TechCrunch
The Disrupt SF Hackathon Is Almost Here! More Tickets Available Now
Two. more. weeks.
In just a little over two weeks, our annual Disrupt SF conference is rolling back into town, and with it, one of our legendary Hackathons.
We’ve released most of the Hackathon tickets already, and each batch has gone faster than the last. Here — have another batch.
Never been to one of our Hackathons? Wondering what to expect? Take a few hundred of San Francisco’s finest engineers. Cram them in a big ol’ room for 24 hours. Give’em a mountain of pizza, challenge them to build the craziest thing they can think of, and close the doors. Each year, the results get better and better.
We’ve seen people build everything from dating apps and music games to cell phone controlled, knife-wielding robots. We’ve had founders meet each other here and go on to form companies together. We’ve had hackathon projects spin out into full-fledged companies and be acquired for millions.
That side project you’ve been thinking about for weeks? There’s really no better place in the world to build it than here.
Here’s what you need to know:
- As long as you’re building something, participating in the Hackathon is free. Interested sponsors, give us a shout.
- After 24 hours of building, hackers present their projects to their peers and a panel of all-star judges (we’ll announce those judges in an upcoming post).
- Every hacker who finishes their project and presents onstage gets a free pass to the entire conference, normally valued at around $2,000. Why? Because you’re awesome and we love you.
- The team behind the best hack of the day takes home a cool $5,000, and the top three teams all get to present their projects to the Disrupt audience. There will also be a bunch of prizes awarded by the Hackathon sponsors — more news on those in a few days.
The Disrupt SF 2013 Hackathon runs from September 7th to the 8th, and we’ve just released a big batch of tickets. Don’t delay, though — these things go fast.
Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.
Circle Gives You Distributed Control Of Your Family's Internet So You Can Be Human To Each Other
Let’s not kid ourselves: We don’t control the Internet, the Internet controls us. Any notions to the contrary are foolish at best, but a new Kickstarter project called Circle wants to help families fight back against the Internet’s omnipresence with hardware and software that allows individual control of devices connected to a local network.
Circle isn’t a router, like the Skydog, which was created by the Xerox PARC company PowerCloud Systems and is based on a similar concept. Instead, it’s a network device that can communicate with your router, and with all of your connected devices, offering up a filter between your existing gear and the unfiltered Internet, allowing you to set limitations for kids’ devices based on age, time, ad content and more. You can receive notifications about different types of Internet activity to your own device, too, and get reports about both “negative” and “positive” browsing, Circle claims.
In other words, Circle makes you the NSA PRISM program for your own household, but with a little bit of China’s Great Firewall thrown in the mix. You can schedule timed access to different categories of site, so that Facebook or YouTube time doesn’t get crazy, cut off access temporarily via Pause mode, turn off access once it’s time for bed, and even block ads entirely on devices that your kids use. All of this is managed via an app for iPhone.
Circle says their solution is better because it doesn’t require setting up user profiles or installing nanny software on every individual device, and because it works with your existing router, you don’t need to get an expensive replacement or change any network settings.
The team behind Circle includes Tiebing Zhang, a former network security engineer for the Department of Defense, and Honeywell Wi-Fi control systems engineer, as well as Jelani Memory, an entrepreneur with experience in design, sports, business development and much more besides. Circle definitely manages to look the part, thanks possibly to founder and Product Designer Sean Kelly, but whether it can back up those good looks with performance remains to be seen.
Circle is $150 to pre-order via Kickstarter pledge, with an anticipated delivery date of August, 2014. Nice to see a hardware startup give itself a reasonable amount of time to deliver. The startup is also looking for roughly $250,000 in total funds to make the project work, which will take the working prototype that currently exists and make it production-ready.
FullContact Automates The Tedious Task Of Adding Business-Card Data Into Salesforce
Business cards. They’re not exactly sexy, but they can turn into good leads and help to make some sales. Unfortunately, they are often long forgotten because, let’s face it, the manual work to punch in business card info can be, at best, tedious.
TechStars alum FullContact has a new service for integrating contact information from business cards into all versions of Salesforce.com. Customers can now take a picture of a business card with the FullContact reader and see the leads in Salesforce Group, Enterprise or Professional Edition.
There are dozens of companies that offer readers. LinkedIn, for example, offers CardMunch but only on its platform. And Evernote Hello, NeatMobile and the Shape Business Card reader are other services to check out.
But it is the automation of contact data into a platform like Salesforce that gives FullContact the edge for now. First the reader scans the data on the business card and puts it in its database. That data is then sent to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where it is manually transcribed. When the task is completed, the contact data is delivered to Salesforce and added to its database. The process takes about 15 minutes.
The capability comes with FullContact’s entry into the Salesforce ISV program. Previously, a Salesforce customer might be running a different version than colleagues. With the new service, the business card lead data is accessible no matter which version they’re on. FullContact estimates that 9 percent of cards actually make it into a CRM system. The service is available on iOS, and the company says it plans to launch an Android version in about two months.
FullContact plans to offer the business-card updating service to other platforms, as well. They want to integrate the data anywhere it makes sense, whether it’s a CRM, email client, personal spreadsheet or anything else.
The company provides an API that software developers use inside their services and applications to provide users complete and up-to-date contact information. It lets developers tap into its database to complete partial, out-of-date contact records. Information includes phone numbers, email addresses, postal addresses, name, title, company, social profile URLs, an image, birthday, instant messenger handles, and more.
FullContact has deep expertise in collecting social data and integrating for individuals and third-party platforms. Once in the system, it is up to the companies to do the analytics using other tools. Data integration is important but the value that comes with adding analytics capabilities is what companies find increasingly valuable as they strive to make their businesses more data-driven.
Keen On… Brewster Kahle: How The Internet Archive Is Fighting Our Orwellian Government
Even if he hadn’t founded the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle – the co-founder of Alexa and Thinking Machines – would still be a first-round inductee in the Internet Hall Of Fame. But with the Internet Archive, Kahle has established himself in the pantheon of the true greats of the Internet. The Internet Archive stands as the web’s largest library, with 3 million users every day. It houses two million books and has collected two petabytes of data just in the last couple of months.
But Kahle still isn’t satisfied. He wants to collect everything – every book, every movie, every song, every webpage, every newspaper – in his digital library. That’s because, he told me, we need a counter to what he calls the “Orwellian world” of big government. And Kahle has a long track record of distrust in what he calls “downright creepy” government. Five years ago, he stood up to the FBI in their request for information about somebody who had visited the Archive. But Kahle actually lived to tell his tale – winning a court case against the government which allows him now to talk publicly about the case.
The best thing about the web, Kahle told me, is that it proves that people don’t only do things for money. And with his non-profit Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle epitomizes the spirit of the web’s true founders – guys like Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf – who were interested in making the world a better place rather than just making a fast buck.
HP Is Back In The Acquisition Game For Targets Between $100M And $1.5B After Cutting Net Debt
Yesterday HP reported mildly disappointing earnings, and after an earnings call that was more a request for patience than a rallying call, investors sent the company’s shares down heavily. HP is trading more than 12 percent down today.
However, despite repeating a declared internal zeal for cost cutting, a balanced plan between revenue growth and margin pressure, and the goal of zero net debt, HP’s Meg Whitman today stated that the company is in the acquisition game, and for big targets to boot.
The interview, as reported by Reuters, stated that “acquisitions will become part of [HP's] future.” The goal of the purchases would be to “shore up some of [the company's] product holes.” The dollar figure that Whitman is willing to spend is flexible and large: $100 million to $1.5 billion.
Whitman flatly stated that HP does not need “a five or six billion dollar acquisition.” She continued that purchases between $100 million and $300 million are interesting.
Liquidity
HP, despite a perhaps unusually heavy debt load, has cash and equivalents of $13.2 billion, providing massive flexibility for the company to pick up targets large and small. HP doesn’t want to spend too heavily, given its focus on improving its balance sheet to a position of zero net debt.
Still, $13.2 billion is 132 $100 million purchases, meaning that HP can cause big waves across technology without disrupting its larger goals. The company wants to invest more in big data and the cloud — like everyone else, frankly — meaning that companies in that space could be in play. Storage was a sector, for example, that came up several times during the earnings call.
The above means that over the next 12 months or so, a few nine-figure deals could be reached. This indicates that the M&A market in technology will have at least one major happy to ink deals. Yahoo has also been incredibly active, but in the low-dollar range, buying for talent and not product, which is essentially the opposite of what HP has in mind.
That split is somewhat encouraging, given that many recent high-profile acquisitions have essentially been the hiring of product teams from failed companies with failed or failing products. That will continue. But to see product-strong firms also find exit points will be fun to watch.
All this gently refutes the new narrative that tech is in a slump. HP is in a slump, but that doesn’t mean the larger technology market is.
Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan
New Update For Find My iPhone Locks Out Non-Developers Without iOS 7 Beta [Update: Working Again]
Update: Reports say that the update is now working again, so go ahead and find those iPhones.
A new update for Apple’s Find My iPhone app seems to have been pushed out a little early: It changes the icon to a flatter design, which is more in keeping with iOS 7′s aesthetics. Unfortunately, it also locks out users on iOS 6 who don’t have a registered developer account or iOS 7 installed and configured on one of their devices with their iCloud account.
In other words, the vast majority of users should not update Find My iPhone just yet, unless you don’t want to be able to actually … find your iPhones, MacBooks, iPads or whatever else you’ve registered with Apple’s MobileMe service. If you’re a registered developer with iOS 7 installed on at least one device, you should be fine, even if you’re updating on iOS 6, but otherwise wait to avoid that update and Apple will likely issue a fix soon.
We’ll keep an eye on this and let you know when it is safe to update the app, since that’s kind of a big part of Apple’s cloud services on its mobile devices.
No comments:
Post a Comment