This year marks my inaugural attendance at TechCrunch Disrupt. The annual conferences starts with a 24-hour Hackathon at The Concourse event center in San Francisco. Over 125 teams participated in the hackathon. Teams built social apps, widgets, hardware connection tools and interfaced with Ford's SYNC. While not all the teams got very far along with their idea, some are nearly market ready.
A couple of notable projects include: HeatData for mobile UI analytics, Communly to visually follow hashtags, LinkedOut which allows you to find startups with common interests, Livebolt which allows you to unlock doors from your phone, BattleSuck for sentiment analysis on Twitter, and several others. (as of this post we're only about half way through the presentations)
While writing this, InstaMillion pitched - worth checking out if you're raising funds.
more on the hackathon coming later
Hackathon Presentations about to begin.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
The morning's keynotes took off with Ben Horowitz, Bill Campbell, and Jack Dorsey. View the 2012 agenda.
Jack Dorsey (Square & Twitter)
Mayor Cory Booker (Newark, NJ) interviewed about his new startup, a content sharing platform for news videos. Mayor Booker has a true understanding of how to use social media for public good and is a huge supporter of building America's future through education.
Salman Khan (Khan Academy) and Sebastian Thrun (Udacity) talk disrupting education. In Udacity's first test, 160,000 students signed up for a AI class. The top 400 were not at Stanford. Sebastian said that the problem with education is access. To get into Stanford, "you're parents have to do everything right."
Salman Khan said his model works because change occurs with students, parents, and teachers - its not a "top down" approach.
Sal demos (below) his new CS tutorial tools with a real-time code editing video. Definitely worth checking it out.
Next Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) speaks.
Reid Hoffman interviewed by Michael Arrington.
Dave Morin - Path.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11
San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee announces October as Innovation Month. Visit InnovateSF.com for a startup map and more information on startup open house which kicks off Innovation Month. - Maybe an idea for other Startup America Regions.
Learn more about Mayor Lee's SF CIty and tech job creation.
Ron Conway - active? Yes. I couldn't keep up with all the growth initiatives he was going through.
Michael Arrington interviews SF Mayor Ed Lee and Angel Investor Ron Conway.
Kevin Rose speaking on investing and Google Ventures.
Kevin provides thoughts on valuation, due diligence, CAP and other insights into Google Ventures.
Krik Dunn (Cloudera), Aaron Levie (Box), Todd McKinnon (Okta), and Justin Rosenstein (Asana) talk big data and enterprise software.
Michael Arrington (TechCrunch founder) interviewing Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com)
After lunch, the disruption continues with Facebook founder and ceo, Mark Zuckerberg.
Michael Arrington with Facebook founder and ceo, Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuck on IPO, "chil out." Zuck says the true test of Facebook is how they perform over the next 3 to 5 years with mobile.
Michael Arrington, "Before the IPO, you said "We don't make services to make money. We make money to make great services." "Seems like you really meant that.""
Zuck, "ads in mobile will have to be more integrated. Early tests show performance better than desktop."
What's Zuck doing with his time, he says he's spending it on mobile and the Open Graph.
Michael, "Last question. Are you having fun?" Mark, "Its not about fun, its about mission."