Watch The Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon Presentations Live
Disrupt NY 2013′s Hackathon took place over roughly the last 24 hours, and now the teams are ready to present. Watch along as we live stream all 164 hacks built during the event, each of which gets just under a minute to demo their hacks onstage and convince the judges they’re worthy of the sponsor prizes. 164 is a lot of hacks for just under a day, and in fact it’s a record for any Disrupt Hackathon to date.
Judges for the event include FuturePerfect Ventures founding partner Jalak Jobanputra; Mahaya co-founder and CEO Tarikh Korula; Path101 co-founder and GroupMe investor Charlie O’Donnell; CEO and founder of The Muse Kathryn Minshew; bit.ly chief scientist Hilary Mason; and BoxGroup founder and managing partner David Tisch.
Prizes include offerings from all the Hackathon sponsors, including Appery.io, AT&T, CrunchBase, General Motors, Microsoft Bizspark, Microsoft Skydrive, NewAer, Pearson, Samsung, Twillio, Visa, Wrigley and Yammer.
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HackSpaces Is A Cloud-Based Management Tool For Co-Working Spaces
Increasingly, startups and hackers and designers are working out of co-working spaces, and almost all of those co-working spaces have the same problems: People have food and items delivered but aren’t around to sign for them; everyone is fighting for space in the conference rooms; and the spaces have trouble collecting money from users.
A lot of co-working spaces have built their own in-house tools to deal with these problems, but today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Hackathon, one team created a cloud-based platform that can be used for helping co-working spaces communicate with members.
The hack, called HackSpaces, is designed as a platform that can be used to keep track of payments, seats and conference rooms. The conference room scheduler, for instance, replaces whiteboards currently used by some co-working spaces and allows users to quickly see via a mobile app which rooms are in use or scheduled later in the day.
HackSpaces also provides a messaging tool that can allow co-working members to let each other know when packages arrive or if there are events happening in the space. The messaging tool allows users to communicate with everyone, or to call out individual members with @ mentions. Individual users can get push notifications or text alerts when, for instance, their lunch has arrived at the front desk.
The app was created by Max Savin, a front-end developer who is at BoxKit; Elie Toubiana, a Ruby on Rails back-end developer who works at Unpakt.com; and Jonathan Bensamoun, who is head of product and tech for ShopKeep. The team’s members frequently work in co-working spaces, so they’re hoping to make the experience better for themselves and others.
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From The Hackathon, HangoutLater Helps Find A Good Central Location To… Hang Out Later
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.
Stage demo coming soon.
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NewsRel Uses Machine Learning To Summarize News Stories And Put Them On A Map
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.
Visit link: NewsRel Uses Machine Learning To Summarize News Stories And Put Them On A Map
Scaffold Wants To Bring Financial Advice To The People Who Need It Most
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 Scaffold, an app built over the past 24 hours at the TechCrunch Disrupt NYC Hackathon, wants to help out. Scaffold aims to be a financial advisory platform that can give actionable insights to lower income users who are particularly vulnerable to financial risk, such as people just coming out of homeless shelters or single mothers who are coming out of battered women shelters.
As you can see in the video of the one-minute onstage demo embedded above, Scaffold lets people set up web video meetups with financial advisors to give them targeted, personalized metrics about their financial risk. The site will also show in plain English the client’s biggest risks through “stress tests” that show what would happen if he or she lost a job, or had an accident — these make it clear to people who aren’t necessarily money-savvy just how important it is to get their financial houses in order.
It’s a somewhat more serious-minded app than you might expect to come out of an overnight hackathon, so it’s not as fully baked as others launching here today: Scaffold’s creators Gabe Kneisley and Kevin Wolkober told me that at the moment the app does not actually let you fill in your financial information, since they haven’t had the time to make sure it’s completely secure. But it’s fun to see a big idea that’s aiming to have an important impact taking root here in a matter of hours.
I talked to Kneisley and Wokober backstage, and you can watch that in the video embedded below.
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