The team hailed from Lagos, New York, and suburban New Jersey and had been up for nearly 24-hours working on imprompt.io, a new collaboration tool for meetings on-the-fly for the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon. It’s a problem the hacking team knew quite well. Hailing from the coding staffing company Andela, which pairs top-tier developers from Africa with startups and large tech… Read More
Toyota’s Prius Prime is an updated take on the company’s popular hybrid, with more emphasis on the EV aspects of the vehicle, including a battery with double the driving capacity, and a few other tweaks that push the car closer toward the EV end of its dual identity, including an acceleration feature that lets the electric motor handle much of the pick-up when you first put your… Read More
How do you convince a potential car buyer your vehicle is a future-focused choice? One way is to get one of the most iconic creators of cinematic futurescapes to help you build a virtual world that people can drive the car through themselves. Toyota enlisted Syd Mead, the creative visionary behind Blade Runner and Tron‘s vehicles, architecture and more. Mead provided concept art and… Read More
Worldwide, there are 62 million girls without access to traditional education due to a lack of resources, safety and general attitudes about girls and women.
In order to address this issue, First Lady Michelle Obama teamed up with AOL (TechCrunch’s owner) to launch the Let Girls Build track as part of the Built By Girls challenge, which recently culminated with a pitch day at… Read More
U.S. companies have a massively greater appetite for startups than their European counterparts. Over the past five years, U.S. companies have purchased about four times as many startups as European acquirers, according to a new report from CrunchBase and entrepreneurship foundation Mind the Bridge. The study looked at about 6,000 acquisitions by European and U.S. companies since 2012 and… Read More
Application development has long been fraught with peril: Projects become bloated, expensive and never ship. The “micro” trend in application development is focused on delivering bottoms-up, simple solutions to complex problems. Micro services, apps and flows offer a new way to weave existing systems in novel, organic ways in order to deliver solutions immediately. Read More
Q: You’ve been incredibly successful as a VC—you’ve had numerous major exits and been named to the Forbes Midas list several times. To what do you attribute your success? I think the most important thing about being successful in the venture business is being able to work with these great entrepreneurs. We try to find them at an early stage then roll up our sleeves and help… Read More
No one person can take sole credit for Star Trek’s success, not even creator Gene Roddenberry.
But Leonard Nimoy could make a pretty strong claim to being the franchise’s heart, or at least its face to the outside world, having portrayed Trek’s most iconic character on the original show, plus the animated series and six feature films. And that’s before his… Read More
A clever hack by Alexander Crosson and Naveen Kulandaivelu at today’s TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon may be giving us tech journalists early warning signs of our forthcoming replacement by AI. While nowhere near advanced enough to conduct independent due diligence or investigative reporting, their project, CrunchLetter, is aimed squarely at automating the way we get news. Newsletters… Read More
I’m not a morning person and the snooze button on my alarm clock regularly gets a workout. If you suffer from the same issue (and own an Amazon Echo or similar Alex-enabled device), then maybe Dooze is for you. Jade Feng, Junshu Okamoto and Muhammed Gü built the project during our Disrupt SFHackathon this weekend. It gives you a strong incentive to avoid your snooze button because… Read More
Do you own a dog or a cat and also hold down a job that takes you out of your house? Chances are that if you do, you’ve bemoaned a common challenge: how do you make sure your pet doesn’t get too lonely while you are away? A project called Doge Ball, presented today at the Disrupt SF 2016 Hackathon, has developed a new piece of hardware that could be the answer. Part influenced… Read More
Nearly 1,000 eager participants converged upon Pier 48 yesterday for an all-night Hackathon, helping kick off Disrupt with a cold and foggy view of the San Francisco Bay Bridge (as though there were any other kind). The near capacity army of developers, coders, roboticists, engineers and all-purpose hackers broke up into 144 teams, tasked with designing and developing projects during a… Read More
At the TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 Hackathon, a team demonstrated a new ride-sharing app called Last Mile Club, which aims to help travelers with the final leg of their trip – getting from the airport to the hotel. Built over the weekend, the Android application addresses this often overlooked – and expensive – part of travel planning, by connecting passengers on a flight… Read More
Crappy photos in restaurant menus be gone! Robots and augmented reality are here and ready to kill you off. That’s the plan for the future, at least, as PeppAR Waiter — an ambitious and forward-looking project from the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon this weekend — showed us. Read More
The five person crew that developed Safe Zone wanted to do something more meaningful than creating just another geo-based social app.
So on this, the 15th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, the team rolled out SafeZone, an app that alerts users to safe spaces in their area. Read More
When friends Eli Byers, Chad Fegley, Amrita Chawla, and Mari Lliguicota fly they’re usually bored. They spend a lot of time in the air and they wanted something that would make the miles go by faster.
Their solution? TheHighFlyers.club. This clever Disrupt hackathon hack lets you see when you’re passing cool stuff outside of the plane and even chat with other people on the flight. Read More
With one out of every 64 American children being affected by Autism Spectrum Disorder, it’s a huge problem worth working on. Shriya Sreeju (aged 6) agrees. She presented the Pepper Robot-powered Autism Solutions robot to the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon audience today. Read More
Update: Service has been restored and ESPN provided us with the following statement: “ESPN Fantasy is restored and we will continue to monitor. We identified a backend data access issue and resolved as quickly as possible. The issue did not impact data for teams, leagues or rosters. We sincerely apologize to all ESPN fantasy users.” As if the rising popularity of daily fantasy… Read More
Another hack presented on stage here at the TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2016 hackathon uses AR to contextualize gadgets with the aim of helping consumers better understand what they’re looking at, find a local stockist and even buy the gizmo there and then. Read More
Machine vision technology will let any smartphone or tablet recognize objects so we don’t have to rely on humans or barcode scanners. TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon project PepperPay brings machine vision to the checkout process. You just hold up the item you want to buy in front of a robot wielding a PepperPay-equipped device that can take a picture of it and instantly recognize what… Read More
