We’re less than a week away from this year’s Disrupt Hackathon, and are delighted to announce the judges and API workshops. I, along with Gemma Cameron, will be your MC and host for the weekend.
Judges
We at the TechCrunch Hackathon pride ourselves in finding the most talented and discriminating judges around. This year is no different. Our handpicked judges are seasoned veterans and have lived to tell their tales.
Natalie Campbell
Natalie Campbell, 32, is an entrepreneur, author and business coach. She is Founding Partner at A Very Good Company, a social innovation agency she co-founded in 2010. The company vision is to create a world where people can feel good, do good and live better. This is achieved through helping clients such as Virgin Media, Marks and Spencer and Channel 4 to do well by doing good.
Notable achievements include creating a global campaign to celebrate ‘Good,’ writing the government briefing paper that catalysed StartUp Loans, creating an internal CR brand and campaign for Channel 4 and training over 50,000 employees in health and financial awareness for Marks and Spencer.
Natalie is currently the Director of ‘Kensington Creates’, a business incubator and co-working space based at the Kensington Aldridge Academy that she launched for EdTech and creative startups. She is also a Trustee of UnLtd, The Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs and BIG Lottery UK Fund.
Asa Calow
Asa Calow is a creative technologist, civic hacker, community biotechnologist and lapsed mathematician. Back in 2009, he co-founded MadLab, a grassroots innovation space for science, technology and art based in Manchester City Centre which now hosts over 50 regular community meetups – from creative electronics and functional programming through to life drawing and DSLR film-making – as well as an ambitious rolling programme of events for hackers, technologists and makers from across the North West.
Most recently, he has helped kickstart the Manchester Space Programme and MadLab Arts+Tech, the UK’s first accelerator programme for artist-technologists. Last week he demonstrated Drake’s Hotline Bling on stage to an audience of 100 of America’s foremost scientists and entrepreneurs.
Prior to MadLab, Asa worked for a number of award-winning digital agencies and European startups – delivering projects for a range of public and private clients including UK Government, KPMG, AstraZeneca, investment bank 3i and Manchester Art Gallery amongst others.
Raph Crouan
Raphael is the Managing Director & Founder of the Startupbootcamp Internet of Things (IoT) Program in London. He’s a Founding Board Member & Chair for the SMEs in the AIOTI (Alliance for IoT Innovation) at the European Commission. He also founded the French IoT Think Tank – alongside key actors of the industry – to advise the government & support the French ecosystem on IoT trends & key challenges.
After spending a few years in Telco & the last 14 at Apple (lately as Head for the Strategy & Business Development for iPhone & iPad in Business in EMEIA), he decided 3 years ago to turn the page on his Corporate life & come back to his love of entrepreneurship & innovation-driven companies.
He is also actively engaged within the investment / VC community & angel investor / advisor himself to various Startups.
Marily Nika
Marily is working with Data for Google’s Speech (Voice recognition) team. She has a PhD in Predictive Analytics from the Dpt. of Computing Science at Imperial College London and has had a strong passion for technology and video games since the age of 8.
Marily has given 3 TEDx talks up to date, she has written various articles (some of which for the Telegraph and Tech City News). Marily won the WISE Influence Award 2015 and a medal from Imperial College London for her work as a women in tech ambassador. She is running the London Geekettes Chapter and is always trying to find new ways of empowering women in tech.
Marily organized the UK’s first female-only hackathon at Facebook London in 2013 and has been a judge in 5 hackathons up to date. Marily has taken part in multiple hackathons and won prizes in 3 of them – The most memorable one being the her team winning the 2nd prize at HackEd 2.0, a hackathon hosted by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Facebook London in 2013. A cool fact about her is that she voice acted for the Voodoolady for her favorite video game, the Monkey Island.
Taylor Wescoatt
Taylor Wescoatt focuses on Product and User Experience in the digital consumer space. After a few late 90’s startups (CitySearch, idealab) and a Design degree, he studied Business at INSEAD in France.
He has developed Products for large brands (AOL, Ebay) and smaller ones (Seatwave, TimeOut) he is now focused on helping startups with Seedcamp’s First Round Fund. As an Expert-in-Residence, he teaches product principles and techniques to entrepreneurs and generally tries to help them focus on what matters to grow their business.
API Workshop
In addition to all the hacking, the Disrupt Hackathon is also an amazing opportunity to learn about brand new technologies and how they can make your job easier. This year we’ve got a great workshop for you to up your game and better your chances of walking out of the Hackathon with prize in hand.
Twilio, 2pm, Marcos Placona, Developer Evangelist
In this workshop the Twilio team will show our hackers how to quickly get started with the Twilio API. This workshop will show you how to build an application that can make and receive telephone calls and send and receive text messages. It will then move on into one of our latest product launches and give you an overview about how to get started with it.
Clover, 2:30pm, Duane Moore, VP Engineering
Join Duane Moore, VP Engineering at Clover – the fastest growing point of sale platform in the US, now live in the UK and Ireland and Christian Miccio, VP Product at First Data. Learn how to use Clover’s extensive APIs and SDKs to build everything from loyalty programs, new payment methods, robotic delivery systems, real time deals, online delivery systems and more!
Spectator Tickets
And finally, we’re releasing tickets for the public to come and watch the Hackathon presentations on Sunday. The presentations start at 11:00 and go until 14:00, at the Copper Box Arena in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. We look forward to seeing you there!
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