The TechCrunch Disrupt London Hackathon kicks off on Saturday, Dec. 3 at the Copper Box Arena in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and we’re honored to welcome this year’s stellar judges.
Saalim Chowdhury
Saalim is a r
ecovering serial founder and startup enthusiast, and has sought refuge at 500 Startups. There he’s an Entrepreneur in Residence, where he finds startups to invest in primarily for the London Series A growth & investment program and works with them specifically on Enterprise Sales, Customer Centricity and Applied Machine Learning.
An old-fashioned polymath, he’s been a technical co-founder (CTO), a growth hacker (CMO) and led sales (CEO). Notable exits he’s been involved with include consulting talent on demand company Skillbridge (acquired by Andreessen-backed unicorn Toptal) and internet security firm ScanSafe (acquired by Cisco). For his sins he was once a News Corporation executive, and started his career at the Boston Consulting Group. He lives mostly in London and loves dogs and puns.
Kathy Dykeman
Kathy joined Facebook in 2010 and her mission has been to help clients reliably determine the impact of their advertising and strive for better industry measurement solutions for digital and mobile channels. Kathy has worked alongside top global FMCGs and Telco globally and across Europe in her current position. Before joining Facebook, London in May 2010, Kathy worked within the business development team at Harris Interactive UK. Stateside, she has served as a Vice President within a San Francisco based research consultancy, a government and academic research Director at Knowledge Networks and an Exit Poll consultant for the major news media in New York City.
Alex Peattie
Alex is the co-founder and CTO of Peg, a technology platform helping multinational brands and agencies to find and work with top YouTubers. Peg is used by over 750 organisations worldwide including Coca-Cola, L’Oreal and Google, and has the backing of 27 top angel investors from the worlds of advertising and tech.
Prior to founding Peg in 2014, Alex was a senior instructor at Makers Academy, helping hundreds of career changers train to become junior developers through MA’s intensive 12 week bootcamp. He also spent a number of years as a digital nomad, traveling and providing development consultancy to a number of tech giants and startups in Silicon Valley (including a year spent at GOAT from Y Combinator’s 2011 batch). His academic background is in Linguistics, and he takes a particular interest in the areas of machine learning and natural language processing.
Carmen Ruiz Vicente
Carmen Ruiz Vicente is a software engineer at Google DeepMind, where she works on technology for health services and patient healthcare. She has also worked on the Google beacon platform, including the open beacon format Eddystone, and Google’s cloud services that integrate Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology with first- and third-party apps. She focused on the development of Android services that improve location accuracy and enable location-based interactions. Prior to that, she was a member of Google’s Privacy Engineering team, which is responsible for delivering and promoting tools, processes, culture and infrastructure to build privacy-robust innovative products and services. As a privacy engineer, she specialised in research and development on the topic of location privacy in location-based internet services.
Carmen completed her Ph.D. at the Center for Data Intensive Systems in Aalborg University, Denmark. Her primary area of research was Privacy-preserving Data Management techniques for Location-based Services and Social Networks. Prior to joining Google, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain).
Keith Teare
Keith Teare is Executive Chair and head of the Investment Committee at the UK’s newest investment company Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV), with investments from the British Business Bank, L&G and Woodford Investment Management. He’s also the founder of Archimedes Labs, the Palo Alto incubator.
Previously he was a founder of TechCrunch with Michael Arrington, and before that at Easynet – one of the first Internet Service Providers in Europe, and the first to do a public offering. He also founded RealNames.
EasyNet and RealNames were both unicorns…. well before the term was coined.
API Workshop
Want to learn a bit more about the tools available at the hack? Take a deep dive into this API in a classroom-style setting.
Cisco – Saturday 2:00PM
In this workshop, you will learn about Cisco Spark’s platform and how to use the RESTful APIs. Create Spark rooms, send messages, add people, create a bot, or an integration to improve team productivity or solve a business challenge.
Twilio – Saturday 2:30PM
Twilio makes it easy to connect the people you care about in the languages and frameworks you already know. Come learn how to quickly build apps with Twilio SMS, Voice, and Video.
Tickets
We’re thrilled to announce that the next wave of tickets to the hackathon is available now, and you can get your free hackathon ticket here.
Hackathon Schedule
Saturday, December 3, 2016
12:30pm – Registration opens (come fed or bring a brown bag lunch, beverages served)
1:30pm – Hacking Kickoff and Opening Announcements
2:00pm – API Workshop: CIsco, Twilio
7:00pm – Dinner
Midnight – Pizza and beer
Sunday, December 4, 2016
7:00am – Breakfast served
9:30am – Hacking concludes and hacks submitted to wiki
10:00am – General public welcome to enter to attend hackathon presentations
11:00am – Hackathon presentations begin
2:00pm* – TechCrunch and Sponsor awards presented
*Final awards may be held earlier or later depending on duration of hack presentations.
Please note, times are subject to change