Category: Tech news

As smartphone adoption rises and technology companies embrace the technology, QR Codes are becoming more of a mainstream product for businesses, products and brands. QR Codes, which is short for Quick Response, are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone – this can be links, videos, text, photos and more. Today, Y Combinator-backed Paperlinks is launching a new way for businesses to engage consumers with QR codes.

Essentially, Paperlinks creates QR codes for businesses and brands but with a particular focus on the design of the code itself. The actual code can incorporate the logo of a brand or business.

The beauty of Paperlinks is that instead of leading peoples to a web page (as most QR codes do), Paperlinks app and codes open up a landing page with the company’s logo and other modules, which can include Tweets, calendars, video, contact info, photos and more.

Paperlinks has its own free QR reader app available for the iPhone. But the startup’s codes are compatible with any QR reader on a phone (i.e. RedLaser’s QR reader would work on any Paperlinks code).

One compelling feature that Paperlinks includes in the landing page is the ability to add content from the brand or business directly to your own applications. For example, if you scan a QR code for a business, you can click on the contact info in the landing page and it can be added to your contacts. Users have a similar experience when adding events from a calendar and more.

Paperlinks also provides analytics (or “scanalytics”) for businesses, which give then metrics on how effective campaigns are, how long users are spending on landing page, which are most popular modules they are clicking on and more. Paperlinks will also provide print services (i.e. printing QR codes on posters and business cards).

And the implementation is fairly easy for brands. Paperlinks offers brands a web app where they can create a QR code and landing page in minutes. The startup has adopted a freemium model, with the lowest priced plan available for only $25.00 per month.

Current customers include the House of Blues (owned by Live Nation) and Joe’s Jeans. House Of Blues’ QR codes lead to a schedule of concerts at a particular location, which can then be added a scanner’s calendar. We’re told Robert Scoble has been using a Paperlinks business card which has already been scanned over five hundred times.

Not only is Paperlinks, which has only raised money from Y Combinator to date and plans to accept money from the Start Fund, seeing traction among brands, but small businesses are using their technology to add to an online and mobile presence at an affordable price. The startup’s sales have doubled every month, with approximately 2,000 QR code campaigns created in three months.

The startup’s founder, Hamilton Chan, has somewhat of unique background for a startup entrepreneur. He graduated Harvard College and Harvard Law School and worked as a corporate attorney during which he represented NBA star Kobe Bryant on number of business-related transactions. He has also worked in M&A at JP Morgan, in the the entertainment industry at MGM Studios and then took over and turned around his family printing business. Chan says that while his path has been a little unorthodox, he’s always envisioned becoming an entrepreneur.

Next week, I’ll proudly be attending the first Digital Agenda assembly, hosted by the European Commission, in Brussels, Belgium. The purpose of the two-day event is to discuss Europe’s strategy for a strong digital economy by 2020.

Oh man was that a lot of gaming. John, Devin and I just spent the last week deep in the bowels of the massive gaming convention that is E3. We went to the press conferences, played the demos, and livestreamed the show floor thanks to Ustream and John and Jon from TechCrunch TV. It was a bit overwhelming, and, as viewers of our livestream quickly realized, gaming isn’t exactly our niche. But we trudged on, forced to play unreleased games, eat free food and hit on booth babes.

Nintendo and Sony brought their A Games this year with the Wii U and the PS Vita. Both will no doubt be hits in their respective markets. The Wii U will finally usher Nintendo into the age of HD while freeing gaming from a dedicated TV. The Sony PlayStation Vita is a wonder of technology. The graphics pumped out of the small handheld are simply astounding, but the novel control schemes of the back buttons, touchscreen and gyroscope opens up portable gaming to newfound experiences. Oh, yeah, Microsoft added Bing to Kinect proving you can’t win E3 every year.

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So you’ve noticed an elderly relative isn’t driving as well as he used to. There are scrapes on the car, he’s hugging the road’s shoulder driving far below the speed limit. A short trip to the grocery store involves blaring horns from the multiple drivers he unknowingly cut off.

You’re worried about him, but how can you know for sure that he’s a danger to himself and others? Even worse, how do you convince Pep Pep to hand over the keys before he mistakes the gas pedal for the brake and ends up driving his Avalon through the candy aisle at Walgreens?

Objectively, of course — with cold, hard data.

A few years ago, a number of devices hit the market promising to tell parents what misdeeds their teen drivers were committing while behind the wheel. From speed limiters to GPS trackers, these electronic nannies promised to put the brakes on Junior’s hot rodding. It was only a matter of time before savvy marketers figured out that those in the “sandwich” generation are just as worried about their parents as their kids.

CarCheckup is one such device. A nondescript gray box, it plugs into a vehicle’s On-Board Diagnostic II (OBD II) port and records miles traveled, panic braking, heavy acceleration and a myriad of other statistics ranging from RPM to fuel flow.

The company has turned its attention to older drivers, and will soon be redesigning its website to appeal to caregivers of the elderly. It’s a smart move as teen vehicle use falls due to high unemployment for highschoolers, and America’s average age gets further over the hill with each passing second.

With some help from a member of the target demographic (this writer’s father, who just turned 76), we checked out CarCheckup.

Using a Chevy Cruze that neither of us had driven before, and not telling Dad what the purpose of the experiment was (he thought he was test driving the car), we each took the car for half a day and ran identical errands. We each took routes with which we felt comfortable, with a mix of back roads and highways.

When I got back to my computer, I plugged CarCheckup into the USB port and uploaded data to the device’s dedicated website — which only works with Windows and Internet Explorer. After a quick chat with a helpful customer service agent who helped me undo a mistake I’d made entering vehicle information, a series of charts and graphs appeared onscreen.

With Dad behind the wheel, top speed was 66 mph over a 33.8 mile route. He spent most time between 1 and 39 mph, with only one instance each of extreme braking and extreme acceleration — most likely merging on and off the highway. He hit the brakes hard twice.

I fared a little worse. With a top speed of 79 mph, I hit the brakes hard three times, while accelerating and braking in an “extreme” manner once each. It took Dad ten more minutes to get to his destination, but he covered fewer miles and did so without driving aggressively.

The verdict is in: Dad gets to keep his keys, and I should turn on some Enya while I’m driving. Had the car had any problems during the trip that caused the “check engine” light to glow, CarCheckup would’ve diagnosed them, too.

It’s certainly not a perfect system. The website wouldn’t let me remove erroneous data I’d accidentally added, but customer service was extremely helpful in resolving it. Adding a second car costs $25, and lack of compatibility with Macs, more desirable browsers or hybrid cars is a pain.

Also, there’s no official definition on the company website for “extreme” braking or acceleration, though top speed contains an RPM readout. The device itself, though plain looking, is large enough to make more paranoid oldsters fear they’re being tracked by the government — not just their kids.

It’s important to remember that CarCheckup doesn’t track near-misses, ignored stop signs or omnipresent left turn signals. For that, you’ll have to brave the passenger seat.

Still, if you’re worried about Nana or Gramps and fear that it might be difficult to start a productive conversation about restricting an elderly relative’s autonomy, CarCheckup might be a worthy investment. Or, you might be pleasantly surprised to find out your father is a safer driver than you are.

WIRED Confront elderly relatives with definitive proof of their bad driving. Track vehicle speed, acceleration and braking data without oldsters catching on. Boring design helps it blend in.

TIRED Must be used with Internet Explorer and a PC running Windows. Useless if Gramps drives a hybrid or a car made before 1995.

Photos by Keith Barry/Wired

Education-focused startup OpenStudy is a platform for “massively multi-player study groups.” What this means is that students who are studying the same subject like math or writing can ask and answer questions on OpenStudy, which uses Facebook Connect to let users interact and learn collaboratively through profiles and group chat.

OpenStudy aims to make education fun by providing users with gamification (yeah I know how terrible using this word is, but I make an exception for things education-related) elements like medals and achievements for completing actions like answering a question quickly or answering  more than ten questions. You can also fan people you’d like to follow, giving users incentive to engage and contribute.

“We want OpenStudy profiles to become like LinkedIn for education,” says Marketing Manager Jon Birdsong, ”An accurate and evolving representation of your academic persona.  We want our students to become heroes to their peers – and we want to make sure everyone knows when they are.”

Having just come out of beta in February OpenStudy now has 40,000 registered students in over 1,500 schools in 143 countries. There are 20,000 questions being asked monthly in the math group alone.

And the institutions that have forked over cash to support OpenStudy are impressive: the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Georgia Research Alliance and the Gates foundation. Most recently the startup partnered up with MIT OpenCourseWare to let students work together on over 65 courses.

Future plans for the startup include adding even more gamification features like referring questions to Facebook Friends, a groups function (“teams”) and the widgetization of OpenStudy profile credentials so users can add them to other sites. “We want our students to become heroes to their peers – and we want to make sure everyone knows when they are,” Birdsong explains.

Here’s a video of CEO Chris Sprague demoing the platform, below.

Amid all the big announcements at this year’s WWDC keynote, there was an undercurrent that was subtle, but important.

“It just works.” Steve Jobs kept saying this over and over again on stage. When Jobs does this, it’s never an accident. It’s a message.

And it’s a message that was underscored by another word. “Automatically.” Jobs must have said it a couple dozen times during the keynote.

So what is the message?

Though Apple stumbled out of the gate with MobileMe, and it never really took off (due to a steep $99 annual price point), Apple is now going all-in with their cloud strategy. But they’re not doing it by simply tacking on cloud storage to their existing arsenal of products. They’re attempting to redefine what the “cloud” is.

At one point during the keynote, Jobs noted that some people think of the cloud as a hard disk in the sky where you put files in and then take them out. He even took a small shot at red-hot Dropbox. But as Apple sees it, the cloud is something much more. “The truth is on the cloud,” is how Jobs put it.

John Gruber correctly called that iCloud is essentially the new iTunes. That is, it moves the digital hub from the desktop computer to the cloud. But Apple is aiming beyond even that.

With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic.

Compare this to Google, the company perhaps most associated with the cloud. Google’s approach has been to make the cloud more accessible to existing PC users. They’re doing this by extending familiar concepts. Google Docs is Microsoft Office, but in the cloud. Your main point of interaction is a file system, but in the cloud. Gmail is Outlook, but in the cloud. Etc.

Meanwhile, another company now largely associated with the cloud, Amazon, has essentially turned it into one giant server/hard drive that anyone can use for a fee. But it takes developers to build something on top of it to give users a product to use. Some are great. But many again just extend the idea of the cloud as a remote hard drive.

While the fundamentals are the same, Apple’s approach to the concept of the cloud is the opposite of their competitors. Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works. When Jobs gave a brief glimpse of their new North Carolina datacenter that is the centerpiece of iCloud, he only noted that it was full of “stuff” — “expensive stuff,” he quipped.

The diagrams Jobs showed on stage as to how iCloud works were as simplified as possible. Had it not been announced at a developers conference, I’m not sure Apple would have even done those. Instead, the focus would have been even more on the demos. You’re working on a document in Pages on your iPad, you move over to Pages on your Mac, and there it is. It even remembers where you were last editing. You download a song to your iPhone, you pick up your iPad, there it is.

It all just works.

And that speaks to the larger game here. Apple has been going out of their way to avoid using the word “syncing” with regard to iCloud. That implies that files exist in one place and need to be moved. But again, even that’s too technical for the story Apple is weaving. With iPad/iPhone and now OS X Lion, you don’t save documents anymore. They save automatically — but an easier way to think about it is that they just exist, as is, in realtime on all your devices.

The truth is that they exist on your machine, then on iCloud — again, the “truth” — in a cycle. But you don’t need to know any of that. They just exist. Who cares where as long as they’re right there on all your devices when you need them?

Files are something Microsoft worries about. Files in the cloud are something Google and Amazon worry about. Apple’s iCloud is about opening an application and the thing you want to access being there.

That also speaks to a key difference between Apple and their competitors. With MobileMe, Apple put a fairly heavy emphasis on the web component. They spent months working on and reworking beautiful web apps for the service. During the iCloud keynote, there was no mention of a web component. For what it’s worth, we’ve heard that the MobileMe apps on me.com will be altered to work with iCloud apps, but that may be a ways off. And that will certainly not be the primary emphasis. The primary emphasis will on the cross-device native apps with iCloud magic.

That’s the opposite of Google’s approach — at least their Chrome/Chrome OS approach. That product is only about the web. That’s where everything exists, and syncing also happens automatically thanks to that. In a weird twist, in that regard, Chrome OS is perhaps the closest thing to Apple’s iCloud vision. When you boot up a Chromebook and enter your password, everything appears. Again, like magic.

With Chrome OS, everything is always there because everything only exists in the cloud. But Google has been bending over backwards to tack on a file management system to Chrome OS. That weakens their cloud argument, in my view. But again, their aim is to ease the transition of current PC users to the cloud.

But Google’s position is especially odd because they have Android as well. Yes, cloud syncing is a big component of that OS and has been for a while. But it’s the Google approach. It’s files, and uploading, and syncing. Some of it is automatic, some is not. It requires some thought. It sort of just works — as long as you know what you’re doing.

And the truth is that this is the point where we may really start to see some truly fundamental differences between Google and Apple after the past few years going head-to-head with feature matching. Apple is going after consumers who have absolutely no idea what the cloud is, and don’t care. Apple is saying they shouldn’t care. It all just works.

Google seems to be aiming more for users who understand current computing paradigms and want to transition that knowledge to the future of computing, the cloud. Power users, if you will. Many of the people reading this post are in this camp. But there are many more who are not.

Apple has rethought and rewritten their apps — including their desktop apps — from the ground up to be woven with iCloud fabric that a user won’t see. Google wants the users to be able to see that fabric if they choose to, and in many ways, encourages it as sort of a safety net in the transition to the cloud.

It is two different approaches to the same thing, the cloud. And Apple doesn’t believe that Google can match them even if they wanted to because they don’t have complete control of their ecosystem in the same way that Apple does. “They can never make this so it just works,” Jobs stated at one point.

In Apple’s core vision, there are three types of products that must seamlessly work with one another: phones, tablets, and the recently “demoted” PC. With Android, Google is currently only strong in phones. Tablets aren’t taking off for them yet. And there is no PC presence — well, beyond the web, which again runs into the Chrome OS bifurcation problem.

With that in mind, it may end up being Apple that helps transition users to the cloud, instead of Google despite their emphasis on PC norms.

“You know, if the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software in them is their soul,” Jobs said on Monday. Apple is now more clearly than ever betting that will not be web software, but native software backed invisibly by the web. Google’s position is decidedly less clear. With the existence of Chrome OS and Android, they’re currently betting on both. That dichotomy screams anything but “it just works.”

[image: flickr/sip khoon]

Guerillapps, a social game maker, debuted a cool new Facebook game at Disrupt NYC that is adding a new spin to green games. What’s more, from what I can tell, Trash Tycoon is the first “upcycling” game to hit the Facebook platform. But what is this “upcycling”, you ask? Upcycling is the process of converting waste materials into new products of better quality and higher environmental value, so when gamers play Trash Tycoon, they take on the role of recycling entrepreneurs responsible for doing just that.

Gamers become the stewards of their city, a la Sim City, fighting litter and trash wherever it rears its ugly head. Players earn game money and points by collecting trash and upcycling it to create new products out of trash, just like its sponsor TerraCycle does in the real, green world.

Guerillapps, which recently received a $500K in seed funding from Rhodium, will be keeping Trash Tycoon in private beta until later this month, but TechCrunch readers can get an early taste of the game here.

One of the many cool parts about Trash Tycoon is that it’s trying to separate its game from the traditional Facebook social game model by adding synchronous play, offering realtime multiplayer, so that users can communicate and collaborate in realtime during play, banding together with friends to attack their city’s trash heaps.

Trash Tycoon is also putting an interesting spin on its revenue model, offering seamless inclusion for green brands right in the gameplay. This may sound slightly off-putting, after all, who wants to play a game with brand logos stamped on every object? But Trash Tycoon’s brand integration isn’t offensive: The energy items players need to collect may be branded products, as will the factories players build to recycle waste. But these brand tie-ins have real world justification. The piece of gum you collect might be Wrigley’s, and so on.

“We integrate the same real world dynamics of TerraCycle brands in the game in attempt to avoid things like banners, or in-your-face branded items, for example”, said Guerillapps Co-founder and CEO Raviv Turner.

And the great thing about Trash Tycoon’s brand integration is that it’s enabled by TerraCycle’s business model. Just as TerraCycle works with major partners to run packaging reclamation programs, which pay schools and other community groups to collect the sponsors’ packaging to later be upcycled into items that bear the sponsor’s brand, this process is mirrored in Trash Tycoon. The company is also able to leverage the existing user bases of its partners, like the 24 million at TerraCycle, which significantly helps write off user acquisition cost. It’s a ready-made user base.

For Guerillapps, it’s not just about offering a game-ified product or game-ified approach to green behavior and upcycling, it’s about creating a playable social game that incorporates reality into the virtual world. Waste Management built a Facebook game to teach users how to use its interactive recycling kiosks last year, but the game still hasn’t taken off (only 6,400 montly active users), and Guerillapps hopes that by incorporating brands and real world concepts like recycling and upcycling organically into the game, as opposed to a game-ified, education-entertainment gameplay experience, the player will learn but do so with greater enjoyment.

To build a more playable game, Guerillapps brought on two veteran game designers Greg Costikyan and Naomi Clark (who has consulted and developed concepts for clients and publishers including PBS, Disney, Fisher Price, Wizards of the Coast, Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Major League Baseball), who are both responsible for Trash Tycoon’s addictive design and gameplay. The veteran designers goes towards alleviating any concern that this is just another Facebook game ported from another medium or whipped off in 24 hours.

Trash Tycoon has partnered with Treehugger.com and also donates 10 percent of revenues from its virtual currency to CarbonFund.org and plans to later introduce a “Play to Offset” icon, so that if you, say, order an Amtrak train ticket, or buy a flight ticket online, CarbonFund partners will present the “Play to Offset” icon so users can go play Trash Tycoon and offset their carbon footprint, instead of just paying with a credit card.

Turner says that that Guerillapps next steps involve taking the Trash Tycoon model to other verticals, like energy, health care, parenting, and more. The company isn’t looking to be the next CityVille, he says, the team wants to design games around affinity groups, which offer a more active and social (and socially active) community of users looking to learn and have fun while doing it. The startup is also currently in the process of raising its second round.

Editor’s Note: This guest post written by former TechCrunch writer Steve Poland (@popo). His last post was Twitter And Facebook Turn Everyone Into An Affiliate Marketer.

Signing up for Twitter at South by Southwest 2007, I can remember those feelings of “Wow, this is going to be big.” That instant feeling of knowing you’re seeing the future and the world doesn’t even have a clue yet. It’d be years before my friends would finally take the leap and get their own Twitter accounts (even if I knew Twitter usernames in 2007 were like domain names in 1995).

There have been other services I’ve thought would be big, but only one other time in the past four years have I been awe-struck. That other moment was earlier this year (SXSW 2011) when Foursquare unveiled v3 with the “Explore” functionality—I knew that was a life-changer. I’ve dug Foursquare since the early days, but this third version is where it became obvious that every person in the world would benefit from using this service.

The third magical “wow” moment just happened this week, and it’s Turntable.fm. The early adopting tech elites are eating this site up, just as they did Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, and others. Barring some awful interference, this app is going to break big and change things.

I’m an avid music listener. I crave new music and love discovering new music before most anyone has heard of it, just as I love discovering new startups before anyone has heard of them. When I find a new song or band that I think is awesome, I love sharing it with my friends (and anyone who will listen). What has been missing is the social aspect of being able to share in the listening experience of a song with my friends. So far, I’ve only been able to do this if we’re physically together (at my house or in my car, typically).

I don’t think I was alone in wishing for a service where I could hit play on a song and any friends I can grab online could share in the experience of listening to the song together—and (text) chat about the song in realtime. For years I have had to resort to non-realtime methods of emailing a song link to friends, which typically doesn’t get listened too, because they aren’t necessarily in a situation where they can listen when they see my email. And when they are in a situation to listen, my email isn’t top-of-mind—so I get zilch feedback from them in the “heat of the moment” when I’m dying to play them the song, right this freaking minute.

Turntable is a game changer. When Stickybits didn’t take off the way they hoped, Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen pitched existing investors ($1.9mm raised) this idea and ran with it. Erick was the first to write about Turntable when he stumbled into a room with Chris Sacca and Hunter Walk spinning tunes, but in summary the concept is what I just explained. You join via Facebook; for controlling growth, you must have a friend on Facebook that is already a user of the service at the moment. After logging in, you browse the different music rooms or create your own. If there’s an open DJ spot (five maximum to a room), you click “Play music” and your avatar transports to the stage. Queue up some songs—they have an extensive library or you can upload your own. Songs played in the room rotate evenly between the DJs. Listeners in the room can then “awesome” a song (and their head starts to bob, and the DJ gets a point) or they can “lame” a song. As users earn more points, they unlock different avatars. Listeners can also add the song to iTunes, Spotify, Last.fm, or their Turntable queue.

The only issue I thought Turntable had was needing to deal with the record labels, but it appears they are licensing the streaming catalog thru MediaNet. Turntable does possibly open up some exposure by allowing users to upload their own tracks, but it seems those (maybe) are only accessible to be played by the uploading user.

As soon as you DJ your first song, you’re addicted. Just as you crave to be retweeted or replied to on Twitter, and just as you crave to have something liked or commented on in Facebook, you crave to have people chat about your song or start bobbing their heads in Turntable. Usage is super sticky—you hang around because you want to play your next track and you’re curious what’s going to play next.

Listening to music has never been this fun. Turntable is also a great discovery tool since everyone is curating all-the-songs-in-the-world to share the very best they’ve ever heard… with you. Oh, and do you remember chat rooms? They’re back. I haven’t used one since the 90s and now I’m non-stop chatting in these Turntable chat rooms and meeting people.

Pandora has some competition. Granted, you can be assured when you play a station on Pandora that the tunes will stay in the same vibe you chose—and if you’re in a work environment, you might want to ensure NSFW tracks don’t play. Pandora lacks the social listening aspect of Turntable though and if there’s only one station playing in your office, Turntable gets everyone’s songs in rotation.

Turntable just introduced a killer feature this morning, the “fan” feature—it’s basically like Twitter’s “follow” feature. When you become a “fan” of another user, you are notified by email whenever that user starts DJing on Turntable. When I know my friend is in a room DJing, I’m likely to join them. The Turntable roadmap has plans for an iPhone app so that not only can you DJ and listen on the road, but at parties with friends you’ll be able to all share the DJ responsibilities.

If MySpace was smart and given a new leash by News Corp, they’d be buying Turntable right now—it would breathe new life into their social network. Turntable doesn’t need them though—the only question is how long they can keep things on the down-low.

Photo credit: Flickr/Drew “Rukes” Ressler

Follow @dens@dens
Dennis Crowley

Okay, totally in love with http://turntable.fm after just 5 minutes. Nice work guys!

about 7 hours ago via webReplyRetweetFavorite

Follow @sacca@sacca
Chris Sacca

Sonos + turntable.fm = friends DJ'ing in every room of my house.

May 27, 2011 8:24 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

Follow @jeff_weinstein@jeff_weinstein
Jeff Weinstein

@seth wow. turntable.fm might have just changed my work day. goodbye @pandora 🙂 good work!

June 5, 2011 7:10 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

Follow @tristanwalker@tristanwalker
tristan walker

ok….turntable.fm is WAY too dangerous. Past two hours and going strong. Great DJs up in here! http://t.co/nnxD6uL (@egleason6 @mh)

about 4 hours ago via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

Disrupt NYC has wrapped and tickets are already on sale for our next Disrupt, which we are incredibly excited to be bringing back to San Francisco this September. However, before we start revealing what we have in store for this fall, we wanted to recap everything that went down in New York one last time. There were too many good things that happened, many of which we know some of you have missed since we keep getting questions about it. Therefore, we wanted to go over our favorite moments, some funny quotes, a few surprises, and a few more highlights for each day we were in New York City. For today, we wanted to recap our incredibly popular Hackathon and show you a couple videos you may have missed of Startup Alley.

Pier 94 was packed with hundreds of brilliant individuals a couple weekends ago in New York City. They stayed up hours upon hours coding, hacking, and networking furiously. It was our biggest Hackathon to date. We had around 500 participants from around the world, getting by on determination, excitement, snacks, and Red Bull.

As the Hackathon started, we had the chance to walk around and meet the participants. One of the earlier ones that stuck out in our mind was Jake Essman, an adorable 14-year-old self taught hacker, who was urged by his mom to join. Coding since he was ten, Jake said that coding is just a hobby and his career aspirations lie in the field of medicine. Even though Jake wants to be a doctor, we thought he made an incredibly inspirational hacker.

After the Hackathon concluded, we had the chance to sit down with him and his team, Buyby, after their Hackathon presentation. Watch what Jake and his team had to say in the video below.

Another highlight for us was when we ran into Steve Martocci, co-founder of Hackathon alumni GroupMe. We got the chance to ask Steve about his thoughts on how to maximize the Hackathon experience. He said, “Don’t listen to me.. talk, go, and build something… Focus on what you’re good at, and solve a real world problem. Do as little work as you can – it gets stressful – use the tools that you have (like Twilio) to make it happen.” And after the Hackathon? First, “Sleep.” Then, use the tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt, to “Walk the floor, show people what you did… [and] get decent exposure to investors.”

Pretty solid advice from an alumni who has gone on to raise $10.6 million since their Hackathon debut last year. To catch more on what he said, check out the video below.

As the hackers brainstormed and coded on whatever they could find, we were lucky enough to capture some of our favorite pictures.

To start things off, we found a few hackers taking some time to release pent-up coding aggression by pitching toys against the wall…

We saw many adult beverages being gulped down…

Twitter was blowing up with funny Hackathon quotes….

We caught some hackers taking a break outside in the New York air…

and we saw glimpses of code on whatever materials the hackers could find..

All in all, the Hackathon was an ultimate success. For a more in-depth look into the NYC Hackathon, make sure you check out our Flickr page for more pictures, live videos of the Hackathon plus the winning presentations here, and the full list of winners here.

After the Hackathon concluded, the Disrupt conference and Startup Alley began. Startup Alley lasted the whole three days during the Disrupt conference and we have some of our favorite footage of the enormous, captivating hall below.

Startups from all over gathered at Pier 94 to show off their companies and products. Our very own Rip Empson took some time to walk around the alley and talk to the startups that caught his eye. For footage of what he found, check out the video below. We’re curious, which startup in Startup Alley was your favorite?

John Biggs and Matt Burns from CrunchGear also got involved and interviewed some of their favorite startups. See if you can find the diamonds in the rough by watching the video below.

There were many other moments in Startup Alley that we encourage you to check out when you can. To view all of the pictures, be sure to go to our Flickr page and for more footage and interviews from all of the companies at Startup Alley, be sure to go to our video page and watch them here.

As always, a huge thank you goes out to our sponsors and partners for making all of this possible. Thank you to Palantir for giving $1,000 of Amazon Web Services to the company with Best Data Integration during the Hackathon, which went to Who Data. And to TokBox for giving a 16GB Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for best use of the OpenTok API (the device will be released June 8) to Movie Wars.

Thank you to Red Bull, for not only providing the never-ending caffeine, but for also previewing the hacks from their upcoming Creation Event in NYC on July 10th.

A special mention to the team at AllStateBanners.com for making us look good in New York City.

And to Giovanni Cabrese and Themendous for the original TechCrunch Disrupt sculpture, which you can see at top.

If you would like to attend Disrupt SF this September, extra early bird tickets are on sale now.

If you’d like to become a foundational part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jeanne Logozzo.

We had a pleasant morning checking out the Sony and Nintendo booths, getting hands-on with a few launch games and feeling up the hardware. The device really is remarkably light; you’d expect such a powerhouse to be heavy and bulky, but it’s quite petite. Unfortunately the units there were all tethered, and all their untethered units were broken. Just block out the cords with your hand and it’s almost the same.

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Wow. Fusion-io, the developer of flash- memory technology for companies, just upped the final price of its IPO to $19 per share, after increasing the range yesterday to $16 to $18 per share from $13 to $15 per share. At $19 per share, the company is valued at $1.47 billion dollars with 77,809,084 shares outstanding at the time of offering.

The company, which will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “FIO” tomorrow morning, is offering a total of 10,755,607 shares in its IPO and aiming to raise as much as $254.6 million. Another 1,544,393 shares are being offered by selling stockholders. In addition, the underwriters have an option to purchase up to an additional 1,845,000 shares from Fusion-io on the same terms and conditions.

Fusion-io’s enterprise flash-based drives help store data in smaller devices and is known for being an incredibly fast data storage solution. Facebook is a client of Fusion-io, which has raised $110 million from Meritech Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Triangle Peak Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

While the IPO market has been heating up for tech companies of late, it’s still unclear whether Fusion-io will have a strong showing on the public markets long-term. In the nine months that ended March 31 (its fiscal year ends June 30), revenue quintupled to $125.5 million and gross profit quadrupled to $65.7 million. But as Dow Jones notes, 10 clients account for 91% of the company’s revenue and Facebook alone generated 47% of Fusion-io’s revenue in the past nine months.

As we saw with LinkedIn, the company’s stock opened high level ($83 per share), but fell in the weeks after, popped on first day of trading but have subsequently dropped to $75.91 per share.

“Building on someone else’s platform is a good idea, if you have your eyes wide open,” investor Fred Wilson told a packed room of entrepreneurs on Monday night at an Internet Week event in New York City. He was answering a question about whether or not it’s a good idea for startups to build on another company’s platform, and we caught his response in the video above.

Wilson knows a lot about this subject. He sits on Twitter’s board and a year ago wrote a blog post warning startups in the Twitter ecosystem ti stop “filling holes.” Twitter then proceeded to fill those holes itself by buying or building various clients and other services, and is still filling them to this day (its new pictures feature is a case in point).

While this issue has created a lot of angst in the developer community, Wilson is very straightforward about it. “You should expect eventually the platforms you are building on to do something against your interest. One day you may wake up and discover that platform is competing with you, and that sucks.” He encourages his own portfolio companies to avoid being in that situation, and to create direct relationships with their customers. Ironically, the one exception that proves this rule, Zynga with Facebook, is also one of Wilson’s investments. Watch the video, he gives some good advice to startups on how to use other platforms to their benefit without becoming dependent on them.

Another topic off discussion that night was startup valuations, which we captured in the video below. Wilson is still not saying the “bubble” word, but notes, “It’s not the most attractive time to be making investments.” Chris Dixon of Founder Collective and David Lee of SV Angel agree, but they are all still investing. The danger, they warn, is that entrepreneurs might take money at too high a valuation now and a few years down the road face a down-round if they don’t meet investors’ outsized expectations.

But Wilson notes that as investors they are benefiting from the high valuations because all the startups they invested in a few years ago are now worth that much more. He disagrees with Michael’s ffirst Blubble post in which he points out that VCs are talking up the bubble in order to talk down valuations because “it is not in our interest to talk down valuations.” It is, however, “just irresponsible.”

If you enjoy these videos, you can also hear what these three investors have to say about the uselessness of software patents.

Talk about a happy birthday. SnapGuide, a stealthy mobile startup founded by Daniel Raffel and Steve Krulewitz, has raised a funding round totaling over $2 million. The round just closed today — which also happens to be Raffel’s birthday.

Leading the round is Index Ventures (Mike Volpi will be taking a board seat), with participation from Atlas Ventures (Jeff Fagnan) and a number of angels including Dave Morin, Gary Clayton, SV Angel, and our own Michael Arrington.

So what exactly is SnapGuide? Aside from the name, there isn’t much to go by on the company’s homepage, which has the tagline “show and tell made mobile”. But we did get a bit more information.

In particular, Clayton’s investment is interesting — he’s the Chief Creative Officer over at Nuance, which is known for its powerful voice recognition software. Raffel isn’t sharing much about the company at this point, but he did confirm that SnapGuide’s apps include significant voice recognition capabilities.

Raffel is best for being one of the original creators of Yahoo Pipes, and Krulewitz was on Google’s Chrome team working on Sync — both left their jobs last summer and began working on this project in February.

The SF-based company is hiring.

Disclosure: As mentioned before, TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is investing in SnapGuide. You can find his investment policy here.

Last year, Twitter held the first Chirp, a large developer conference in San Francisco akin to Facebook’s f8, Google’s I/O, and Apple’s WWDC. Everyone assumed this would become an annual thing. Then they decided not to do one this year. And that’s too bad, because this may be the most important year to have one as much of ecosystem is questioning Twitter’s intentions for their platform.

But the lack of an official conference isn’t stopping some developers. They’ve decided to organize their own developers conference for the Twitter ecosystem. The Twitter Developers Summit will take place this July 26, in San Francisco, an invite informs us.

So who’s participating?

HootSuite, keepstream, KLOUT, CoTweet, and Bottlenose are all on the banner. More will likely come. One name not anywhere to be seen: Twitter. We’ve reached out to the company to see if they plan to participate at all, but as of right now, they’re clearly not involved.

EngageDigital, the company behind the event, writes on the site:

The Twitter Developer Summit takes place July 26, 2011 in San Francisco. The Twitter developer ecosystem is changing rapidly, and with the cancellation of Chirp, our Twitter Developer Summit is the best place for twitter-focused developers (from startups to Fortune 500) to network with like minded developers and discuss best practices: what is working today, what is changing, and what to expect tomorrow.

Sounds like Twitter would almost be necessary to comment on a lot of that, no?

Another company nowhere to be seen: UberMedia. Twitter’s nemesis would also seem like a natural fit here if Twitter itself isn’t participating. This is pure (juicy) speculation, but perhaps they haven’t been invited yet in the hope that Twitter will agree to participate.

Meanwhile, Twitter has been hosting smaller events for developers, such as the first official Devnest in May. They will also hold one related to the newly announced iOS integration. That event was actually supposed to be tonight but has been changed to tomorrow night.

Registration for the Twitter Developers Summit will begin on June 24.

According to Twitter PR representative Carolyn Penner, Twitter has started rolling out its new photo feature to a small subset of users outside of employees. The feature was live for employees as of last week, but it is hitting the rest of Twitter users starting this week. Our own @Alexia is one of the lucky users to get the service first.

As we reported last week, the new feature allows users to upload photos, which show up in your actually Tweets and timeline. Because some users now has the service, we now know more details on how it works. For example, the camera feature is located next to “add your location” in the Tweet UI (see screenshot below) and from there you’ll be able to upload a photo as you Tweet on Twitter.com and eventually via mobile clients.

For now, the service doesn’t seem to work on mobile clients, and defaults to yFrog’s photo sharing service.

Twitter is partnering with Photobucket to host these photos but you don’t need a Photobucket account to use it. And photos are only visible on Twitter, and not on Photobucket’s image sharing site. Beneath every photo is a “powered by Photobucket” note.

And if you click on a photo in a user’s stream who you are not following, Twitter will show you this message, “This Tweet is from someone you’re not following. The media they’re mentioning could be anything, even something you might find offensive” with an option to display the photo. You can also choose to always display photos from users who you are not following or following. You can also turn off auto-display in Settings as well.

Twitter just announced a pretty in-depth integration with Apple’s iOS 5, which also leverages the new photo service. Here’s what the iOS/Twitter integration looks like.