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
Some people are simply the worst. For reasons that are my own fault, I’ve recently been involved in series of conversations that I’d really rather not be having. Enter Phoney.club, a mobile-first service that can quickly get you out of sticky situations. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016, a five-person team created a tool built on IBM’s Watson, Node.js and Twilio to call… Read More
“Doing something for children was our first thought,” Camilo F. Buscaron explains, fresh of the Disrupt Hackathon stage. “We wanted to do something in education.” At some point during the 24 hour process, however, things took a turn for the medical, no doubt helped along by the fact that one member of the six-person team (Kate Gofman) was an honest-to-goodness… Read More
Malaria is treatable and preventable. And yet, the World Health Organization reports that almost half the world’s population — 3.2 billion people — are still at risk of contracting the life-threatening disease. At the Disrupt SF Hackathon, a group of teenage girls is gamifying malaria prevention to help halt the spread of the disease. They’re Aruna Prasad, 16,… Read More
BMW plans to accelerate its electric vehicle plans, in the wake of an executive shake-up and leading into a vote planned for the end of this month. The new BMW expanded electric lineup will kindle fully battery-powered versions of the Mini, the BMW 3 Series and the X4 SUV. The company has previously discussed plans to electrify the 3 Series and other vehicles, but German’s… Read More
Everyone knows waiting on hold for a representative sucks, and only a few companies have systems that will call you back when a representative is ready. The result is hours wasted and very often you’ll forget you’re on hold and the representative will hang up, or your call will just drop altogether – both of which lose your place in line. So today at the Disrupt SF… Read More
Every company needs to understand their customers better, and it’s difficult to get a grip without a body of knowledge, especially when the customer is new to you. Imagine being able to access a pool of aggregated data about that customer to help you with that.
That’s precisely what TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon participant Stephen Bussey wants to do with his hackathon idea, the… Read More
Possibly my favorite hack to come out of the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon is solving a so very San Francisco problem. Meter Maid Monitor uses high tech cloud magic to automate the game of dodging meter maids when you’re parked in the 2-hour resident bays around the city. Read More
LoveBot is the thoughtful husband or wife that you aren’t.
Presenting at the 2016 TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon, Guru Ranganathan was sure to specify once he got onstage that his LoveBot doesn’t do what you probably think it does.
Instead of making robot love, this chatbot speaks the love language by sending messages to designated contacts telling them how much you love and… Read More
