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Gillmor Gang: Kaleidoscope Eyes
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — picture themselves in a boat on a river, as the first wave of Google Glass hits the network, aka Scoble’s forehead. @scobleizer promises to never take off this thing, and even the hyperbole doesn’t refute the central notion. As was evidenced over the last few days in Boston, the whole world is not only watching but feeding the realtime stream. Social meets mainstream.
As Google Glass goes into alpha, Apple’s stock collapse seems to indicate a changing of the guard. But our bet (I don’t think I’m alone in this) reflects not only the volatility of who’s on first but the value of a real horse race in floating all boats. More likely we’ll see a back and forth motion as Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook surge ahead and then are overtaken. The winners — that would be us.
@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
It’s only a matter of time before Twitter releases its own Google Glass app, as Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr dropped the hint that the company was looking into building one during this month’s Glass Collective announcement. A tweet from an official Twitter Glass app has been spotted, interestingly enough by the gentleman that brought you the first unofficial Twitter app, GlassTweet. The user that it came from had no information in their bio when I looked at the profile, but it has since been deleted, along with the tweet below: You’ll notice the “Twitter for Glass” label, which denotes which app the tweet came from. That, coupled with the fact that the account has since been deleted, shows that somebody might have let the cat, or Glass, out of the bag a little too early. I reached out to Twitter, but the company provided us with no statement or comment on its intentions for Glass. It will be interesting to see what an actual Twitter Glass experience will be, as I can’t imagine that anyone would want to see every single tweet from their stream pass before their face. I could see the utility of getting direct messages, perhaps replies and mentions and most certainly sharing pics and videos. Expect to see a lot of Glass apps popping up from companies like Twitter and Facebook in the next few months, as they’re clearly trying to figure out how best to tap into a device that could increase usage and let users share a brand new perspective with media. The example that I always use with people is that Glass will be really fun at a concert or other live event, where I don’t have to take a phone out of my pocket and remove myself from the situation. It will be naturally to snap a shot without disrupting my field of vision and attention. [Photo credit: Flickr]
MallWeGo is launching at the Disrupt NY 2013 Startup Alley today with a social, gaming shopping experience for web and mobile. The company has built a virtual world for socialising with friends in avatar form, which looks like a simplified Second Life or The Sims, but the kicker is it's built for ecommerce, with a virtual mall where people can buy real-world products.
It looks like lightening has struck on the towers of Dailymotion. Yahoo’s bid to take a $200 million majority stake in the video site — known as the ‘YouTube of France’ — has been killed by the French government, which decided that it didn’t want a U.S. company to take a controlling stake in a French operation, TechCrunch has confirmed with a source close to the situation. Rumors of problems with the deal have been swirling around for weeks now. At first it looked like the issues were because of internal disagreements at Yahoo, according to Business Insider. But a report in the French newspaper Le Monde last week noted that Orange had suspended the deal because of opposition from the French state, which owns 27% of the telecom company. We have confirmed with someone close to the deal that the latter is indeed the case. Our source said that Arnaud Montebourg, the French Minister of Industrial Renewal, effectively told Orange that it could not go through with the deal. “Dailymotion is considered a marquee company in France’s technology industry,” the source said. “Hence, Montebourg didn’t want to let it go to the Americans. He wanted anchorage to stay in France. It’s a shame because all of the growth at Dailymotion is international. It would have been in the best interests of the company. It’s stunning, really.” Stéphane Richard who wants to stay at the head of Orange for another term didn’t want to go through with the deal. In the meantime, Dailymotion won’t be able to keep up with the competition — and especially YouTube — if Orange is not ready to invest more capital in Dailymotion. The end to the Yahoo deal will have a couple of ramifications. For one, Dailymotion will likely now have to raise money from somewhere — France Telecom or the French government, or perhaps from a national business — in order to invest in its platform. Les Echos estimates that the sum will need to be in the region of €50 million ($65 million). The alternative to that is to seek out another buyer, probably in France, who would be interested in buying most of France Telecom’s stake, since the carrier had already made it clear that it intended to divest itself of most of that stake when it took it on earlier this year. It’s not clear which company would be a
The first day of TechCrunch Disrupt NY is a wrap. The morning started with a fireside chat with Chris Dixon and Eric Eldon where the Andreessen Horowitz partner 
The first day of Disrupt NY 2013 is nearing its end, but we can't end things without giving our Audience Choice winner a chance to present in front of our judges. Today, the Israel-based folks behind the video messaging app Glide (not to be confused with Battlefield contestant
College recruiting is becoming increasingly competitive. Companies have begun to realize that top graduates not only bring a lot of talent and energy to the table, but they also tend to cost less than more experienced prospects. But in order to successfully woo those fortunate enough to have their pick, businesses need to begin the recruiting process earlier. If they're going to stand a chance, they have to build long-term, non-spammy relationships with students and educate them on the opportunities and culture unique to their business.
Kloudless launched at Disrupt NY 2013 today with its service for moving data from email to different cloud platforms through connectors which act like pipes that flow between the different services. The service offers a plugin that the user installs in Outlook or as an extension through their web browser to use in Gmail or other apps, said CEO Eliot Sun. Kloudless does not store any data, nor files, the service sits in the middle, acting basically as just a pipeline. When looking at Kloudless, think of services such as ifttt but with less automation and more ability to customize how data flows out of email and into other services. The idea is to give people more flexibility when moving data. It may be that you want some ways to customize the data when pulling into Salesforce.com or some other app. It pulls data on-demand from one cloud service to another. For example, Sun said it has the capability to pull in data points from an analytics tool to a discussion in a service such a Yammer. Venture Capitalist Tim Draper and Yammer Co-Founder David Sacks liked the idea so much that they put a seed investment into the company. So far the company has raised $889,000. They believe that Kloudless can be a wedge in the market, offering the automation and the flexibility that companies need. Plus, it provides a level of data governance that can be developed with more customized solutions. There may be integrations that a company standardizes for reasons of compliance but also gives freedom in other ways that an automated system can’t offer. Kloudless is, in technical parlance, a “message bus” for the cloud. The message bus is a permanent layer, an intricate event-based system — a middleware essentially. Every event, every request, goes through the message bus. The data gets normalized and sent to the right place, in the right context. Companies such as Tibco have made a fortune selling message bus technology. Other companies like Tibco, Mulesoft and SnapLogic provide top down systems. Kloudless provides a bottom-up approach. It’s both a consumer type app and for managers, team leaders, and IT to provide dashboards for better visibility into data ownership/workflow and the ability to set cross-application policies. Kloudless uses a consumer enterprise style pricing. It’s free with limited features. Pricing starts at $3 a month. It uses its foundation as an email platform to network. The idea is to build enough
Major League Baseball has always been very strict about its content appearing on YouTube and other video streaming sites. Peruse YouTube for highlights from your favorite players and teams, and you'll find it nearly impossible to find quality footage. As soon as a clip from a game goes up on YouTube, it's taken down. Up until now, it's just a collection of slideshows and footage uploaded from fans' shaky hand-held cameras at the ballpark. Finally, Major League Baseball is stepping up its effort to tear down those walls.
Easy app creation, outside of the land of Ruby and Python, has become a huge phenomenon in the last year. And the latest company to join the fold,AppArchitect, is launching straight from our Disrupt NY stage. AppArchitect lets you build custom iPhone and iPad apps using a simple drag-and-drop interface. That’s right — you need zero coding experience to build your own iPhone app. It’s a brand new world. Once you log in to the AppArchitect system, you’ll be asked whether you want to make an iPad or iPhone app. From there, you head straight into a dashboard complete with a Screens tab, Library tab with default background and picture options, and a Properties tab where you can handle styling. You can drag and drop backgrounds, images, add text, maps, or links. From there, you can test and review your app before submitting it to the App Store for approval. According to co-founder Ilya Zatulovskiy, AppArchitect is unique within the competitive landscape because there are no templates in the entire system. Of course, the downside here is that n00bs looking to explore app creation will need their own unique idea in mind before trying to build. Still, the template-free model gives aspiring entrepreneurs and creative explorers as much freedom as a true, coding app developer. In fact, one of the few apps you probably couldn’t build within the platform would be a game. “The platform is fully extendable,” said Zatulovskiy. “Since each plugin is written in Objective C, any feature requirements can be implemented via our SDK.” The idea for AppArchitect started at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in 2011, where the first lines of code were written. Since then, the company went through the DreamIt Ventures accelerator and so far raised a total of $325,000 from Actinic Ventures, BHV, DreamIt Ventures and angel investors, with plans to raise another round soon. The app creation industry has been blowing up lately. Services like Appy Couple and Yapp have been focused on niche use cases, such as weddings or events. On the other side of the spectrum, Kleverbeast is using similar drag and drop tools to build all kinds of personal apps in a snap. However, AppArchitect is one of the first services to offer web-based tools without any of the limitations of a template-based system. The company has been in a private beta for the past 4 months with over 400
Yahoo is hoping to bring in more advertiser dollars with two new units that it's announcing today as part of the 
iOS 7 is probably right around the corner, at least as a preview coming at Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference in June, and it looks like it might be the most exciting change to Apple's mobile OS we've seen in a long time, at least on the surface. iOS 7 will get a flat visual look, which is all the rage these days, at the hands of Apple's chief design guru Jony Ive, according to a new report by 9to5Mac. The blog's sources say that it's "very, very flat," losing any evidence of computer-generated shine, glare or the skeuomorphism reportedly favored by deposed iOS chief Scott Forstall.
E-commerce is booming, but shopping for clothing online can still be a challenge. Unlike many consumer products, clothing is personal and often needs to be tried on for fit. Plus, there are numerous options available via the web, so sometimes it’s tough to even know where to begin with an online shopping expedition. Two companies from TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley are addressing these problems by offering personal stylists and recommendations online. One, Stylit, is targeting women and another, Black Tag, is focused on men. Stylists-as-a-service? Yep, it’s that kind of thing. Tel Aviv-based Stylit’s co-founder and chief stylist Maya Kramer has a decade’s worth of experience in the fashion industry: She’s worked as a stylist herself, as well as a personal shopper, photo shoot producer, boutique owner, fashion writer, styling instructor, model and even TV personality. Her clients have included Vogue, Sak's Fifth Avenue, Microsoft, Glamour, Target, Victoria's Secret and various celebrities, designers and artists. Others on the founding team include CEO Yaniv Nissim, CTO Michael Gutkin, and lead engineer Shilo Ayalon. “We feel that personal styling was not accessible to everyone,” explains Kramer. “Stylit solves this.” After signing up on the website, users are prompted to fill out a questionnaire, detailing their budget, body type, and personal tastes. Stylit’s personal shoppers will then curate a selection of outfits based on these answers. The outfits, sent out on a weekly basis, don’t just include the clothing, but also accessories like shoes, bags, hats, jewelry, etc. Users can choose to buy the outfit and/or the individual items, or just pass altogether. But to help the stylists better learn their own personal tastes, users are also asked to rank the outfits they’re sent, allowing the recommendations to improve over time. Unlike with many stylists in the offline world – and even some found online – there’s no charge to use Stylit’s personal shopping service. Instead, the company is monetized through affiliate sales for now, though Kramer explains that longer-term, the company could work with brands directly to help them connect with those who best fit their target demographic. In addition, the company wants to eventually build each of their users their own personalized stores that provide items that fit their body type and style preference, says Kramer, who calls this bigger vision a “Pandora for online shopping.” The stylists work for the site on a freelance basis. This differentiates the service from
Bidzy, a new platform for connecting local services businesses with customers who need the service they offer in the next few hours, is launching at Disrupt NY 2013 today. Like the best ideas, Bidzy's premise is simple: allow the customer to specify exactly what they want and the amount they are willing to pay and then let the individual businesses decide if they're happy to take the job on.
Disrupt NY 2013's Startup Battlefield competition is now well underway, and now New York native Keen Home is taking the stage to present its first-round pitch. Keen Home is a home automation startup, which aims to follow in Nest's footsteps by building remote vents for your central air conditioning and heating systems that can be controlled from your smart phone to optimally direct air where you actually need it, and away from places you don't.
Floored scans office spaces, apartments and houses using 3D camera technology and proprietary software to build customizable 3D models for real estate purposes. At Disrupt NY 2013, the company launched the platform to create an immersive, interactive and user-friendly experience. Instead of static photos and floor plans, you can move around in real-time, add furniture and easily realize if the space is a good fit. “The marketing in the commercial real estate industry is absolutely abysmal,” co-founder and CEO Dave Eisenberg said in a phone interview before Disrupt. “The two-dimensional floor plan has not evolved in decades.” At first, Eisenberg was interested in 3D capturing and wanted to explore potential real-world applications. That’s when he discovered Matterport, a 3D device to capture interior spaces, and partnered with it to take advantage of Matterport’s existing hardware solutions. “Matterport is a pretty incredible technology company. They incorporated the Kinect into a device they built,” Eisenberg said. “It's the first point-and-shoot solution to grab a 3D capture of your environment.” Matterport now works with Primesense, which manufactures the sensor inside the Kinect. But Floored had to customize the device to their needs and develop a new software layer on top of Matterport’s existing capabilities. The two companies are tackling different pieces of the puzzle and have different clients in mind. Floored cleans up the data in-house and renders the result in real time for the web and its iPad app. The entire process currently takes 48 to 96 hours. At Disrupt, Floored unveiled its next update, due later this year, with new features, such as the ability to change the lighting conditions in real time. Users will also be able to add furniture using a really simple 3D editing tool. “This is the number one most requested feature set,” Eisenberg said onstage. In addition to the technology achievement, Floored allows for nearly limitless customization possibilities. You can make changes to a space and see how it would look like. For example, Floored turned an empty retail space into a coffee shop. In addition to seeing a place in its current condition, you can see it in a new condition. Floored showed the Disrupt crowd an impressive demo of the top floor of One World Trade Center. You can walk around and enjoy the view just like you will be able to do later this year. The New York-based startup has raised $1 million
Paidpiper launched at Disrupt NY today, aiming to make your physical wallet, and presence, less necessary -- in a good way. Paidpiper aims to solve that problem with its consumer-facing app, Ok'd. Using Ok'd, you can walk into a store, snap a picture of a product, and send it to a friend, parent, employer, etc. and ask them to pay for it.
Mobile device management company Good Technology has raised $50 million, according to a Securities and Exchange (SEC) filing. A company spokesperson confirmed the fundraising but had no comment about the purpose of the raise. The SEC document says the company is seeking a total of $60 million. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Good Technology is backed by Oak Investment Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Meritech Capital Partners, DFJ ePlanet Ventures, DFJ Growth Fund, Rustic Canyon Ventures, Allegis Capital, GKM and Blueprint Ventures. In its E round, investors included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Advanced Equities, Crosslink Capital and Broadview Ventures. Good Technology plays in the fast-consolidating MDM market. It provides enterprise mobility technologies across multiple platforms and security and management software. Its product offerings include Good for Enterprise, Good for Government, Good for OEM Device Manufacturers/Carriers and Good Dynamics. Good puts an emphasis on providing a platform that allows enterprise developers and ISVs to create secure mobile applications. It has been reported that Good is pursuing an IPO. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company has hired four investment banks to explore the possibility of a public offering. The IPO is believed to be taking place later this year. Morgan Stanley, Barclays PLC, Bank of America Corp., and Citigroup Inc. were hired to help with a deal that the WSJ says is likely to be valued at over $1 billion. The bring your own device (BYOD) movement has in many ways changed the dynamics for the way people work. Mobile use is accelerating faster than any expected, leading to some interesting issues for IT managers who have become accustomed to managing desktop personal computers and laptops. The shift has forced the CIO to adopt the tools provided by MDM vendors. Enterprise vendors recognize this budding demand and have been making acquisitions to build out mobile work suites. For example, in January, Citrix acquired Zenprise , an MDM vendor.
An online retailer platform called simply “42” is debuting today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY with new ideas about how to bring the intelligence of online e-commerce tools to brick-and-mortar merchants. The B2B platform provides businesses and brands a way to better connect and personalize their interactions with customers, as well as to gain broader insight into consumer buying patterns, customer loyalty, and more. The company was founded just this February by a team which includes Cathy Han, formerly of Procter & Gamble, and Nick Porter, previously of mobile customer engagement solutions provider Benbria. There are two part-time co-founders involved as well: Lucas Lemanowicz of Palantir and Sarah Hum of Google. Han explains that the inspiration for building 42 – which, yes, is a nod to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - arose from her work at P&G, whose clients include several large retailers. “My job was to look at the data, and look at where the gaps in their businesses were. It was a huge realization that, as it turns out, a lot of these brick-and-mortar businesses don’t have access to a suite of online tools,” she explains. “They could use technology a lot better to help engage their customers and drive their sales.” She felt there was not only an opportunity in developing a suite of online tools for this underserved market, but also because there were few who really understood the industry from both the technology and the retailers’ side. 42 today is an online B2B platform which uses data from retailers’ point-of-sale systems. That data is manually exported and uploaded into 42′s systems, but the eventual goal is to automate that process. Once online, the business can view a snapshot of key trends among customers and sales in a visual and intuitive dashboard interface. The main screen shows things like total sales, margins, average sales per customer, growth drivers, popular items and best sellers, among other things. Another part of the 42 interface offers more granular data about the store’s top customers, including demographic and contact information, past purchases, and more. On the consumer side, the system relies on collecting a shopper’s email information at checkout – which could be a challenge given that, historically, this information has only been used to add consumers to mass mailing lists which offered little value. So it will be up to the retailers themselves to explain to customers the benefits
With a plan of making product ratings social, 
Children are known for how much they love to play make believe, and StoryKid, an app introduced today during the Disrupt Hackathon in New York, takes this and gives it a new twist by offering a series of pictures as visual cues for a child to tell a story based around them. StoryKid is aimed at children aged 2 to 5 who are already talking but may either be too young or just starting to write. Created by two comparative literature PhDs from Columbia University, the idea is that this will, in turn, help bring children into the world of story telling and literature. And as co-founder Tianjiao Yu tells me, it can also be used by parents when they've run out of inspiration for their own made-up bedtime stories.
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The past 24 hours have just flown by for the hundreds of hackers here at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, but the sun is finally up and it’s time to pass judgment on their caffeine-fueled projects. As it turns out, there’s a ton of them here — with 164 registered projects this is our biggest Hackathon yet, and each presenter only had 60 seconds to wow our judges (not to mention the rest of the audience). As you might guess there was no shortage of amazing projects that came together in a single day, but our judges could only choose one team to take home our $5,000 grand prize. Anyway, that’s enough out of me — meet our newest Hackathon winner! Winner: Rambler Rambler, created by William Hockey, Zach Perret and Michael Kelly, is a web app that lets users view their credit and debit card transactions on a map. During the dev process, the team tapped the Foursquare API for locations and the Plaid API to access user spending data. Runner-up #1: Learn To Drive Learn To Drive, created by Jared Zoneraich, Jemma Issroff, Kenny Song, and Nicholas Joseph, is an app for the GM vehicle platform that acts as a virtual driving instructor by speaking driving instructions aloud and display driving statistics like miles driven, hours driven, and hours driven at night. Runner-up #2: Radical Radical, created by Sam Saccone, Carl Sednaoui, and Jeff Escalante, allows users to create attractive calendars and embed on webpages with a single line of code. These three teams will also demo their projects on the main Disrupt stage on Wednesday afternoon, but that’s not to say everyone else is going home empty-handed. Hackathon sponsors Appery.io, AT&T, CrunchBase, General Motors, Microsoft Bizspark, Microsoft Skydrive, NewAer, Pearson, Samsung, Twilio, Visa, Wrigley and Yammer have also graciously doled out prizes of their own for the most innovative and interesting uses of their APIs and services. And just who decided the fate of these sleep-deprived hackers? Our panel of judges includes Mahaya CEO Tarikh Korula, Path101 co-founder Charlie O'Donnell, founder/CEO of The Muse Kathryn Minshew, bit.ly chief scientist Hilary Mason, FuturePerfect Ventures founding partner Jalak Jobanputra, and TechStars NYC Managing Director David Tisch.
Carson Britt and Matthew Drake convinced everyone with their onstage demo of Laser Mountain at the Disrupt NY Hackathon. They attached Android phones to the Nerf guns (that TechCrunch gave away yesterday) to recreate a laser tag game with a real-time score server. After receiving the Nerf guns, they started working right away on Laser Mountain. “We already had the domain name lasermoutain.com, so we didn’t have a choice,” Britt said. When asked why they bought this domain, Drake answered, “I pick up domains all the time.” The Android phones track movements using the built-in gyroscopes and then transmit the information to a Node.js server. To register when someone is firing, they use the phone’s microphones and the Nerf gun’s loud firing noise. Last night, the team of two didn’t sleep at all to finish their hack on time for the onstage demo. It wasn’t their first hackathon but it was the first time at the Disrupt Hackathon. But it’s not the end for Laser Mountain. “We are going to Kickstarter it,” Drake said. With fewer than 24 hours of development, the team is certainly talented enough to succeed. You should watch the two developers play laser tag onstage:
EverSlide is a basic, but potentially very useful, hack built over the weekend at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon. As you might guess by the name, the service turns your Evernote notes into slideshow presentations. And it’s crazy simple to use, too. The first line of text in your Evernote note becomes the slide’s title, the second line becomes the slide’s content, and to create a second slide, you just insert a horizontal line from Evernote’s editing menu at the top. Then, boom, instant slideshow! The hack was created by computer science student Michelle Fernandez and Andrew Leung, who’s currently in between work. The team met at the hackathon, and said they got the idea for the project by reading the Evernote forums where employees had posted ideas for hacks. (And word has it, the Evernote staff here, too, got pretty excited for this idea as well – they told EverSlide’s founders that they talked about the hack amongst themselves for some fifteen minutes after hearing about the team’s plans.) The service is very minimal right now, given it was built over the weekend in between those midnight Nerf Gun wars and all, but the plan is to add more customization options in the future, including the ability to edit the fonts or colors of the text, perhaps, the ability to add photos, and more.
Startups still have a hard time finding the right applicants for their jobs. During our Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon, Codecademy engineer Bob Ren wrote a little web app that takes the Common Application for college admission as its inspiration. Just like high school students can use the Common Application to apply to multiple colleges simultaneously, Startup Common Application will take your application and then submit it to multiple startups. Large companies typically have a huge pipeline with job prospects, but startups “naturally suffer from not having the big pipelines that big companies have,” Ren told me – and for a small startup, it’s even harder to find the right applicants. Currently, startups either rely on email, Job Score or Resumator, but the system is still very inefficient, especially for the applicants. You often spend hours getting your applications ready and submitted, but a system like Startup Common Application could just automate all of this for you (and you don’t even have to pretend that you really personalized the system). Common Startup Application runs on top of Heroku and Ren is working on a number of scripts that will take his users’ data and then auto-submit it to more startups. In the spirit of the Hackathon, Ren coded until 6 a.m. and then slept an hour before getting ready for his demo this afternoon. Obviously, this is still a hack, so Ren will surely have to work on the design a bit more, but he’s definitely tackling an interesting problem. Given that he can automate much of it, what he really needs right now, of course, is support for as many startups as possible, but there are some pretty obvious ways he could monetize this service if he decides to continue working on it.
Dosi.io is a new Chrome extension that builds a better dossier at the top of LinkedIn profiles where it helps you determine who’s worth your time. Once installed, LinkedIn stalking gets a lot more interesting, as Dosi.io displays more information about the person in question by pulling in additional data from CrunchBase, GitHub and AngelList. It also displays a score indicating that person’s importance to you in terms of how well they match your networking goals. The extension, built here at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 hackathon, is currently designed for the developer crowd, but the creators intend to bring it to other communities in the future. You can think of Dosi.io as something like a Rapportive for LinkedIn, explains co-creator Niles Brooks, who’s also the co-founder of sustainable restaurant guide Clean Plates. He says he came up with the idea for the extension the midnight before the hackathon’s start. Kenneth Chen, a software developer in the finance industry, had been thinking about things along the same lines, he tells us, and decided to team up on the project along with third member, Vijith Assar. In a nutshell, the extension’s secret sauce is a combination of the number of followers a person has and the general impact they might have. From AngelList, it knows whether or not you have an account – a signal in and of itself – as well as the number of followers you have there. That information also helps Dosi.io know what companies to query up on CrunchBase, where it learns about the investments a company has, the sale price of a company, and the total amount of funding a person has raised over their lifetime. And on GitHub, Dos.io learns the commits you’ve made, the number of public repos you’re involved in, and again, the number of followers the person has. All of this data is boiled down into a simple visualization that appears directly above LinkedIn profiles, which also shows you a person’s overall Dosi.io score. Ranging from 1 to 10, the score is meant to convey how much of your time that person warrants. Brooks says he imagines this score becoming even more useful one day as a Google Glass application using facial recognition, where it could help users better network while at conferences and other events. (Nope, not creepy at all!) The extension today is client-side JavaScript, and though it’s live, they’re running
When you’re a hacker waiting to take the Disrupt Hackathon stage, you’re probably just making sure that your project actually works. One gentleman decided to scrap his project completely and use his 60 seconds to discuss his political views, attacking large corporations for using your data to make money. The crowd was a bit surprised as he read a prepared statement from his iPad, but listened to what he had to say nonetheless. “Do we really need a new way to share our shit?” he began his talk with. And it got people’s attention: He urged the attendees to stand up against sharing all of their data, opting to sell their content for a price they set. After the Hackathon resumed its regular tech show-and-tell programming, I met Todd Bonnewell backstage to discuss what had just transpired and find out about the actual hack he scrapped to share his message. There you have it. Even a hackathon can get hacked.
One hack from our Disrupt NY Hackathon, called Kar Nanny, seeks to let users see where their kids are driving and get notifications if they're being unsafe. Or you can see where your spouse is. Or, if you own a car rental fleet, this will give you the opportunity to keep tabs on how renters are using your cars.
My calendar is mostly filled with Facebook birthdays, these days, and at best those notifications will prompt me to post on someone's wall once a year. Gftr, a project from TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013's Hackathon, wants to use those birthdays to power more meaningful gift-giving, thanks to crowdsourcing and the one day every year when people have the most goodwill directed towards them.
Financial advisory services often aren't targeted at the people at the lower end of the economic spectrum -- and arguably, those are the folks who really need money advice the most. That's where 
Jared Zoneraich and Nick Joseph are two high school students who've spent the night here at the Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon coding an in-car app for learner drivers using GM's API. The pair got a great reception on stage during their presentation for Learn to Drive -- not least for the in-car dashboard app's killer feature: a voice warning that booms out when a learner is going too fast.
What a two weeks it’s been. Something happened that has been simmering for a while. The API market exploded. Intel bought Mashery for more than $180 million and CA acquired Layer 7. 3Scale received a new $4.5 million round of funding from Javelin Ventures. Mulesoft acquired Programmable Web. And then Facebook jumped in and bought Parse. The acquisitions and funding point to a maturing market that is reflected in the ubiquity of APIs across the application landscape. It’s not a new market by any means. The space is filled with companies that have leveraged the API build out that has happened over the past several years. Instead this is an inflection point. There are more than 30,000 APIs, according to Programmable Web, the leading API directory and blog. Javelin Ventures Managing Director Noah Doyle said to me in an interview that analysts see the API market growing five to ten times over the next five years. With that scaling in number of APIs comes a virtuous circle for the developers that build compelling apps and APIs. The APIs extend the apps reach as they become part of distributed data network. As more people use the APIs so the app developer generates more data. As the data increases in scope, often the service will become an API. Facebook needs new streams of data to keep rolling out new digital products. Back end as a service providers like Parse provide SDKs and APIs that give developers access to infrastructure for storing basic data types, locations and photos. How Facebook uses this data is a question mark. But regardless, Pare serves as a constant replenishing source, nourished by the apps on the Parse platform that use APIs. Facebook now will decide how to package and segment that data to push more relevant advertising to its 1 billion users. APIs Are Like Glue APIs will be the glue to the Internet, said Programmable Web Founder John Musser. Musser, like Doyle, sees a new generation of APIs emerging that are fueled by demand, triggered by mobile devices, which serve in many respects as the new client/servers. Apps are hosted on cloud services and distributed across mobile devices that read and write data, sending and receiving information, connecting via APIs. In the first generation, Mashery and companies like Apigee pioneered the API management space. Twitter and other web companies emerged in the second generation. In the
After 24 hours of staring at their screens, the teams that participated in our Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon have now finished their projects and are currently presenting them onstage. With more than 160 hacks, there are far too many cool ones to write about, but one that stood out to me was NewsRel, an iPad-based news app that uses machine-learning techniques to understand how news stories relate to one other. The app uses Google Maps as its main interface and automatically decides which location is most appropriate for any given story. The app currently uses Reuters‘ RSS feed and analyzes the stories, looking for clusters of related stories and then puts them on the map. Say you are looking at a story about the Boston Marathon bombings. The app, of course, will show you a number of news stories about it clustered around Boston, then maybe something about the president’s comments about it from Washington and another article that relates it to the massacre during the Munich Olympics in 1972. In addition to this, the team built an algorithm that picks the most important sentences from each story to summarize it for you. As you scroll through the stories, the app always recalculates the related stories on the fly, too, which makes for a pretty interesting news-reading experience. Besides the map, the team also decided to develop the user interface around gestures, so you swipe down to read the full story on the news service’s webpage and you can swipe left and right to scroll from one story to the next The team members have a background in machine learning and iOS engineering. They met during their undergrad studies a few years ago and decided to team up for the hackathon. They told me that they plan to keep working on the app and release it in the near future.
Once you’ve had a few drinks at a bar it’s easy to let loose and blow off steam. Unfortunately, while you’re having fun, you could end up annoying others around you, namely the staff at the venue you’re at. By acting like a fool, you’re jeopardizing your future visits, since bartenders tend to remember who was a jerk and who was a great customer. A project at our Disrupt Hackathon called “Bar Power” is an app that will remind you to “not be a douchebag.” It’s somewhat of a game, walking you through nice things to do when you enter a bar. For example, the app will suggest that you say “hi” to the bartender and introduce yourself. If you do it and mark it down in the app, you get some karma points. The really interesting part of the app comes into play when you’ve done something wrong. Did you drop a glass? Fall down? Mark that down, too. Naturally, you’ll lose those karma points that you gained by being the perfect customer. I chatted with the team who built it, Patricia Ju and Chris Baily, and they discussed their reasons for creating Bar Power, mostly stemming from Baily’s professional experience in the bar scene. While Bar Power might complicate what you’ve set out to do, which is drink, it is a good way to have a little fun and learn how to be a better customer. Ju explained: “It’s so much better to go out to places where you know people. Bartenders gave us feedback and that helped us make Bar Power’s rules. Once you’re in the app, you select the bar that you’re at and then start doing the nice things that it tells you to do. Slip up? Check that off on the list, too: The map below will track how you’re doing throughout the city, alerting you to areas that you should avoid since you were a freaking jerk the night before: As Baily explained, if people understand what to do and what not to do from the bartender community, their experience will be a better one. If the team can build relationships with venues to get them to interact with customers through the app, this could be a neat rating system that goes both ways, Ã la apps like Lyft and Uber. It sounds like Bar Power has potential past being “just a hack,” and I
Some of the creators of TechCrunch Disrupt NY hackathon project Espace are still learning to code, and this was the perfect event at which to hone their skills. The six-person team designed a site this weekend to connect meetup groups with venues offering space where events can be hosted. Organizers and venue owners use the site to sign up and list their needs or what they have to offer, respectively. Espace then helps to put them in touch to broker the deal. The idea resonated with two of the group’s members in particular: husband and wife team Jamal and Felicia O’Garro. Both started learning Ruby recently, and today host a meetup group of their own. This group, started in January, is focused on helping others who are also learning to code, by offering training classes and coffee-and-coding sessions. The group meets Sundays at New York-based co-working space, Alley NYC, and despite its young age, it has already grown to around 550 members, with 30 or so showing up at each weekly session. Others working on the Espace team this weekend include David Lau, Adam Waxman, Cavaughn Noel and Linda Peng. The site uses the Twilio API, which gives both the vendor owner and meetup organizer a virtual number that they can use to connect to discuss the details of the group’s meeting space needs. Asked if meeting organizers were really all that concerned about sharing their real phone numbers with venue owners, Jamal admitted that he was mainly interested in playing around with the Twilio API. Jamal may be a newer coder, but he’s already building software for another area startup, CommonBond a recently seed-funded company that connects student borrowers with alumni to crowdsource funding of student loans. Whether or not Espace continues after this weekend is unknown: Jamal is turning into a hackathon junkie, it seems – this is his third in just a few months’ time, he says. Espace onstage:
After 24 hours of hard work at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, Michael Kolodny, Jingen Lin and Ricardo Falletti demoed us HangoutLater, a nifty hack built on top of the Foursquare API. When you check in and a friend is close to you, it will ask you if you want to hang out later. Then, it will automatically find you a central location to meet. Kolodny and Lin already knew each other before the event. They met Falletti at the Manhattan Center. As they already knew what they wanted to work on, they started developing right away. Over the past 24 hours, the team has not slept a single minute to deliver this hack built in Python using the Django framework. They certainly needed Red Bull and coffee to keep going during the wee hours of the night. Yet, The team had a great time and will certainly take part in other hackathons. When asked whether Kolodny will hang out later with fiends that were not at the hackathon, he said that he wouldn’t use the service this afternoon. It’s time for them to celebrate, or more probably to finally rest. Watch the onstage demo:
One of the hacks at Disrupt NY's Hackathon this year employed hardware startup Leap Motion's new 3D gesture controller, which unfortunately just ran into a delay. Leap Motion's issues aside, this project, the combined effort of Chao Huang, Cedrich Pinson and Jorge Martinez, brings a Facebook Home-style experience to the desktop.
It's only been about six hours since our Disrupt NY Hackathon officially began, and we're starting to see our intrepid hackers hit their stride. Granted, some of them are a little farther along than others -- Darrell found one guy who made an 
We’re on the ground in New York City at the Disrupt Hackathon and there are a lot of interesting thing being created. Since I’m walking around wearing Google Glass, I’ve obviously been looking for teams building apps for it. I met up with Jonathan Gottfried, Twilio’s Developer Evangelist, and he built a quick and dirty app called GlassTweet, which lets you share photos to Twitter, rather than the out-of-the-box experience of sending shots to Google+. Once you’ve installed the app and connected it to Glass and your Twitter account, a new contact comes up that you can share to, called “Tweet”: The excitement about developing for Glass reminds me of the early days on Apple’s App Store. Gottfried explained: “It’s a great platform and being able to create all of the fundamental apps for people is a tremendous opportunity.” There’s only a few people testing GlassTweet out right now, but I imagine that small apps like this will be installed by most of the community who are looking for inspiration. It would be interesting to see a photo gallery of those who are using the app as well, perhaps with some geographic location attached to the photo. You can’t tweet videos yet, but Gottfried tells me that the feature is coming soon. During the Glass Collective announcement this month, Kleiner Perkins parter John Doerr mentioned that Twitter was thinking about working on its own app, and it’ll be interesting to see how they adapt their service for the small screen. Surely you don’t want every mention or reply lighting up in front of your face. At least, I don’t. Gottfried has built a few Glass apps so far, including one that lets you purchase a dedicated number through Twilio for texting. Let the Glass games begin. [Photo credit: Flickr]
We decided to feature nerd fashion at this year's hackathon at Disrupt NY, and what better statement is there these days than eyeglasses? Obligatory Google Glass sighting aside, these hackers definitely had noteworthy eyewear. We've showcased some of our favorites below.
Despite developers grumbling that they would ditch Parse's mobile app backend service now that it's been bought by Facebook, Parse CEO Illya Suhkar tells me signups spiked 9.4x and fewer clients are leaving than before. Meanwhile, to calm fears about Facebook spying on Parse app data, the company issued the statement "We currently have no plans to make any changes to how Parse app data is used."
The hacking has begun. As I write this, participants of the Disrupt NY Hackathon have been working for about six hours on what they are going to show us onstage tomorrow. We talked with a few of them to see how motivated they are. Full of energy, most of them are still enthusiastic about the long and (mostly) sleepless night ahead of them. It takes dedication to build something awesome in fewer than 24 hours, but our fearless hackers seem up to the task. Teams are now working hard to turn their ideas into a working demo. Everybody knows what he or she has to do for his or her team. In other words, the technical and hard part now begins. They will develop, iterate, make compromises and deliver. But after a few minutes talking to us, developers want to get back to what they were doing. Even after only a few hours in, there is not much time left, given the ambitious ideas of some of those teams. Enthusiasm is contagious, so we can’t wait to talk to them again in the coming hours. Video production by Steve Long.
Live from New York it’s CrunchWeek, the weekly show where a few of us writers gather ’round the TechCrunch TV cameras and chitchat about a few of the most interesting stories from the past seven days in the world of tech. At the moment we’re in New York City for Disrupt NY next week, and the weather here is pretty amazing — so Jordan Crook, Ryan Lawler and I decided to film this episode in Manhattan’s High Line Park. Watch the video embedded above to hear us discuss the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4, Betaworks’ surprise acquisition of social reading app Instapaper, and how we all feel about the resurrection of Valleywag.
The Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon has kicked off and here's one of the new hack team pairings hoping to claim tomorrow's prize after a long night of coding. Michal Shaffer, left, from New York and Peter Ma, right from San Francisco -- met at the event and are now collaborating on a proximity art app that will be using Samsung's API and the Galaxy Note plus S Pen to power random collaborative doodling.
The floor at Disrupt's NY Hackathon is filled mostly with people working on software projects, but there were also some interesting hardware endeavors underway. One in particular caught my eye: a robot built from open-source components build to help anyone subject their app or device to strenuous, physical testing in a non-simulated environment.
Sites like Kickstarter have been used to crowdfund a wide range of projects, but I don't think they've ever done what 
Credit where it's definitely due: this post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Box CEO 
Editor's note: Peter Levine is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. As a former CEO and senior executive, there was a time when I did not quite understand the profound impact a CEO has on the culture of a company, even though I always knew culture was important. The organization reflects the behavior and characteristics of the CEO, and that establishes the culture. Foster an environment of open communication and the organization inherits a culture of open communication. Operationally detailed? The organization becomes operationally detailed. Political? The organization becomes political. Curse a lot? The organization curses. Angry? The organization gets angry. Have a big office? Everyone wants a big office. It doesn't matter what's written on a coffee mug or on a "culture" slide, what you do as a CEO, day in and day out, and how you behave will define your company's culture.
Some developers got very angry and threatened to leave mobile app backend platform Parse when it was bought by Facebook yesterday. Hoping to capitalize, competitor StackMob has since released a Parse migration tool that makes it easy for devs to import their Parse apps. It’s a cutthroat game, this game of tech. When the Parse acquisition was announced, disgruntled developers flocked to Twitter, Hacker News, and our comments reel. Facebook pledged not to screw up the beloved development platform. While it won’t operate independently like Instagram, Facebook’s hands-off approach to the photo sharing app it bought a year ago should instill some confidence. Facebook’s director of product management Doug Purdy said in his statement about the acquisition that “We've worked closely with the Parse team and have seen first-hand how important their solutions and platform are to developers. We don't intend to change this.” On the phone with me he reiterated that Facebook doesn’t intend to mess with a good thing. Still, developers’ complaints I read centered on two fears: 1. That Facebook would degrade the Parse service, potentially by promoting its own social integrations and app install ads too hard, and 2. That Facebook would spy on data coming into Parse, including what types of content people chose not to post to the social network. Wasting little time, StackMob launched an auto-importer for developers looking to move their apps elsewhere and published a blog post touting its advantages over Parse. StackMob CEO Ty Amell tells me the company had already been tinkering with a Parse importer, but when the acquisition was announced, it finished it up and made it accessible yesterday alongside a step-by-step guide. Then today the company began offering a Python script that turns the multi-step process into a single step. Amell explained to me, “Over the last few months we’ve seen an increase in people coming over from Parse. Once we heard they’d been acquired, we knew there was going to be a lot of backlash and uncertainty from mobile developers. Facebook has a history of monetizing other people’s users, and charging through ads and other ways to access users. Parse not being independent any more is a pretty large concern for developers.” He says developers had two main questions about the acquisition. 1. Do developers still own their data? 2. What rights to privacy do developers have, and how will Facebook use their data? Amell says “Facebook has some pretty
At first sight, Suitey looks like nothing more than a run-of-the-mill real estate website. But while sites like Trulia and Zillow merely provide a listing of available properties from a large assortment of brokerages and owners, all the properties on Suitey are being directly offered by Suitey itself. That's because Suitey is a fully fledged real estate brokerage, and they believe they're the first software-powered brokerage that offers a better, more transparent home buying experience. At their core, Trulia and Zillow are really nothing more than virtualized billboards. They provide a centralized location for brokers and owners to advertise their for-sale properties. Let's say you're looking for a new apartment, and you've narrowed down your list to five places. That means you'll probably have to deal with five different real estate brokers, which from experience can be a total nightmare. With Suitey, everything is simplified. Once again, let's say you're looking for an apartment in Manhattan (for now, Suitey only offers listings in New York City). Once you narrow things down to five options on their website, you can contact a Suitey agent who will set a time to view all the properties with you. In the future, you'll be able to video chat with the agent directly from the website. This face-to-face experience with Suitey's agents is key to the company’s ethos. "We want to ensure that our agents are people you'd feel comfortable buying a home from," says David Walker, CEO of Suitey. He tells me that Suitey's agents are heavily vetted by the company before they are hired in a process that ensures their competence and general likability. Once you've agreed to buy the home, Suitey gives you a one percent discount to sweeten the deal. That may not seem like much, but if you're buying property for several million dollars, that rebate ends up being a couple thousand dollars you can put towards your deposit. "I've never heard of anything quite like it, and it would interesting to see what happens," says Laura Goldstein, Managing Editor of AOL Real Estate. "People have such a bad association with real estate agents, and the customer service approach feels very appealing." Suitey was one of the ten companies featured at the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator's Demo Day today. You can check out a roundup of startups from our coverage of the event here. (Disclosure: AOL is the parent company of
Samsung is working on a dust-proof and water-proof Galaxy S4, which will essentially resemble the S4 but with environmental superpowers, says the Wall Street Journal. The paper also reported that Samsung is launching its next-generation Galaxy tablet in June, as well as a compact S4 at "just" 4.3-inches in size (this still seems large to me, but maybe I'm just old). Samsung has always been keen on capitalizing on flagship branding by diversifying its line with a variety of offshoot devices, so the news should come as no surprise.
This week, NEA's 
Google felt it appropriate to highlight some of Glass' specs earlier this week, but there's much more to the company's wearable display than just the 
Venture capitalist Jim Breyer is giving up his seat on Facebook's board in June, which he's held since April 2005. The split is amicable, and stems from his desire to concentrate on his new board seat with the Harvard University Corporation Board. Breyer joined the Facebook board after his venture firm Accel became one of Facebook's earliest investors, leading its $12.7 million Series A.
According to Anupam Singhal, cofounder of Monaeo, two out of three Fortune 500 companies get audited every year. And although there are surely several companies that get audited simply because they were unable to pay their taxes, most of the time it's simply due an unfortunate case of miscalculation.
