Category: Tech news

 Three co-founders from local deals startup Perqy — Dave Idell, Adam Chew and Nisha Garigan — met up this weekend at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon to present their project, which uses iBeacons installed at local businesses, like coffee shops or co-working spaces, to allow customers to reserve a spot and then be automatically charged for the exact number of minutes they worked… Read More

 One of the hacks from our Disrupt NY Hackathon already has a customer: in less than 24 hours, Gruberie set up a site, built an app, and convinced a local diner to install Gimbal beacons so they could test their service in the real world. Read More

 Meet Pager, a neat little hack developed during our 24-hour Disrupt NY Hackathon by a team of three engineers. It’s the perfect idea for small business owners who want to turn their Facebook page into a more traditional website. The team has already worked for restaurant owners, doing freelance work and teaching them how to update their WordPress websites — in many ways, it’s… Read More

 If you saw someone pushing an office chair through New York’s financial district this weekend chances are it was this guy: developer Joe Heenan, who’s just shown off a neat hardware hack aimed at improving office workers’ posture here at the Disrupt NY Hackathon. Read More

 The last few years have been a dizzying and heady time for travel startups, filled with mammoth funding rounds, high-profile acquisitions, and dramatic examples of young startups soaring past incumbents. Last year, Uber eclipsed Hertz and Avis after it raised money at an $18 billion valuation. The rapidly growing company then went on to raise another $1.6 billion at a $41 billion valuation as… Read More

 Here is a fun drone hack from our Disrupt NY Hackathon. FloNew brings together Gimbal beacons, Esri mapping, Nexmo’s communications platform and Parrot’s RollingSpider MiniDrones. Using FloNew’s mobile app, you can automatically send your drone to any of your nearby beacons. Read More

 Brother and sister team Peter Ma and Nancy Ghaly presented Piper Pied, a lossless compression algorithm for online images, at the Disrupt NY Hackathon today. The startup is a “creative spin” on Pied Piper, the startup with a similar lossless compression algorithm for everything that appears in HBO’s Silicon Valley, according to Ghaly. Read More

 What if live streaming, like those streams that run today on apps like Periscope or Meerkat, could be used to save lives? That’s the premise behind an app called Witness, which made its debut today at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon. Built over the course of the weekend, developer Marinos Bernitsas demoed an app that immediately begins recording live audio and video as soon as you… Read More

 If plants could tweet, what would they tell us? Well, the FollowPlants team at the Disrupt NY Hackathon might help us find out. To be clear, the plants aren’t expected to share their thoughts and feelings. (That would be weird, right?) Instead, to use FollowPlants, a grower could install sensors near their plants, then data from those sensors would be automatically translated into… Read More

 There are two things that Andrew Furman loves — riding a Citi Bike, and playing with maps. So when he participated in TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY Hackathon, he mixed these two things together and built a neat little tool. While it is still mostly a work in progress, My Citi Bike is a promising stat page for Citi Bike addicts. Read More

 Chevrolet just announced the final pricing for its 2016 Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid, and it’s surprisingly affordable. If you get the full $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles, the new Volt will come in at $26,495. If you happen to live in California, state-level credits can bring that down to just $24,995. That’s newsworthy because it’s starting to dip into… Read More

 There are a number of apps out there that are made to help you split a bill at a restaurant, but even super ubiquitous ones like Venmo don’t offer a truly seamless experience. At today’s Disrupt NY Hackathon, Venmo software engineer and developer evangelist Cassidy Williams built an app that makes splitting the bill as easy as taking a picture. Read More

 More than a thousand hackers descended on the Manhattan Center in New York City over the weekend to build the best apps that can come out of a 20-hour period, and now is the time we see the fruits of their labor. Each team has 60 seconds to present their app onstage, in front of a room full of fellow hackers, as well as a panel of local judges. 104 teams are set to present, and you can watch… Read More

 Having launched over 35 startups in our decade of operation, we’ve been fortunate to be involved with our share of ‘unicorns’ (Palo Alto Networks, Nimble Storage) and really nice white stallions (Sumo Logic, Trifacta and Snowflake Computing). Given the wide range of companies we’ve worked with—and their equally wide range of success/failure—we’re… Read More

 Silicon Valley and the wider world of technology are mourning the very sudden death of Dave Goldberg, a long time entrepreneur and investor, CEO of SurveyMonkey, husband of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, father and friend to many. The news was made public earlier today in a Facebook post from his brother Robert. Read More