Category: Tech news

A mere 24 hours ago, coders started hacking with hopes and dreams of building the next great app or program. Many participants stayed overnight, fueled on gumption and Red Bull. Others cut out early, apparently satisfied with their creation. But they’re all back now, waiting to present on our massive Disrupt stage. Watch it live!

Update: The presentations are over! The judges are deliberating and will soon announce the winner. Standby.

Click to view slideshow.

More Hackathon Coverage!

• The Disrupt 2012 NYC Hackathon Is Officially On!
• The Art Of Expression: T-Shirts Of The Disrupt NYC 2012 Hackathon
• The Disrupt NYC Hackathon: We’re 8 Hours In
• Meet The Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon Hackers
• This City Never Sleeps, And Neither Do The Hackers

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

There have been a lot of complaints voiced over the last couple of years from people who wish entrepreneurs would address the world’s “real problems” or do “something bigger” rather than create “me too” applications and websites. I’m not a fan of that sentiment but that’s really a whole other post I need to write. In all honesty, there’s a place and need in the world for all sorts of business visions – big and small.

And after watching a “big vision” TED talk from a few years ago, it has changed my life. Jane McGonigal presented this idea: Millions of people around the world are becoming gaming and computer virtuosos. Through video games, people journey to alternate “worlds” where they have epic journeys and become heroes. What if we tapped into that talent and desire for a world changing quest to change our own? What if we changed the idea behind gaming completely to create games that directly had a real world impact?

While at a recent Wild-Aid fundraising event, I was thumbing through the live auctions and found a company called The Blu that is trying to do just that. Created by Academy Award winner Andy Jones (for Avatar), a digital whale named “Big Blu” takes followers on a journey through a digital ocean that the creators hope will teach us all about our underwater counterparts and why we might want to save whales and their underwater friends. I was intrigued, and the whale, in fact, sold for a whopping $10,000. Proceeds go towards both the team behind Big Blu Wild-Aid’s outreach efforts.

Having been so enthralled by the concept, I was determined to meet the founders, so I sent this tweet:

Within 10 minutes, they were at my table. We chatted about the broader goals of The Blu and we talked about Jane’s vision, which they shared. The Blu is a beautiful digital ocean with revenue sharing for both the digital artists that create the fish and ocean life and the partner ocean conservation organizations around the world that support the educational mission. It’s not exactly a game, but it is a real-time immersive experience that by itself is a big idea and can become much bigger.

Revenue sharing with non-profits through games is not a new idea. Zynga raised millions for Haiti and has had other such fund-raising initiatives behind their games, but this is one of the first games/platforms that I’ve seen that specifically is targeting changing something tangible in the real world, and where the product experience is truly aligned with that mission.

Towards the end of our discussion, it occurred to me that they should talk to Dr. Sylvia Earle. She’s a personal hero of mine and this seemed right up her alley with what she’s trying to accomplish. Dr. Sylvia Earle won the TED Prize for her wish to protect our oceans. Sylvia has spent over 50 years exploring and working on ocean exploration and conservation. She spearheaded the Google Ocean initiative to help go beneath the water’s surface in order to help give the world access to what she sees on her regular ocean dives, so that we can help her in her quest to save it.

They were already on it; I had somehow stumbled into a breaking story.

Sylvia teamed up with Sir Richard Branson, Jackson Browne, Dr. Rita Colwell, Jean-Michel Cousteau, Graeme Kelleher, Sven Lindblad, Her Majesty Queen Noor, Nainoa Thompson, Ted Turner, Captain Don Walsh, Neil Young and Gigi Brisson (the founder) to create the Ocean Elders, a group based off Richard Branson’s idea of elders who help guide world leaders and world issues, but specifically focused on the ocean.

These elders are going to get on The Blu, June 8th, in honor of World Oceans Day and interact with members during the launch (remember the digital whale?) into the digital wild. You can ask live questions and join them on their mission to save the ocean.

From their press release they are going to send out after this post:

 What: OceanElders, WildAid, and theBlu.com are holding a global online celebration at theblu.com, in honor of World Oceans Day, June 8, 2012. Entitled, “If You Love The Ocean, Download It!” Interested parties are encouraged to start registering immediately to ensure best interaction with the celebrities and leading ocean advocates expected to participate.

I’m so excited about this. I’ve downloaded The Blu and it runs as a screen saver so you are constantly reminded of our beautiful and bountiful ocean that is sometimes too out of sight and out of mind. I plan on sponsoring loads of little digital fish and I will follow the company closely to see how they evolve.

Even though 70% of the earth’s surface is water, if you took all of it and put it in a sphere of its own, it is quite small in comparison to the Earth. 860 miles in diameter, it is one of the single most important resources to our planet and human-kind, yet no one owns any of it and therefore it has very little protection. Thank you team Blu for dreaming big and using the virtual metaphor to make preservation of the ocean more real.

SpaceX and Elon Musk will not be held from the history books. Last night the company announced that engineers were currently replacing a faulty valve on engine #5, and if successful pending a data review today, the company would attempt a second launch on Tuesday, May 22nd. This comes as SpaceX’s maiden voyage to the International Space Station was cut a half second short by an automated safety function built into the rocket.

SpaceX is attempting to become the first privately owned entity to reach and dock a capsule with the ISS, therefore increasing its chance to win what will likely be a lucrative contract to ferry cargo and humans between Earth and Space. So far these duties have been carried out by the U.S., Russia and Japan. However, as governments are cutting space budget programs they are looking to hand over these relatively nominal duties to the private sector and redirect funds to long-range space exploration and science programs.

Come next Tuesday, SpaceX will attempt to make history again

.

A life-size fire-breathing dragon. A fully robotic calliope band. A full-scale flight simulator built by teenagers. An entire herd of homemade R2-D2s. Electric cars, steampunk fashion, a robot petting zoo, a piano made of bananas, and a cardboard Trojan Horse. Plus a zillion different interactive attractions, classes, and events for kids of all ages. Yes, the Maker Faire is back in town, and only just in time.

It was exactly the tonic I needed after my inability to get excited about the Facebook IPO and my ongoing sense that most of the Valley is focused on building meaningless mobile/social/local/scrapbooking sugar water. This was a place full of people building real, tangible things for the sake of sheer awesomeness. Oh–and while they’re at it, almost as a side effect, hidden behind their Burning Man-esque decor is a community and technology ready to turn the whole planet on its ear.

The maker movement has hit an interesting flux point; its amateurs and enthusiasts, much like the computer geeks of the 1970s and 1980s, now stand on the verge of watching their hobby erupt into big business that will reshape the way people everywhere live. Do I sound hyperbolic? Don’t just take my word for it; listen to the mighty Economist, which in its British understated fashion recently called digital manufacturing no less than “The third industrial revolution.”

“What happens when you give the tools of the industrial revolution to the creative class, for the cost of a bad coffee addiction?” asked Mark Hatch, CEO of TechShop, a company that offers its members access to workspaces armed with industrial-strength toolsets. Then he reeled off some impressive examples: James McKelvey built the first three prototypes of the Square card reader — in two weeks — at TechShop in Menlo Park. That’s also where Phil Hughes and Bob Lipp built their initial fanless liquid-cooling system for server farms, which went on to soundly defeat IBM in a “chill-off.”

TechShop’s Mark Hatch.

But I’m most interested in the economic effects once the maker movement hits the developing world, where the demand for custom parts, recycled materials, and mechanical repairs is immense and inexhaustible. Or consider another of Hatch’s examples: the Embrace low-cost infant warmer which is reportedly on track to save the lives of 100,000 premature babies over the next five years.

And we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. When maker technology and spaces like TechShop begin to metastasize all over the planet, so that anyone and everyone can plausibly build their own solutions to their problems rather than waiting for some industrial-scale corporation to do so, that’s when a lot of lives will really begin to change. And TechShop is indeed expanding, although, alas, only in the USA for now: there’ll be “more than one open on the East Coast by the end of the year,” according to Hatch.

In the interim, drop by a Maker Faire if you can, to catch a glimpse of this nascent future in its larval stage, while it’s still messy and exuberant and fueled by amateurish enthusiasm. (Bay Areans: it’s open until 6PM today.) And the next times your eyes glaze over at the sight of yet another SoLoMo app, consider looking into what’s happening in the world of hand-made hardware instead. If nothing else, it’s awfully colorful:

The Ragtime Castaway Band, a fully robotic giant calliope band.

Laying down a beat with a piano made of bananas and a drum kit built from limes.

That dragon again.

With Disrupt NYC 2012 literally a day away (tickets here), it’s hard not to think about the past success of our former Battlefield startups. I’ve taken a close look at quite a few over the past couple weeks, and to be honest none have come as far as Mint.com. The company has rocketed to success since launching at TC40 in September, 2007, and subsequently winning the top prize at the Battlefield.

The personal finance service has raised a total of $38.1 million over the course of the past five years, and has gone on to be acquired by Intuit for a whopping $170 million in September of 2009.

When I spoke to VP and general manager of Mint, Aaron Forth, he said that two very specific things, the financial crisis of 2008/09 and a launch on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage, were the main factors of the company’s success, both in acquiring users and being acquired themselves.

Here’s what else he had to say:

TechCrunch: So tell me the story of Mint, from launch until now.

Mint.com: It’s been such a great run. We won TC40 in 2007, and that was the first time our product saw the light of day. It was an intense moment, debuting something we had put so much work into.

Winning gave us a great start. We hit 20,000 users within the first couple hours of the announcement. We’ve been on a crazy growth trajectory ever since, and we saw TechCrunch as a catalyst for getting out of the gate.

It’s a special place to launch, particularly for a service like ours. We were trying to disrupt the personal finance world. We were asking for sensitive information, and credentials to financial accounts. What TechCrunch gave us was access to a young, tech-savvy, comfortable-on-the-web readership that was excited about exploring the service. They didn’t get aggravated by security concerns.

It became a very viral growth process for us. We continue to spend very little money in marketing. Our growth is from word of mouth, and the TechCrunch crowd are great amplifiers.

TechCrunch: I seem to get really emotional during the Battlefield. People are launching products they’ve been working on for years sometimes, and it’s a huge moment in their lives. How was the experience of launching on stage?

Mint.com: We came out with a fairly immature product at TC40. So we realized that we had a ways to go. We were very focused on trying to demonstrate the value of the product and into pulling everything into one place. We wanted Mint to do all the work for you, which was our focus at TechCrunch.

But at the time we could only aggregate checking, savings and credit. Over the next two years we worked on rounding out the financial picture, pulling in investments, loan functionality, and adding budgeting features. This type of full view built up quite a lot of data.

We knew where consumers were shopping, and during the financial collapse in 2009, we became a huge resource to the media. Our data was anonymized and aggregated, and we could help the media tell a story with real data. It got our name out, and we continued to see really healthy growth during the economic downturn.

Then we brought out mobile apps. It’s started to really drive us a lot of new users at a very affective acquisition cost. In fact, 60 percent of our new users come from app stores. By then, interest from Intuit and others started to come our way.

As you already know, Intuit acquired us in September 2009 for $170 million, and we’ve continued to grow post-acquisition.

TechCrunch: Do you think your TC40 win may have strengthened the argument for you guys, whether it be with investments of with the acquisition?

Mint.com: Our win absolutely lent credibility. But then there’s the after effect. The amplifier that TechCrunch provides means that a lot of influential people end up following your service and getting buzz going. That, paired with attention from the media gave nothing but legitimacy to what we’re doing.

The idea of aggregated finances has been done before, but it didn’t get traction. We did it substantially differently. Having that kind of platform to be born into the world got our name out there, gave us a lot of users fairly quickly, and made it easy to demonstrate growth.

TechCrunch: So if you had to name a few things that led to your success, what would they be?

Mint.com: I think TC40 made us.

It was the launch at TechCrunch and the work we did to parlay that into making us a reputable service. Another thing that helped was the economic crisis. Being financially conscious was actually cool all of the sudden, and we could help people be cool and not be trapped in the desktop or a legacy personal finance tool. We modernized it and made it mobile.

TechCrunch: There are hundreds of entrepreneurs headed to New York right now, if they aren’t already here. As a winner, and a super successful member of the Disrupt alumni clan, what advice would you give to them as they launch their products on stage?

Mint.com: I think the demo has to impress, which rests on the strength of the product. the demo just makes it believable.

But the thing that really resonates — and you have to realize that the panels are made up of guys who are used to investing and seeing lots of ideas come by — is the value proposition of how your product is going to change lives.

If you have that hook, something that makes people believe in your company, then you have a chance.

The next thing that you’re sure to be challenged with is how you’ll do it better than other people. Be prepared to speak about it in those terms. “Here’s how we’re different and that’s why we’re going to win.”

If you can show the product and communicate a clear value proposition and how you’re going to win relative to competitors you’ll have a successful onstage launch.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

It’s been a long, caffeine-fueled ride for the hundreds of hackers who have set up at our big Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon, but the furious process of taking a wild idea and turning it into something real is finally winding down.

Projects were being finalized, UIs were being tweaked, last minute Red Bulls were being downed — it was a quite a sight to see everyone buckling down for those final few minutes before submissions were due.

It’s almost like a weight has been lifted off everyone’s shoulders though, and more than a few people have chosen to let off some of their stress-fueled steam by running around with the arsenal of Nerf guns we’ve left strewn about.

Oh, but it’s not over yet.

Now that everyone’s hacks have been collected, they’ll all start to take the stage here at Pier 94 and present the fruits of their hard work to our panel of judges. The chosen winners will then have the chance to present their projects at the Disrupt main stage in front of all of our wonderful attendees (but only after they get a few days to catch up on their sleep). On top of that, our API sponsors will be handing our prizes of their own, ranging from cold hard cash to a free Windows Phone.

The Hackathon finals are set to begin in just a few moments, so stay tuned for all the action!

Click to view slideshow.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

Pictures of the Prophet Mohammad have always been a highly contentious issue — they’re not explicitly prohibited in the Qu’ran but many Sunni Muslims forbid the idea, while others do not seem to mind as much. Among the latter group are those who feel that banning such images is a restriction on freedom of expression. The issue at the center of the Pakistan-blocks-Twitter story today has been reported to be around a viral activist campaign that’s been running for the past few years to point attention to this.

But as with the actual blocking of Twitter itself in Pakistan — there has been no official Pakistani government statement about what is actually behind the current Twitter block at the moment (here is a screenshot of an alleged email ordering the block to ISPs with no specific reason behind it) – it’s hard to pin down exactly what content was actually sent around that caused the block in the first place.

And at least one group is raising the question of whether this blockage could be related to the government testing an image filtering service — something with wider-ranging implications.

Update: Twitter is back up, and we have a full, separate post on that here.

A Prophet-drawing campaign started on Facebook in 2010 with a specific page, Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, created in response to the TV show South Park getting some heat for depicting the Prophet. The EDMD page was eventually taken down; but not before resulting in a temporary Facebook block in Pakistan. This year, according to Wikipedia, EDMD was specifically geared at sending pictures around via Twitter, to protest the arrest of Saudi poet/journalist Hamza Kashgari for writing “insulting” tweets about the Prophet. However, there are a number of Facebook pages that come up when one searches for “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” — not clear whether any of these are “official.”

And at least one Pakistani blogger/activist (and, yes, dentist) Awab Alvi has raised the point that there may be no direct blasphemy accusation involved today at all. In a blog post Alvi explains:

Ever since the reports emerged we have asked affected users to help test the site from their ISP connections and within minutes we had hundreds of reports The traceroute shows a very interesting fact, the block is at the DNS level, the url is not resolving right from the get go… My gutt [sic] feeling is that PTA is just testing their URL Filtering system, we had reports of them testing some image servers on facebook last week, and it disappeared by the evening. PTA choose Sunday to avoid any legal backlash exploiting the courts day off….

…The civil society has to its credit a stay order on the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority preventing them from blocking websites obtained on 19th April 2012 which can be used against them.

Once they get through these testing days I am sure it can be later used as and when needed. Though the argument presented by PTA is that it needs this technology to crack down on Terrorism related issue, but one may never know when it can be used for political censorship

Regardless of what is really behind today’s Twitter block, the issue of not being able to easily access the social network clearly touches on a sensitive point in Pakistan around freedom of expression: watch #twitterban to see how people in Pakistan and elsewhere are responding to the story.

We have contacted the Ministry, Facebook and Twitter to try to get more information on this.

Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its people to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication? There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it has become the latest country to ban the use of Twitter. Update: it’s now back up — new post explaining development here. Read below for full story.

According to the blog Dawn, the chairman of Pakistan’s telecommunications authority has today imposed the restriction because of blasphemous content: it reports that Chairman Mohammad Yaseen blocked the site today “because Twitter refused to remove material related to a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.” Facebook, apparently, has complied with the request, says the blog. Others are now starting to report the same, and below the break we have a screenshot of how accessing the site looks from one of our readers in Lahore who says he “cannot access the site at all.”

Getting blocked in Pakistan, if true, is particularly ironic because the two, paired up, played a major role in one of the most important news events to be broken in recent history: the raid and demise of Osama bin Laden, which was tweeted by at least two people watching the raids as they happened in the mountains of the country.

This is a developing (and slightly confusing) story: just yesterday, about 12 hours ago, Senator Rehman Malik, of Pakistan’s People Party, tweeted that nothing was getting blocked: “Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our country and it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors,” he wrote. We have contacted Twitter and Facebook for their responses to this story.

Update: More details coming in from Pakistan’s Express Tribune: The request to block the site was made by the Ministry of Information and Technology, it says, citing a drawing competition (more on that here). The ministry, apparently, made several requests to Twitter, which responded that it “cannot stop any individual doing anything of this nature on the website.”

Directives to block the site were sent to ISPs in several parts of the country, including PTCL Broadband and Wi-Tribe. It also reports that Twitter is still accessible by mobile using secure browsers like Opera, as well as proxies and VPNs like Vtunnel. [original report continues]

This is not the first time that Twitter has been blocked in the country: a similar ban took place in 2010, Dawn reports. That lasted for two weeks.

The move underscores how susceptible social networks remain to higher powers in government. And Pakistan is not the only country to pull something like this.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter  are still officially forbidden in China (although millions use it anyway using VPNs — virtual private networks), with the bans often having strong political overtones around people expressing contrary opinions. Developing countries with big populations represent some of the biggest potential growth opportunities for scale-oriented social networks — when they can get used.

Even developed countries like the UK have floated ideas about how to restrict the flow of information on social networks — this was something that came up last summer during the London riots and the role that some believed services like BlackBerry Messenger played in gangs getting organized to loot.

Update 2: One of our awesome readers in Lahore, Waqas Ali, sent us this screenshot:

Ali has also played a role in a past campaign in the country to keep Facebook from getting banned. He says that he cannot access Twitter at all right now but that a friend is able to use the Opera Mini browser to access the site.

Update 3: Here is a follow up post some back story on Prophet drawings, along with another theory: the blockage could be to do with Pakistan testing an image filtering service, which sounds even wider-ranging in its possibilities.

[Image: Farooq on Flickr]

It’s midnight.

The city is alive with Saturday night fever, and Pier 94 is just as awake, and perhaps a bit more drunk. Tequila shots (and plenty of beers) are flowing, along with Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and Energy Bites.

In other words, this place is like one giant vat of FourLoko, topped with a sprinkling of coders. For the most part, they seem ready for anything. We’ve heard that the majority of them are ahead of schedule, which is good news considering that the alcohol-induced energy rush will only last so long.

We caught up with Jake, a 15-year old hacker who’s back for the second time to code away, along with Matt Hall, co-founder and CEO of Docracy and former Hackathon winner, and both seemed confident in their hacks. However, Jake has all the energy in the world (despite eating basically nothing), while Matt says he’s typing at a rate of one character per minute. Clearly, youth is an advantage once the clock strikes midnight.

We also brought along some Nerf Vortex blasters (the ones that shoot discs) so that the hackers could take a break and let loose a bit, which basically means that the floor of Pier 94 is currently littered with little green discs.

All in all, the hackers are hitting their stride with about 11 hours left to perfect not only their product, but their presentations. We’ll keep you updated on the action as it’s happening.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

It’s been about eight hours since our big Disrupt Hackathon kicked off, and all of our intrepid hackers have been busy letting the code (and the caffeine) fly ever since.

I managed to tear a few of them away from their work (these folks are pretty motivated, so it took a bit of doing) to tell us a little bit about themselves and what they’ve been trying to crank out during the wee hours of the morning.

Devon Peticolas

Devon is a senior at Rutgers University (and the newly-minted president of the school’s undergrad CS club). As you might imagine, he’s no stranger to hackathons either — he can’t quite put his finger on it, but he’s probably in the “double digits” at this point.

He’ll be spending the night working on a mobile web app that allows users to find their friends in a crowd through sort of a hot-and-cold approach — if all goes well, a phone will vibrate when it’s pointing in the direction of a user’s friend, and will vibrate even stronger as the two people get closer to each other.

Peter Verrillo

Peter is the CEO of a company called EnHatch, and during the day he works on creating apps to help promote, demo, and sell medical devices for use in surgery.

He and his team specialize in creating those 3D apps for the iPad, but he’s looking to spend his time at the Hackathon bringing that 3D experience to the iPhone. The app he’s working on tonight deals with slightly less gruesome fare — instead, it aims to walk users through the process of putting together Ikea furniture.

“If Ikea had a good app, this would be it,” he told me.

Dasara Kushi

This is Dasara’s second Hackathon (her first was a photo-centric event), and this time around she and her partner Ronn have decided to spend their night building a web app that uses a computer’s built-in webcam to analyze a user’s face and suggest places for them to go in real time.

“If you look sad, it’ll tell you to go to a comedy club,” said told me.

Their project makes pretty extensive use of the faceAPI, but there’s still plenty of work to do — they’re both still looking at pulling in new data from different APIs, to make the service more robust, but thankfully the night is still young.

Jared Zoneraich

Jared is a 14-year old hacker who attends Bergen Academy, and he’s quite excited to stay up and have fun here at his very first Hackathon. His project of choice? Nothing less than an ad delivery service, of course.

“If I weren’t doing this, I’d be doing homework,” he said.

His hacker idols include Mark Zuckerberg as well as seasoned iPhone cracker George “geohot” Hotz, who just so happened to attend Bergen back in the day as well.

Pavan Krishnamurthy

Pavan and his teammates are cranking away on an iOS app that will tell you what sort of music people in different cities are listening to – a noble and clever goal. Cities that tend to listen to faster-paced music on Rdio are labelled ‘hot,’ while more laid-back cities (Chicago in their mockup) are tagged with the “chill” label.

His team’s mockups look pretty darned solid, but we’ll soon see if the finished product lives up to their ambitions. When he’s not hacking, Pavan works at Bloomberg and (like Jared) looks up to Mark Zuckerberg as his own hero hacker.

Jon Gottfried

Jon works for Twilio (during the day) and dons his hacker cape when night falls. He and his buddies are working on a system for A/B testing Amazon products tonight — not the sexiest idea the in the world sure, but that system is only part of his team’s plan.

They hope that their testing system can be used to determine consumer desires, and use that information to whip up a subscription service — Thingscription — that’s focused on delivering those goods to people on a regular basis.

Octavian Costache

The royally-named Octavian (or Vivi, as he’s also known) and his teammates are working on a second-screen app that provides users with additional context as they watch Game of Thrones, which is probably one of the geekier endeavors we’ve spotted today. Need to figure out why that guy just got stabbed? Or some lesser-known facet of some clan’s convoluted family tree? Keep your eyes peeled on this guy.

Incidentally, he is totally in love with the Khalisi (because of the dragons, not the other thing) and his Twitter is Okvivi.

Karina Ruzinov

Karina goes to Rutgers (there’s a pretty large contingent of Rutgers kids, it would seem) and is spending her summer interning for Refinery 29. She studies Computer Science and Math and she says the student parties are real ragers.

She and her team are working on a app that helps people come up with names for their Hackathon projects. It’s not quite ready for primetime yet, but when it is, it aims to inspire people by providing synonyms and rhymes for words that embody their particular project’s spirit.

Victoria Mo

Victoria is a Master’s Student in Computer Science at Columbia University and her tech role model is none other than Google’s Marissa Mayer.

She and her team are working feverishly on an app that helps users find the hottest clubs in town (and not the hottest clubs in Ontario, as it sounded when we first heard the pitch). They aim to accomplish that by posting images and videos of the clubs’ exteriors so people will be able to quickly determine how popular a particular venue is.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

What a week. After eight years, Mark Zuckerberg takes Facebook public at a $104 billion valuation. His longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan gets her medical degree from the UC San Francisco. He has his 28th birthday.

And to top it all off, they get married today! Mazel tov.

Apparently, the wedding had been in the works for four to five months, according to a source authorized to speak on behalf of the couple. It wasn’t tied to the IPO, but rather Chan’s graduation from medical school on Monday.

About 100 of their closest friends and family showed up at the backyard of their Palo Alto home, thinking they were going to celebrate Chan’s graduation. When they arrived, they were told it was a wedding. “It was a surprise,” the source tells us.

Zuckerberg gave her a ruby ring he designed himself, which Chan had never seen until today. The food came from their two favorite restaurants, Palo Alto Sol and Fuki Sushi, and they shared it family style. For dessert, they served Burdick chocolate mice (which is what the pair ate on their very first date!)

Chan and Zuckerberg met more than nine years ago while at Harvard. In this cute story from the Harvard Crimson seven years ago, Zuckerberg asked her, “Hey Priscilla, do you want a job at the Facebook?”

“I’d love a job at Facebook,” she responded, offering him a Twizzler.

How things have changed. What an amazing ride for the pair and for the company, and hopefully a lot longer to go too.

There’s a strong murmur in the room with random spurts of excitement. Hackers and coders have teamed up and mostly (hopefully) decided on a project. There are only 15 hours left. But night is approaching. That’s when things tend to get loopy thanks to the sudden influx of food and beer.

So far the event has been fantastic. There’s a 3:2 ratio of Macs vs PCs. Epic t-shirts are everywhere. Caffeine is flowing thanks to Red Bull and Outburst Energy Bites.

The event runs until tomorrow morning. Coding a fantastic app is just part of the fun. Starting at 11:00 am tomorrow morning, teams will have one minute to present their project, hopefully winning over the judges for a shot to present at TechCrunch Disrupt. But first the participants need to make it through the night.

Click to view slideshow.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

Hackers aren’t necessarily known for their fashion sense. Most of the time, a t-shirt and jeans is as far as it goes. But there are certain circumstances in which it’s clear that hackers pay a little extra attention after rolling out of bed in the morning. The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is one of those instances, but that doesn’t mean that the go-to jeans and T have been abandoned.

Even better, our hackers are choosing to express themselves through the t-shirts, and I have to say that they’re some of the coolest I’ve seen. Last year in San Francisco, most of our hackers had something on their heads, whether it was a baseball cap, headphones, an Ushanka, or even a shower cap.

This year, it’s all about the classic T, but with a coder’s spin.

Without further ado, these are the most badass t-shirts of the TC Disrupt NYC Hackathon:

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

A GT500CR surveys its less-lucky friends at Plakos Scrap Processing in Brooklyn, NY. Photo by Anthony Barbato

I sat staring at Carroll Shelby’s signature on the passenger-side dashboard of my GT500CR tester.

It was just days before the legendary Texan left us for that big racetrack in the sky. Shelby rocked automotive culture more times than most folks move apartments in his 89 years on earth — from winning Sports Illustrated‘s “Driver of the Year” award in 1956 and 1957 to building the Ford-powered AC roadster that defeated the then six-time champion Ferrari team at the 24 Hours of Le Mans two years straight.

And there I was, getting ready to drive a replica of his souped-up 1967 Mustang many have come to affectionately know as “Eleanor.” Reflecting on my experience now, a week after his passing, I can’t help but feel as if I were fated to drive the car.

Shelby raced, designed and collaborated on countless track and street machines during his illustrious campaign, but among his more widely known works are the snarling GT350 and GT500 Mustang mash-ups manufactured between 1965 and 1970.

Eleanor was one of these beasts. But of course, I wasn’t driving the real thing. My tester was a “restomod,” a version of the original metal that’s been restored accurately, but also upgraded with modern components.

According to Jason Engel, founder of Classic Recreations, the Oklahoma-based company officially licensed to build the Shelby GT500CR, a restomod is often better than the real thing. Technology and auto design have advanced considerably since the muscle cars’ heyday of the late ’60s and early ’70s, and such a machine shows its age today.

“The steering, suspension, skinny tires, heavy motor and dated cooling system mean it’s great for car shows or a quick cruise around the neighborhood, but not much fun to drive on a regular basis,” Engel says.

Restomod shops keep the vintage look, but update the suspension, the steering and the brakes, and also add things like fuel injection and A/C. The finished product has all the charm and appeal of a vintage ride, but with the reliability and driving experience of a modern vehicle. There’s certainly no denying that the restomod GT500CR possesses the soul of original, but I still wouldn’t recommend one of these babies for daily grinds to work in rush-hour traffic.

“Restomod buyers want something representative of history that actually works,” says Tom DuPont, founder of DuPont Registry, a marketplace for fancy, expensive cars, ‘bots and other luxury lifestyle accoutrements. “You want to satisfy that nostalgic urge with a current version of the real thing. Think of it as a practical car you don’t mind leaving out in the rain at the country club.”

Classic Recreations is licensed by Shelby American to build ’66 and ’67 Shelby continuation vehicles. Each one is fitted with an official Shelby serial number that’s included in in the Shelby Registry. CR has been building these cars for only a few years — it picked up the business after the previous licensee, Texas-based Unique Performance, had its door busted in by the police during a fraud investigation for VIN irregularities in 2007.

CR starts with a real ’67 steel Mustang body (not a GT500 body), stripping it down to its skivvies and stuffing it with all manner of modern upgrades: coil-over-shock suspension in the front and rear, cross-drilled and zinc-washed brakes, a Mass Flo fuel-injected 7-liter engine with 545 hp and 5-speed Tremec transmission. Any sheet metal that’s been damaged or allowed to rust over the last 45 years is replaced, and the overall structure is reinforced to handle the extra power. (The engines in ’67 Mustangs varied dramatically, running either 6 or 8 cylinders and starting as low as 115hp.) Shelby-licensed body panels — listed in the brochure as “authentic Carroll Shelby Exterior Fiberglass enhancements” — and signature accessories and gauges complete the look. And, boy, does it look real.

In all, a dozen skilled craftsmen spend some 2,500 hours — about four months — building each one.

Safety cables keep the hood closed so it doesn’t blow off at 110 mph. Photo by Anthony Barbato

I’ve never seen a ninja on a bicycle.

Then again, if a ninja did ride a bicycle, would I see him? Stealth is kind of important for those guys.

So, if you asked me to find the best bike for a ninja to ride, I’d pick this one: BMC’s UC01 city bike.

This thing has stealth in spades. Its matte black paint job is dressed with black decals, and there are just enough red highlights to make it mysterious. But the real stealth feature is the silent Gates carbon belt drive that replaces the typical chain.

For non-ninjas, a quiet ride isn’t really a feature worth salivating over, even though the startling silence of the bike is enjoyable on the occasions when you find yourself away from the noisy traffic of the city. But where the carbon belt really shines is in its practicality. Developed for industrial use (think saws, drills, and other machines with fast-moving drivetrains) and increasingly found on motorcycles, carbon belt drives require almost no maintenance, repel water, dirt and mud, and supposedly last about twice as long as metal bike chains.

Gates’ CenterTrack system, which puts a small ridge down the centerline of the drivetrain, keeps the belt from wiggling from side to side as you pedal. And because the belt doesn’t require oil or lube, you don’t have to roll up your pant leg — a perk I appreciated more than I thought I would. BMC has kept the bike even more low-maintenance by wrapping the belt around an 11-speed Shimano Alfine internally geared hub. Those 11-speeds gave me a wide enough range for all but the steepest climbs here in San Francisco.

One drawback of an internally geared hub is weight, and the UC01 wasn’t immune. The triple-butted aluminum frame and carbon fork are lightweight, and the added heft of the hub is enough to make it noticeably tail-heavy. Between that and the straight bars, the bike is great for cruising along at speed, but doesn’t give a ton of power when accelerating away from a stoplight.

BMC has years of experience building traditional racing bikes — the Swiss company sponsored 2011 Tour de France winner Cadel Evans — but is making its first foray into belt-driven bikes with the UC01. The company has been bringing UC01s on tour for its racing team to use when they want to tool around in town before and after races. (They even produced a special model for Evans’ home use: the super-light MC01.)

To spec out the UC01, BMC mostly uses Shimano’s Alfine components — the company’s high-end “comfort” line — and they don’t disappoint. The hydraulic disc brakes gave great stopping power, but retained sensitivity even in the rain. The slick Shwalbe tires, also standard, are fast yet cushy, and the Fizik grips and saddle are both stylish and comfortable.

These are premium parts, and the bike’s price tag reflects that. The model I rode was the European version of the UC01, which sells for 1,900 euros, or about $2,420. (Later this year, American customers will see a model using the same frame but with slightly different specs priced at $2,000.) You really feel like you’re riding a luxury machine. It’s obvious BMC didn’t skimp anywhere except the pedals, though a lot of bikes don’t even come with pedals to begin with.

One oddity with my test bike was the 26-inch wheelset — the European version of the UC01 I rode comes with the smaller, mountain-bike-sized wheels. The bike is consequently a bit squirrelly until you get used to it. An optimist would call it “nimble,” and that it is, especially in traffic.

The aforementioned, less-expensive American version will sport a more road-friendly 700c wheelset as an option, and will come with an 8-speed hub. Also, the American version of the UC01 only comes with a silver paint job for now, though we’ll have the option of buying the same black-on-black version with the 11-speed hub next year.

So no stealth bikes for us just yet. But then, we can’t all be ninjas.

WIRED Smooth ride, smooth style. High-end parts. Belt drive is as slick and silent as can be. Braze-ons for rear rack mounting. Internal hub offers plenty of options, and you can shift gears even when you’re stopped.

TIRED Frame design is not conducive to acceleration. Aggressive posture may alienate some cyclists. Pricey. Wheelset, gearing and color choices are limited by geographical location.

Photos by Jon Snyder/Wired