack in just 24 hours.
We could all feel the excitement in the air when the 106 teams took the stage to present a short one-minute demo to impress fellow hackers and our judges. But only one team could take home the grand prize and $5,000. So, without further ado, meet the Disrupt NY 2015 Hackathon winner.
Winner: Witness
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Witness is a panic button that takes advantage of everything your phone can do — and yet, it remains very easy to use. To activate Witness, you just need to launch the iPhone app and press the big red button. As soon as you activate it, it will call and text your emergency contacts.
In addition to alerting your friends and family, Witness will record your location, camera and microphone activity, and stream it over cellular and Wi-Fi to your emergency contacts in real time. In the meantime, your screen fades to black so that nobody can notice that you are streaming what’s happening.
The team didn’t use any third-party backend to handle the live-streaming code on the iPhone and server. In addition to being a very useful hack, Witness is also an impressive tech achievement. Read our separate post for all the information about Witness.
Runner-Up #1: Picorico
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Picorico is a hardware device for modern downhill bikes. Today’s bikes have a lot of adjustability, but their performance is hard to measure. That’s why the team behind Picorico built an open-source telemetry system.
The team used off-the-shelf sensors and built a string encoder using a retractable key badge with a capacitive encoder. It’s quite impressive to see your suspension compression rates in real time while you play with the bike.
Runner-Up #2: MoolahMe
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MoolahMe is a replacement for ATMs. The app allows you to broadcast cash requests to nearby users, and users around you can respond to your requests. After a cash hand-off, money is automatically settled on the cloud through a peer-to-peer payment service.
Hackathon Judges
Lisa Chow
Lisa is the co-host of StartUp, a documentary-style, serialized podcast focused on entrepreneurial life. The podcast is produced by Gimlet Media. Before joining Gimlet, Lisa worked as a senior editor at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s re-launched site at ESPN. She has also reported for NPR’s Planet Money, This American Life, Marketplace, and New York Public Radio. She has a BA in applied mathematics from Brown and an MBA from Columbia.
Haytham Elhawary
Haytham has a PhD from Imperial College London and a Mechanical Engineering degree from University of Navarra in Spain. He also reviews theater for the blog site Theatre is Easy and loves to do improvised comedy, although admittedly he’s not very good.
Jodie Fox
Jodie’s work on Shoes of Prey has been recognized many times over, including receiving the national Telstra Business Women’s Awards Winner (Australia), Hudson Private & Corporate Sector, 2014 Top 30 most influential women in Australian retail, 2014 Top 10 Australian female entrepreneurs and 2015’s top 8 entrepreneurs to watch.
Benjamin Joffe
Katie Notopoulos
Charlie O’Donnell
Charlie has a reputation for being early to identifying important companies. Nick Bilton identifies him as an influence on early Twitter investors in his book, Hatching Twitter. Dennis Crowley credits him as having helped kick off the first funding of Foursquare before other VCs had said yes. At First Round Capital, he sourced the firm’s investments in Singleplatform (sold to Constant Contact) and GroupMe (sold to Skype). Charlie discovered GroupMe at the hackathon where the service had been built. He also sourced investments in Backupify (which was an idea he had tweeted to the founder, a friend of his), chloe + isabel, Refinery29, Docracy, and Salescrunch.