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The 15 Startups That Launched At Disrupt NYC Day 2. Who’s Your Favorite?

kram412 — Wed, 23 May 2012 03:37:32 +0000

Disrupt NYC day two has just wrapped up. During the conference today, Michael Arrington demanded to know from Ron Conway when he was going to run for Mayor of San Francisco (he kept saying he would “never” ), our very own Josh Constine grilled Tim Armstrong with questions about AOL, layoffs, which publication he likes more: Huffington Post or TechCrunch (he said “both”), and we watched 15 more amazing startups battle it out for the ultimate Disrupt prize — the Disrupt Cup and $50,000. Starting tomorrow at 3:30pm ET we will have our Startup Battlefield Disrupt finals. Yesterday, we wrote detailed articles with pictures and pitches from all of the startups who presented . Below are the ones who were featured today. Out of these 30 companies, both from yesterday and today, five will be chosen to fight it out for the ultimate prize. We will have an all-star panel of judges tomorrow for the finals and things will probably get intense; people always get a little crazy at the finals, but as you can imagine, it’s a blast to watch. So, take your time in reviewing all of the stellar startups below. Compared to the brilliant ones yesterday , which startup do you think will make it to the finals? Going further, any guesses on who you think will win it all? Tune in tomorrow for the results! Session 4: Disrupting Local SpotlessCity SpotlessCity helps local dry cleaners connect with customers in a brand new way and lets people finally get their clothes cleaned in the same convenient way they already handle all of their other chores – online. Mirth Mirth is a principled objection to the frenzy of details. It’s a card-linked loyalty experience for the regulars of business with character. SnipSnap SnipSnap is the first mobile application to let you scan, save, and redeem printed coupons on your smartphone. It was featured by Apple on the App Store front page and rose to a top-50 ranking after going live. Centzy Compare services in your area by price, rating, hours, and more. We use paid crowdsourcing to gather comprehensive data from every local business, including the 75% of them that don’t post their information anywhere else online. Cardify Unlock VIP rewards and perks at your favorite places when you pay with a credit card that’s connected to Cardify…. throw away your punch cards and keep that phone in your pocket. Session 5: Disrupting Collaboration Vinlymint Vinlymint is a real-time creation web application that easily fits into your existing production methods, allows you to store and manage projects from a single place and collaborate with anyone, anytime and anywhere. Postwire Postwire enables you to make a private webpage for each client. You can collect videos, photos, web links, and documents and share them on each client’s private page. Sunglass Sunglass is a cloud-based platform that enables designers to collaboratively build tomorrow’s products, buildings and cities, democratizing access to 3D content across formats. Talkdesk Talkdesk allows any company to create a call center in 5 minutes – all in the browser. Apptegic Apptegic helps online businesses keep and up-sell their existing customers. Use Apptegic’s online service to understand each of your customer’s visit patterns, actions, and business metrics and to respond appropriately in real-time. Session 6: Disrupting Identity Networks Hmmm Hmmm empowers you to express and share your life without inhibitions. You can tailor your online-identity like you do in the real-world, as you interact and selectively share with people from every walk of life. Social Stock Social Stock is a stock market of places and people, where every place and person has a stock price based on their social interactions and enables trading social shares in places and people. About Last Night About Last Night is your social network for nightlife. It’s about the party last night, the concert last night, or the date last night. Do you want to know where the hot party is happening, where your friends are, or what is happening at your favorite hangout? Do you want to know who is performing at your favorite club, or learn about special deals and offers? Are you visiting from out-of-town and want to know where to go? About Last Night is for you. Hownow Hownow is a mobile app that allows users to post geo-fenced messages in order to have semi-anonymous, locally relevant conversations. Buyou (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner) Buyou is a free online mall that aggregates various brands into one beautiful, easy to use interface. And while it’s great that the app begins learning your taste through your likes and dislikes, it’s even better that it relays that information back to its brand partners. This means that a retailer like Express will begin to learn the clothes you like and more asily target clothing you may enjoy to you. All in all, it was a very fun day. And will be even more fun tomorrow. See you then.

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The 15 Startups That Launched At Disrupt NYC Day 2. Who’s Your Favorite?

RocketFrog Wants To Build The Largest Social Casino On The Web, Myspace Tom Joins As Advisor

vertical8 — Wed, 23 May 2012 03:14:29 +0000

One of the hottest trends in gaming right now isn’t mobile, social, or massively multiplayer games, but online casinos. This may seem somewhat surprising considering that it was only a year ago that the Justice Department seized the domain names of some of the country’s largest online poker platforms, like PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, UB.com, and Absolute Poker, charging their founders with bank fraud, money laundering, illegal gambling, among other offenses. And five years prior, the Unlawful Gambling Act effectively putting a stop to online gambling in the U.S. and sending the market into a tailspin. However, in December, the Justice Department reversed its stance on many forms of online gambling, paving the way for what is becoming a revitalization of the social gambling market. Naturally, with activity in the space increasing, a number of startups have popped up to take advantage, like the rebranded Titan Gaming , for example. Today brings another entrant into the social gambling space with RocketFrog , which is setting out to bring casino entertainment to Facebook with the launch of a free-to-play online casino that offers players the chance to win real prizes. Traditionally, online casino players participate in the casino gaming experience recreationally, with the rewards being the opportunity to socialize with friends or earn a few virtual badges. So, RocketFrog wants to change this by leveraging the Facebook platform — where all of your friends are already — to create social tournaments, where players can interact and compete against their friends to win real prizes, not just accumulate points on leaderboards or vie for status increases. Each day, the startup will run poker, blackjack, and slot tournaments in small-ish fields of 80 to 300 players, with levels lasting two to five minutes. In a somewhat unusual business model, RocketFrog plans to recruit a different advertiser each day to sponsor a variety of prizes, including movie tickets, music, and good, with prizes obviously being related to whatever company happens to be paying for the ads. If it’s Pizza Hut, prizes will likely include coupons, meal offers, and probably some free pepperoni. The platform intends to accomodate gamers of all abilities, so that if a user is new to a game, for example, they can peruse through the startup’s suite of learning tutorials, game strategy articles, and expert tips. Its games also allow players to choose their stakes and limits in an effort to customize the overall gaming experience, while challenging friends, tracking their bank roll, sharing achievements, earning loyalty rewards, and comparing game stats and rankings. RocketFrog was founded in 2010 by Brett Calapp, Matthew Osborn, and Uri Kozai. Calapp is the former CEO and co-founder of Centaurus Games, a subscription-based gaming network that sold to PartyGaming in 2010. The startup’s leadership, along with the potential market opportunity, has attracted a familiar face in social networking. Tom Anderson, also known as the co-founder and former president of Myspace, has joined RocketFrog’s advisory board alongside reality TV star and celebrity poker player Brody Jenner. When asked what he sees as RocketFrog’s core value proposition, the former Myspace president said that few have “really pushed incentive-based gaming on the Facebook platform.” It’s as simple as the fact that millions of people play online poker for free, he says, so if they’re given an engaging platform and gaming experience, why wouldn’t they want to play for realworld prizes? What’s more, “RocketFrog is also giving advertisers what they always want but can’t seem to get — an immersive and deep experience that actually features their brand — banners alone aren’t enough.” CEO Brett Calapp says that, while legislation and regulations will take time to iron themselves out (legislation may not be put in place until next year, or 2014) and casino platforms are popping up by the minute, RocketFrog’s core strategy is to avoid making players feel inferior about their bankroll in order to drive sales of virtual currency, but instead to reward its players by offering them the ability to compete in tournaments for quality, realworld prizes. Rather than relying on a small, obsessive segment of addicted players, Calapp says that RocketFrog wants to expand its community to include new players, those not typically classified as gamblers, but who don’t want to just play for meaningless virtual rewards. RocketFrog has a steep uphill climb to track down the bigs in the space, like DoubleDown Casinos and Zynga’s Texas Hold ‘em, but with some influential advisors and a mission to bring social, tournament-style gamble-gaming to the masses, the startup may just be onto something. For more, check out RocketFrog at home here.

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RocketFrog Wants To Build The Largest Social Casino On The Web, Myspace Tom Joins As Advisor

Betaworks Acquires And Relaunches Hownow, The Semi-Anonymous Hyperlocal Social Network iPhone App

ACMAir — Wed, 23 May 2012 03:09:15 +0000

On one end of the spectrum, networks like Twitter and Facebook have acted as catalysts to organizing events like the Arab Spring or the riots of London. On the other end of that spectrum, networks like Yelp or Foursquare tee up user generated reviews, tips and public-facing profiles. Somewhere in between all that falls hownow, an iPhone app-based social network that lets users publish messages semi-anonymously at a hyperlocal level. At its core, the app allows all those who have downloaded the app to strike up semi-anonymous conversations with others at a “block” level, “Neighborhood” level, “City” level or “Worldwide” level. There is no sign-up process and though users have the option to post anonymously, they also have the option to create a pseudonym if that tickles their fancy. Betaworks says they may implement a “rules of the road” to help users take full advantage of the network at some point down the road. Messages can be left forever, for 30 days, a day or an hour at any level. (Don’t be surprised if you see local businesses take advantage of this.) Photos can also be shared via hownow and users do have the option of linking their Twitter accounts for cross-posting, too. Made popular during the peak of the Occupy Wall Street movement, NY-based Betaworks has since acquired hownow to help bolster and fast track the company’s vision for online identity “and the growing significance and opportunities with mobile services.” The app was refreshed and re-released to the App Store last week with tweaks made under the hood and the inclusion of Google Maps. There are no plans to expand to other platforms in the near future. If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering what sort of user information is stored both locally and afar, right? According to Neil Wehrle, VP of user experience at Betaworks, the only data being stored on Betaworks end includes, “Date, Time, Location, Message Content, and an anonymous ID.” An “anonymous ID key” and a cache of the most recent messages is stored on the user’s device. hownow [App Store]

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Betaworks Acquires And Relaunches Hownow, The Semi-Anonymous Hyperlocal Social Network iPhone App

About Last Night Wants To Improve Your Nightlife By Making It Even More Social

kram412 — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:56:26 +0000

They say that all work and no play makes for some dull boys, and I think brothers Darren and Derek Dodge would definitely agree with that sentiment. The two of them have just launched a new iPhone app called About Last Night here on our Disrupt stage that aims to connect fans of the nightlife and help them find the best parties, clubs, concerts, and games every night. “We like to think of ourselves as a social network completely geared around nightlife,” Darren told me. About Last Night is a simple service to get started with — after logging in with their Facebook credentials, users can share photos and videos of where they are, tag their Facebook friends, and upvote the events they attend if they’re particularly good. Images of events and venues that are especially well-rated are pushed to the top of the app’s main activity feed and can even garner bronze, silver, and gold medals to highlight just how good a time everyone is having. Those posts can be set to private if users want to keep some parts of their night hush-hush, but they generally don’t last too long anyway. In a bid to make sure users come back again and again, those posts will disappear after 48 hours. Users can navigate through the app by swiping left and right from the main landing page — they’ll always be just a swipe or two away from listings of nearby events, friend activity, and locations that they’ve chosen to follow. Tapping an icon on the top left causes the entire panel to slide to the right, revealing a control panel a la the Facebook iOS app from which users can search for their friends on ALN. With all the location posting, About Last Night sounds a bit reminiscent of Foursquare. Indeed, the brothers Dodge told me that Foursquare got people into the rhythm of checking in, a behavior they’re clearly keen to harness. Still, their unwavering focus on the nightlife also means that their audience of potential users are avowed fans of finding things to do into the wee hours of the morning, an audience that they believe plenty of brands are itching to reach. While the brothers are all about making sure you get to have a good time — the idea struck them while enjoying the heady party scene in college, after all — they also want brands and venues to be able to connect directly with their users. “Brands spend billions of dollars yearly on the nightlife,” Darren noted to me. “But they’ve had no other way to reach these people other than advertising.” Then plan to do this by giving them the ability to create sponsored and contextual posts to be injected into the streams of users who follow specific brands or venues. Those venues will also be able to offer discounts and deals a la Groupon to lure people through their doors. But that will all come in time, and they tell me that they don’t plan to monetize the service yet — they’re planning to flip that switch within the next few months. Disrupt Q&A Q: How big a market can this address? What are the demographics? A: Nightlife is huge, we think that college kids we be heavy users, but anyone who goes out often will benefit. Q: Do you have a sense of the scale needed to attract national brands A: We’re already talking to big brands — Sam Adams for one. Q: How you brands know when to send out deals? A: Will be able to detect when a user is actually at the location, businesses will create their targeted posts from a web front-end. Q: How will heavy partiers remember to set their sensitive posts to private? A: There’s a rocker directly in the Post page that’s pretty hard to miss.

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About Last Night Wants To Improve Your Nightlife By Making It Even More Social

To Capture New Users, Socialcam Redesigns Its Website And Introduces A Leaderboard

bestcbstore — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:30:23 +0000

Social mobile video startup Socialcam is rolling out a new website today, which is designed to create more engagement for users that might not have the mobile app installed. The company has also introduced a leaderboard to help highlight users to celebrities, brands and top producers on the Socialcam platform. For Socialcam, the new release is all about community , according to CEO Michael Seibel. In the website’s left column, Socialcam shows off all the videos from users that you follow, as well as likes and comments that follow. And in the right column, Socialcam hopes to introduce you to new users that you don’t yet follow, as well as showing your activity and what your friends are up to. The idea is to replicate a lot of the features that are available in Socialcam’s mobile app on the web. In addition, Socialcam is hoping to highlight some of its most popular users by releasing a leaderboard . Doing so will show off some of the celebrities and non-celebrities who have developed followings through the platform. Not surprisingly, Britney Spears is the #1 user on the platform, but she’s only produced one video. MC Hammer , Floyd Mayweather , and Lupe Fiasco are among other celebs with huge followings. A lot of people like to call Socialcam the “Instagram for Video,” but Seibel hates the comparison. “The two companies have very different challenges,” he wrote in an email. Also, he believes that social video apps are all about getting people out of the mindset that video is only for consumption, and “creating a new media creation trend by unlocking the video camera on your phone.” The average video length is about 60-80 seconds, compared with the maximum 15 seconds allowable through competitor Viddy — and the 2-5 minutes that is standard for user-generated YouTube videos. Users also spend a lot of time playing with filters and effects before uploading videos onto the platform. On average, they check out eight different effects on each video before publishing. In addition to the major revamp being released today, Socialcam has also rolled out a series of changes to the way its social tools work, mainly to ensure that users are aware of what they are sharing through the site and the app’s Open Graph integration. “We want people to understand exactly what it means to have social mode on and exactly what it does, so you always know what’s going on,” Seibel told me by phone. That addition comes after both Socialcam and Viddy have received some criticism for being “spammy” in users’ news feeds on Facebook. Thanks to Open Graph integration, Socialcam has added a ton of new users , but some of them might have inadvertently been added as a result of watching videos from services like YouTube that were ingested into Socialcam’s platform, rather than user-submitted videos from the startup’s mobile app.

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To Capture New Users, Socialcam Redesigns Its Website And Introduces A Leaderboard

ooVoo Rolls Out Video Chat Apps For iPad And Facebook

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:00:43 +0000

Consumer video chat provider ooVoo , which has more than 46 million users worldwide, is rolling out new applications that will make its service even more attractive. And the service, which is popular among kids and young adults, will remain free on all those platforms, with monetization provided primarily through advertising served up to web users. ooVoo allows customers to create chat rooms with up to 12 participants which can be accessed through a number of different platforms and devices. The new iPad and Facebook apps come on top of apps for the iPhone, Android, Web, and PC applications that consumers can use to chat with their friends. Although up to 12 participants can join ooVoo chats, the new iPad app, available today, provides up to four simultaneous HD video chat streams to users. And with the Facebook app, the already social app will make it easier for users to find friends and to connect via video chat. In addition to sharing video chats on Facebook, ooVoo users can send invitations via email or by texting an ooVoo call link. In an ooVoo video chat through the company’s new iPad app, CEO Yuval Baharav told me that its young user base frequently uses the app for ambient communications, basically leaving their video chat windows open for hours. The average users watches about 200 minutes of video chat sessions per month. Users frequently use ooVoo as a way to remotely collaborate on music and other projects, and many record those sessions and upload them to YouTube or share them on Tumblr. As a result, ooVoo has added a free video record feature that they can use, taking the friction out of this popular usage of the app.

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ooVoo Rolls Out Video Chat Apps For iPad And Facebook

Tagbrand Gives Fashionistas An App To Check-In Their Brands

vertical8 — Tue, 22 May 2012 03:00:42 +0000

“All people wear clothes!” declared one of Tagbrand’s founders on stage at Disrupt today. That’s true, but let’s review. DailyBooth was (is still perhaps?) a phenomenon for a time as people became accustomed to sharing their daily lives in a more quirky manner than mere video can afford. (Ok, OK, it’s a bunch of teenagers sharing their zits, but work with me here, people). Now Tagbrand wants to apply that model to fashion, but with a tagging twist. The model is simple enough. Take and upload photos of what branded clothes you are wearing and tag them. Effectively, it’s a photo check-in for brands, or ‘Foursquare for fashion’, if you will. The twist is that users are encouraged to tag up pictures with a visual tag of what brand each item of clothing is. Alas, the site does not yet do visual recognition of the clothes. Maybe one day… TagBrand doesn’t call this check-ins, but – wait for it – “brand-ins”. People can then comment or vote on the brands their friends are wearing. Clearly the opportunity here is to capture a fashion-obsessed audience and provide a platform for advertisers. Thus, although Tagbrand is like DailyBooth if everyone on DailyBooth was obsessed with fashion, it’s this tagging element which looks pretty viral. The product combines contains brands, polls and e-commerce. There’s a lot of virality built into the service – every tags has a Twitter or Facebook button on it. But clearly the people who do this are obsessed with fashion. TagBrand gives them the tools to be obsessive. The polls certainly feature makes the experience more entertaining when you’re trying clothes out. Now, clothing brands and retail stores are constantly chasing these people. This is one way of delivering them a highly targeted audience. Tagbrand’s business model is based on creating a special marketplace for them which is visible while browsing the brand’s tag on a photo. The stores provide Tagbrand with a price-list and its system attaches them to a “Recommended” block. So while browsing their friends’ clothes, users see the real-world item beside the image and can purchase from there (click are on a CPC basis). Users also get delivered latest news on brands they such as new collections. Admittedly they have older competition in the UK operation, WIWT.com , but Tagbrand’s visual tags are a slightly cuter way of doing it. TagBrand has secured a $100,000 seed investment from Russian investor Glavstart, while founders Ivan Olenchenko and Alexandr Kobozev have been working on startup projects in Russia for a while now. (And we should add they did a pretty good pitch at a TechCrunch meetup in Moscow last year). Q&A Judges asked about extending the app into giving users the ability to upload their own home made brands, and that seemed to be on the cards according to the founders. Currently in Russian and English, the app launches today in the US. The Judges also had an issue about copyright and the images uploaded, which seems a fair point. Right now 80% of usage of the product is on the iPhone app versus 20% on the web. So far they’ve had 15,000 registered users in 2 months with no promotion/marketing just in the Russian market. With about $4.5 billion spent annually on advertising clothes, they reckon there’s plenty of money to be made out there. Da!

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Tagbrand Gives Fashionistas An App To Check-In Their Brands

Stevie Turns Your Social Feeds Into TV Shows

vertical8 — Tue, 22 May 2012 02:47:36 +0000

We spend more and more time on social networks, but sometimes it can feel like work. I mean, scrolling through your news feed isn’t work work, but it’s not quite as easy as vegging out on your couch and watching TV. That’s where a new startup called Stevie comes in, with a website launching today at Disrupt, along with mobile apps that function as remote controls. Stevie looks at content shared in your social network feeds and elsewhere on the Web, and it assembles that content into TV shows that you can watch, shows with names like The Comedy Strip, Music Non-Stop, and Celeb TV. Naturally, the shows incorporate video content that your friends have shared, but they also include things like Facebook status updates, tweets, shared headlines, and birthdays, running mostly as tickers under the video. Essentially, it’s a way to watch Facebook and Twitter on your TV. Co-founder and Chief Creative Technologist Gil Rimon argues that this is the right way to do “social TV.” Apps like GetGlue, which offer check ins and other social interactions around existing TV content, aren’t a good fit for how people watch TV now, because they ignore its essentially passive nature. Stevie takes the opposite tack — instead of trying to encourage new types of behavior, it’s introducing new content into the traditional couch potato experience. Rimon compares the app to Pandora. In the same way that Pandora learns your musical tastes and preferences, automatically delivering music that’s tailored to your tastes, Stevie uses something that the team calls “The Stevie Factor” to look at your social data (such as Facebook Likes) and automatically stitch together the videos and other content that you’ll probably enjoy. When Rimon demonstrated Stevie for me, I was particularly impressed by the look and feel. Granted, I don’t watch much TV aside from Game of Thrones and Doctor Who , but the video content struck me as quite bubbly and polished, especially for something that was being algorithmically assembled on-the-fly. Rimon’s experience in TV writing, editing, and presenting probably helps with that. I expect Stevie will become even more appealing when it’s available on connected TV devices. The company has raised $300,000 in angel funding from investors including Jeff Pulver and Gigi Levy, and it’s participating in the Microsoft Accelerator for Azure program in Tel Aviv. Oh, and if you’re interested in couples who run startups, here’s another one — Rimon is married to his co-founder and CEO Yael Givon. You can visit the Stevie website here , download the iPhone app here , and download the Android app here . (Again, the apps aren’t standalone experiences, but remote controls for watching on the browser.) Disrupt Q&A Q: How do you connect the Internet to the TC? A: We’re not delivering hardware — it’s a web-based experience, with more devices (starting with iPad) coming soon. Q: Who is your competition? A: No direct competition, though of course there are other video discovery companies. But they’re not replicating the TV experience. The real competitor might be old-fashioned TV channels. Q: Why hasn’t connected TV taken off? A: That’s changing — see, for example, the growth of Apple TV.

Meet The Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon Hackers

ACMAir — Sun, 20 May 2012 07:11:22 +0000

It’s been about eight hours since our big Disrupt Hackathon kicked off , and all of our intrepid hackers have been busy letting the code (and the caffeine) fly ever since. I managed to tear a few of them away from their work (these folks are pretty motivated, so it took a bit of doing) to tell us a little bit about themselves and what they be trying to crank out during the wee hours of the morning. Devon Peticolas Devon is a senior at Rutgers University (and the newly-minted president of the school’s undergrad CS club ). As you might imagine, he’s no stranger to hackathons either — he can’t quite put his finger on it, but he’s probably in the “double digits” at this point. He’ll be spending the night working on a mobile web app that allows users to find their friends in a crowd through sort of a hot-and-cold approach — if all goes well, a phone will vibrate when it’s pointing in the direction of a user’s friend, and will vibrate even stronger as the two people get closer to each other. Peter Verrillo Peter is the CEO of a company called EnHatch, and during the day he works on creating apps to help promote, demo, and sell medical devices for use in surgery. He and his team specialize in creating those 3D apps for the iPad, but he’s looking to spend his time at the Hackathon bringing that 3D experience to the iPhone. The app he’s working on tonight deals with slightly less gruesome fare — instead, it aims to walk users through the process of putting together Ikea furniture. “If Ikea had a good app, this would be it,” he told me. Dasara Kushi This is Dasara’s second Hackathon (her first was a photo-centric event), and this time around she and her partner Ronn have decided to spend their night building a web app that uses a computer’s built-in webcam to analyze a user’s face and suggest places for them to go in real time. “If you look sad, it’ll tell you to go to a comedy club,” said told me. Their project makes pretty extensive use of the faceAPI, but there’s still plenty of work to do — they’re both still looking at pulling in new data from different APIs, to make the service more robust, but thankfully the night is still young. Jared Zoneraich Jared is a 14-year old hacker who attends Bergen Academy, and he’s quite excited to stay up and have fun here at his very first Hackathon. His project of choice? Nothing less than an ad delivery service, of course. “If I weren’t doing this, I’d be doing homework,” he said. His hacker idols include Mark Zuckerberg as well as seasoned iPhone cracker George “geohot” Hotz, who just so happened to attend Bergen back in the day as well. Pavan Krishnamurthy Pavan and his teammates are cranking away on an iOS app that will tell you what sort of music people in different cities are listening to – a noble and clever goal. Cities that tend to listen to faster-paced music on Rdio are labelled ‘hot,’ while more laid-back cities (Chicago in their mockup) are tagged with the “chill” label. His team’s mockups look pretty darned solid, but we’ll soon see if the finished product lives up to their ambitions. When he’s not hacking, Pavan works at Bloomberg and (like Jared) looks up to Mark Zuckerberg as his own hero hacker. Jon Gottfried Jon works for Twilio (during the day) and dons his hacker cape when night falls. He and his buddies are working on a system for A/B testing Amazon products tonight — not the sexiest idea the in the world sure, but that system is only part of his team’s plan. They hope that their testing system can be used to determine consumer desires, and use that information to whip up a subscription service — Thingscription — that’s focused on delivering those goods to people on a regular basis. Octavian Costache The royally-named Octavian (or Vivi, as he’s also known) and his teammates are working on a second-screen app that provides users with additional context they watch Game of Thrones , which is probably one of the geekier endeavors we’ve spotted today. Need to figure out why that guy just got stabbed? Or some lesser-known facet of some clan’s convoluted family tree? Keep your eyes peeled on this guy. Incidentally, he is totally in love with the Khalisi (because of the dragons, not the other thing) and his Twitter is Okvivi . Karina Ruzinov Karina goes to Rutgers (there’s a pretty large contingent of Rutgers kids, it would seem) and is spending her summer interning for Refinery 29. She studies Computer Science and Math and she says the student parties are real ragers. She and her team are working on a app that helps people come up with names for their Hackathon projects. It’s not quite ready for primetime yet, but when it is, it aims to inspire people by providing synonyms and rhymes for words that embody their particular project’s spirit. Victoria Mo Victoria is a Master’s Student in Computer Science at Columbia University and her tech role model is none other than Google’s Marissa Mayer. She and her team are working feverishly on an app that helps users find the hottest clubs in town (and not the hottest clubs in Ontario, as it sounded when we first heard the pitch). They aim to accomplish that by posting images and videos of the clubs’ exteriors so people will be able to quickly determine how popular a particular venue is.

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Meet The Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon Hackers

Day After IPO, Mark Zuckerberg Marries Longtime Girlfriend Priscilla Chan

Budowniczy425 — Sun, 20 May 2012 06:28:29 +0000

What a week. After eight years, Mark Zuckerberg takes Facebook public at a $104 billion valuation. His longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan gets her medical degree from the UC San Francisco. He has his 28th birthday. And to top it all off, they get married today ! Mazel tov. Apparently, the wedding had been in the works for four to five months, according to a source authorized to speak on behalf of the couple. It wasn’t tied to the IPO, but rather Chan’s graduation from medical school on Monday. About 100 of their closest friends and family showed up at the backyard of their Palo Alto home, thinking they were going to celebrate Chan’s graduation. When they arrived, they were told it was a wedding. “It was a surprise,” the source tells us. Zuckerberg gave her a ruby ring he designed himself, which Chan had never seen until today. The food came from their two favorite restaurants, Palo Alto Sol and Fuki Sushi , and they shared it family style. For dessert, they served Burdick chocolate mice (which is what the pair ate on their very first date!) Chan and Zuckerberg met more than nine years ago while at Harvard. In this cute story from the Harvard Crimson seven years ago , Zuckerberg asked her, “Hey Priscilla, do you want a job at the Facebook?” “I’d love a job at Facebook,” she responded, offering him a Twizzler. How things have changed. What an amazing ride for the pair and for the company, and hopefully a lot longer to go too.

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Day After IPO, Mark Zuckerberg Marries Longtime Girlfriend Priscilla Chan