Category: Tech news

The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is drawing to a close, with over 300 hackers battling through the night, fueled by pizza and caffeine. The 90-second demos of the final products took place this morning and afternoon, with one winner (out of 60 teams) left standing. Every team that makes it through the Hackathon will get a free pass to Disrupt, but only the winning team will bask in the glory of presenting their creation on stage this Wednesday (alongside Startup Battlefield companies).

Our esteemed judges include Soleio Cuervo, Chad Dickerson, Tarkih Korula, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Shervin Peshavar, Don Dodge, Cyan Banister, Tom Igoe and our own Michael Arrington.

The winners are FutureMario, Twitter Demographics, and Worst Phone Ever. Future Mario is an application that allows you to play the Super Mario Brothers with voice, by blinking your eyes, and by tracking your eyes. Twitter Demographics mashes up Tweets with geolocation and demographic data. So if you search for a specific keyword on the application, you can see the percentage of Twitterers who Tweeted about the keyword within certain income ranges and even by political party.

Worst Phone Ever searches for baseband crashes on your desktop, uploads them, and saves them to a database. The results are tabulated and added to the total, eventually leading to a detailed class-action lawsuit.

Runners up include an iPad suction holder and Mr. Stabby, a robotic concoction made by the folks from NYC Resistor.

Also check out ZDNet’s coverage of the event.

We just saw a great product at the TC Disrupt Hack Day. It’s basically a class action lawsuit generator against AT&T that uses your actual call drop data to tabulate how many times your phone crashed and how many times you’ve been generally hosed by AT&T.

The site is worstphoneever.com and it searches for baseband crashes on your desktop, uploads them, and saves them to a database. The results are tabulated and added to the total, eventually leading to a detailed class-action lawsuit.

Continue reading…

One of the cooler, subtle things that Google showed off at Google I/O was its new Android Cloud to Device Messaging service that’s a part of Android 2.2. The “don’t call it Push Notifications” service allows you to automatically send links from your computer to your Android device.

Everyone is talking about the ability to push Android apps (and eventually music/media) to your devices — and rightly so. But also useful is this link push ability. For example, if you looking at a page on your computer than you want to take on the go (something I do all the time), you can now just use a Chrome extension and with one click, it automatically appears on your phone.

And it’s even more useful with maps. If you’re looking up an address in Google Maps on your computer, you can click the extension and it will automatically push it to your Android device — and open it in the Maps app.

This sort of reminds me of the television show 24. Jack Bauer is constantly telling Chloe O’Brien to send stuff to his phone — and magically it always seems to appear in seconds. With this, that would actually be possible.

Of course, there’s a downside to this too. Imagine a friend or co-worker is at your computer where you have the extension installed. They could easily push you any page. Porn, Rickrolls, etc — imagine the possibilities!

Watch it in action with both a link and a map below.

If you have Android 2.2 (and if you don’t yet, be patient, it’s coming) go to the Chrome-to-Phone Google Code page for instructions on how to make this work. Basically, you just install a Chrome extension and an Android app and you’re good to go. This all works because it syncs through your Gmail address over AppEngine.

Update: Pastefire (which we covered in January) does something similar for the iPhone. But again, the Android way is using something Google specifically built-in to Android 2.2.

The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is drawing to a close, with over 300 hackers battling through the night, fueled by pizza and caffeine. The 90-second demos of the final products will commence now and by 2pm, one winner will be left standing. Every team that makes it through the Hackathon will get a free pass to Disrupt, but only the winning team will bask in the glory of presenting their creation on stage this Wednesday (alongside Startup Battlefield companies).

You can watch the presentation of the final products here.
Also, check out ZDNet’s coverage of the event.

Ah, I just enjoyed one of those great morning stretch/yawns that is right up there in awesomeness with the first beer after a hot day or talking a cop out of a speeding ticket. Good morning! And while people around the world, give or take your time zone, are just waking up and having a first cup of coffee, 300 + hacker gladiators have been battling it out all night at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hack Day.

In just a couple of hours the bell will be rung and all work must end. And then, we see what they’ve done in a blitz of 90 second demos.

There are hardware hacks. There are software hacks. There are projects that include both. One I saw in the works late last night involved a huge plastic knife, a robot and a swarm of some seriously nerdy hackers. Some of them will be fun, others unique, and still others just plain dumb. A very few are the seeds of future products that people will actually use, although that isn’t really the point.

The best and most creative projects will be seen in front of the proper TechCrunch Disrupt audience (the main event kicks off tomorrow morning). But everyone who finishes a project will get a full ticket to attend TechCrunch Disrupt, and they’ll always have the memories of an absurd night spent among old and new friends.

We posted a video of the event yesterday, but this morning we came across this video created by Jay Corcoran that gives a little more of an idea of what it’s like to be there.

Who doesn’t want to play Super Mario Bros. by singing? Enjoy.

The Jay Leno/Conan O’Brien fight over the Tonight Show is long over. Leno soldiers on, and O’Brien is out mixing it up with real people on tour.

But the resistance movement carries on, and Coco supporters (as O’brien is known) have found a bunch of outlets to vent their frustration. Some trick Leno into taking pictures supporting Coco. Others hang out on a Facebook page supporting him called “I’m with Coco / Conan O’Brien.”

But now there’s another way, and this one is likely to piss off NBC. Go to any Tonight Show clip on Hulu and check out the user added tags that appear in the mouseover.

There’s a variety of tags added to the show, but popular ones include: i’m with coco, creep, sellout, douchenozzle and hack.

Ah, the power of the people to voice their opinion on things. Too bad these are going to be ripped down pretty darn soon. Hulu’s terms and conditions on tags arguably prohibit all of these keywords.

Just a quick update for those tracking the Disrupt Hackathon. Pizza has been delivered, the Red Bull girls have made their rounds, and the group seems to be in high spirits. TechCrunch developer Andy Brett and I made the rounds this afternoon, chatting with developers (who came from places as close as New York and as far as Israel) to discuss their projects and their strategy for the evening. Many expected to use a combination of potent caffeine and quick naps to power through the session. Some offered quirkier solutions: one team toyed with the idea of napping in the beginning and working during the late hours (to sleep through the noisiest part of the day) and another set a hard deadline of 2 am so that they could be the most refreshed team during the presentation round. We’ll find out who makes it and what they’ve made tomorrow at 11am— and for those who can’t be here, we plan to Livestream the event as well. Until then, enjoy our brief video of Hackathon (Andy doesn’t make frequent video appearances so this is a real treat, bonus points if you find his 2 cameos). This was all shot on a flip cam.

Last last night (early this morning) there was some confusion about our post indicating that Android 2.2, Froyo, had started to roll out. Some thought we had Photoshopped the pictures (I wish I was that good at Photoshop), others though we were just using the developer build, and others thought we got some sort of special press copy. But rest easy people, I have in my inbox a confirmation from Google that says the following: “The roll out to Nexus One devices has begun!“

Naturally, I asked the company what the deal was with the roll out, since I was as surprised as anyone to see 2.2 ready to install on my device when I picked it up last night. After all, Google itself had just tweeted out that the new OS would be available on the Nexus One in the “next few weeks.” But that looks to be a solid under-promise, over-deliver — very nice, Google.

Actually, like many other Google roll-outs, this will be a staggered one. So it may be a couple of weeks before everyone gets it (Google didn’t say). And yes, it does look like a lot of members of the press are getting it first (maybe because we got the device at the Nexus One launch event prior to its launch, who knows). But again, it is starting to roll out to everyone.

Those who can’t wait for the OTA update, can manually install a build. Phandroid details how to do that — sounds easy enough.

Having played with it for the past day now, I can safely say that Android 2.2 is indeed a big, big improvement over 2.1. The speed alone is the killer feature — and there are a number of other nifty feature upgrades as well. Now I just feel bad for the new EVO 4G, which Google gave to all attendees at Google I/O. Because it runs a customized Sense build of Android, it’s likely going to be a bit before we see the 2.2 version of that. And it makes the device feel sluggish compared to the Nexus One with 2.2 now.

[image via TFTS]

Google had another Oprah moment this past Thursday at the Google I/O conference, giving all 4,000 plus attendees the Evo 4G, the new HTC Android phone being sold via Sprint. The phone is set to be released to the public on June 4, but attendees have gotten a sneak peak of the impressive device. Of course, many of these lucky recipients have already been quick to start peddling the phone on Craigslist and eBay, for as much as $1200.

On eBay, ‘buy it now’ price points range from $600–$1200, with many at $650-$750 range. Prices are more reasonable on Craigslist’s San Francisco site, with many of the devices being offered at $500-ish (the range is between $450–$750). There were a few offers to purchase an Evo for $250, with one person willing to buy it for $500.

Of course, if you wait until June 4, the Evo costs $199 with a two-year contract with Sprint. Usage plans start at $69.99 a month plus a $10 charge for 4G service. The plus of buying now? You get a free month of service with the Google I/O phone. Also, many of the sellers may be international recipients who cannot use the phone outside of the U.S.

Google has a history of giving its phones away to attendees at events. Last year, all attendees were given special edition, I/O-themed HTC Magics. At TED this year, attendees were given Nexus Ones. Developers were also offered the choice between a Nexus One and a Droid during IO registration this year.

Checking-in has so far mainly been thought about in terms of location. But there’s a growing idea that it can be ported to other things as well — such as checking-in when you’re watching a movie or television show to let others know. That’s the idea behind Miso, a product we first covered back in March following their first major movie partnership. Today, Miso has announced its seed financing and the alpha version of its website.

Previously, Miso only existed as an iPhone app. (It’s actually the second iPhone app the team behind Miso, BazaarLabs has come up with. Back at our Realtime Crunchup in November, they launched Flixup a sort of Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregator based around what people are saying on Twitter.) But now, with a website, they should be able to broaden their reach.

And the timing is good for that — there’s something launching at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference this week which should compete with it in some ways (stay tuned on that).

Earlier this month, Miso also announced a partnership with the online video channel Revision3. Thanks to that partnership, you can check-in while watching Revision3 shows and earn special Miso badges — yes, just like Foursquare, but again, all based around media consumption.

Miso’s seed funding comes from individual investors such as Keith Rabois, Jawed Karim, and ex-Googlers Georges Harik, Richard Chen, Thomas Korte, Kurt Abrahamson. The amount of the funding hasn’t been disclosed. Meanwhile, Rabois is also joining on as an advisor.

You can find Miso’s iPhone app here.

It’s on. The Disrupt Hackathon is fully underway, over 300 hackers are battling through the night to create the very best app, gizmo, robot (or whatever these crazy kids can come up with) within 24 hours. Thanks to the sponsorship of Facebook, Media Temple and Air BnB, the hackers will have access to a pile of Aero beds and all the essential food groups: pizza and caffeine (boxes upon boxes of Red Bull).

The Hackathon will have experts on hand to help participants with the APIs of Facebook, Yahoo!, SimpleGeo, Facebook, Etsy, Mashery, MeetUp and Google. For those who want to get their hands dirty, there’s a scrapyard station in the back, complete with a Hungry, Hungry Hippo set, the circuit board for a crosswalk sign and a Winnie The Pooh in a wizard outfit. (A gallery of the scrapyard: here)

There was also this thing: a plastic cup, marker, and motor contraption that swirled around, drawing circles on a large white piece of paper. In almost any other context, this would be weird. At Hackathon, this endearing thingamabob was perfectly at home.

Early in the session, there was a constant stream of chatter and activity, as teams formed and discussed their projects. The majority of the groups held court in the main hallway while other hackers sought solitary confinement in one of the many conference rooms.
This is a true battle of wits, endurance and speed.

The hackers have until 10 am Sunday to complete their projects, 90-second demos will commence at 11 am and by 2pm, one winner will be left standing. Every team that makes it through the Hackathon will get a free pass to Disrupt, but only the winning team will bask in the glory of presenting their creation on stage this Wednesday (alongside Startup Battlefield companies).

Ford, like most modern manufacturing companies, is utilizing virtual reality tools at all levels of development. Gone are the days of designers and engineers hunching over drafting tables in a smoke-filled room, working on blueprints for what will next be molded out of clay.

These days development is done on 20-foot ultra-high resolution displays with real world testing done in a virtual world. Designers can experience nearly every aspect of a future vehicle before any physical piece is constructed. Ford even employs virtual tools for the manufacturing phase to maximize efficiency there as well.

I recently got a close look at a bunch of these tools and processes. I was granted access to everything from Ford’s gigantic full vehicle motion simulator to the gigantic video wall. These are some impressive toys.

While grandma flips through photo albums on her sleek iPad, government agencies (and most corporations) process mission-critical transactions on cumbersome web-based front ends that function by tricking mainframes into thinking that they are connected to CRT terminals. These systems are written in computer languages like Assembler and COBOL, and cost a fortune to maintain. I’ve written about California’s legacy systems and the billions of dollars that are wasted on maintaining these. Given the short tenure of government officials, lobbying by entrenched government contractors, and slow pace of change in the enterprise-computing world, I’m not optimistic that much will change – even in the next decade. But there is hope on another front: the Open Government Initiative. This provides entrepreneurs with the data and with the APIs they need to solve problems themselves.  They don’t need to wait for the government to modernize its legacy systems; they can simply build their own apps.

The federal government’s open data initiative, data.gov, was launched exactly one year ago with 47 datasets of government information, by Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra. This has grown to more than 250,000 datasets. Hundreds of applications have already been built to harness this information. A few states and localities have also followed the lead, the most notable of which is San Francisco City.

In June, 2009, San Francisco CIO Chris Vein launched an application that allows citizens to access the City’s 311 Call Center through Twitter. Instead of making a phone call, members of the public can send a tweet to alert the city about a pothole, or to find out about the City’s green initiatives. This led to the Open311 API, which provides access to government data by third-party applications.  Entrepreneurs have already built some useful apps with this, such as CitySourced, MyCityWay, SeeClickFix and TweetMy311. Buoyed by this success, the city is going one step further – to open up all non-private data. The City’s director of innovation, Jay Nath, is building DataSF.org – what he calls “the city’s one stop web site for government data”.

This has some notable San Francisco residents such as craiglist founder, Craig Newmark really excited. Craig says that San Francisco seems very serious about providing better customer service – while saving money – by giving citizens access to the data that is rightfully theirs. He lauds the city for standing up to “elite influence peddlers”.  Over breakfast, last week, he told me that he would readily spend his own money to offer prizes to entrepreneurs who create the most innovative apps that address real-life issues:  like getting a pothole fixed, asking if now is a good time to visit the DMV, or maybe to finding out one’s tax situation.

Legendary publisher and guru of Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly, is also a big fan of open government. Known for his ability to predict the future by detecting “faint signals” from alpha geeks, O’Reilly says that a few years ago, he began to notice that developers were scraping government data (such as local crime statistics) from clunky government websites and displaying these in ways that were far more useful to citizens. He noticed “signals of an emerging open government movement”. So, in 2008, he decided to focus on encouraging the Obama administration to harness these.  Under the auspices of a new conference series called Gov 2.0 (one of which, the Gov 2.0 Expo, starts next week in Washington, D.C.), O’Reilly began meeting with key government officials; at first listening to their challenges and perspectives; and then framing the opportunity back to them.  Social media was spreading like wildfire in D.C. at the time and initially became closely associated with the term Gov 2.0.  O’Reilly’s message was that adopting social media wasn’t enough for true change; governments needed to borrow a lesson from the technology industry and start building a platform.

O’Reilly’s goal is to get regions all across the U.S. doing what San Francisco has done with Open311. But one of the challenges is to standardize APIs across localities, and to create standards. If this effort does succeed, developers will be able to write common applications that route requests to the correct department in whatever jurisdiction the citizen happens to be at the time. The application on your mobile phone shouldn’t work just within the boundaries of one city, after all.

There are other evangelists, like Jennifer Pahlka of Code for America, who is working to “help the brightest minds of the Web 2.0 generation transform city governments”. Pahlka says that cities are under greater pressure than ever, struggling with budget cuts and outdated technology. “What if, instead of cutting services or raising taxes, cities could leverage the power of the web to become more efficient, transparent, and participatory”, she asks. Code for America’s fellows program is modeled around the Teach for America program.  It works with city officials and leading web-development talent to identify and then develop web solutions that can then be shared and rolled out more broadly to cities across America.

The bottom line is that there are new opportunities for entrepreneurs to do good for their communities and for the country, and to build wealth while doing this. I’ve lamented how in Silicon Valley, instead of building businesses that do good, we have the greatest minds and the deepest pool of investment capital in the world focused on building Facebook and Twitter apps. Here is an opportunity to still build these apps and yet do good.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa

Sometimes there are advantages to staying up really late at night. I had just laid down in my bed to try and get some sleep before an early flight to New York tomorrow when I remembered I hadn’t charged my Nexus One. I reached over to my bedside table to grab it, and I see an alert letting me know a system update is available. Having just read numerous reports that Android 2.2 would be coming to the device in the “next few weeks” I figured this couldn’t be the new OS codenamed “Froyo.” But it was.

Yes, apparently Google is starting to roll out the Android 2.2 Froyo update to Nexus One devices right now. I just tried the EVO 4G (the newest Android phone which Google gave out at Google I/O this week) but 2.2 isn’t available for that device yet. I guess being the “Google Phone” has its advantages. Nexus One owners, if you’re up, check for an update right now.

I can tell you right away, as promised, Android 2.2 is much faster than Android 2.1. During the Google I/O keynote, Google promised a speed increase of 2x to 5x over 2.1 (and did a humorous demo with an iPad to show the speed) – it appears they weren’t lying.

Update: A few hours later and I’m seeing very few reports of others getting the update. In fact, so far, I can find about two. I’ve emailed Google to confirm that a very slow, staggered roll-out is starting. But rest assured worrisome commenters, this is very real.

Note: Our MobileCrunch readers will be horrified by this post. But lately I’ve been on a rant about using simple technologies that just work, instead of always trying to make at least the basic features of the newest and greatest product we’ve ever seen do something spectacularly awesome, like make a phone call that doesn’t end from a carrier drop or a dead battery.

A week ago I found myself in a difficult position mobile-phone wise. My two go to phones – the Motorola Droid on Verizon and the Nexus One on T-Mobile – were history. The Nexus One mysteriously disappeared during my move to Seattle. And the Droid, my backup phone when I needed rock solid Verizon coverage, came to an untimely and violent end during extended “testing” on my rock slate tile floor. I was without a working mobile phone of any kind.

Normally I’d remedy that situation by buying a new phone. But I wasn’t about to shell out a few hundred dollars for a phone with the HTC EVO coming just around the corner. I needed something to get me to June 4 when Sprint will sell me that phone.

That’s when I became immersed in the pre-paid phone world. Based on watching The Wire, I knew pre-paid phones were important tools of the drug dealing trade – if you are careful enough and switch phones often, it’s extremely hard for the Baltimore police department to get a solid wire tap on your pre-paid phone, for example. Other than that, I could not speak intelligently about what they had to offer.

So I walked into my friendly neighborhood Radio Shack and took a look at what they had to offer. These aren’t exciting phones, unless it was 1999 again, in which case the tiny color screen would be very cool. But they’re small and, importantly, they make phone calls.

And wow are they affordable. For $25 I walked out of the store with a Net10 LG 100 phone that had 300 minutes of talk time included over a 60 day period. As long as you buy more minutes all the minutes keep rolling over to new months. And there is no contract and no termination fee. I pointed my Google Voice phone number at the phone, and everyone that calls my normal number gets through just like they did on my old smartphones.

The phone has features such as making calls, receiving calls, a speakerphone that’s better than any smartphone I’ve had, and a battery that seems to last forever. It also does text messaging and has a variety of cheesy ring tones to choose from.

That’s it. And five days later after heavy usage I’m not sure I’m going to stop using it. The call quality, despite the fact that it uses the AT&T network, is five stars. Calls fail to be dropped. I consistently am able to hear what the person I’m talking to is saying. All of these things are new experiences to me, or at least new in the last few years.

I tend to carry my iPad around everywhere with me, which does browsing and apps a lot better than any smartphone anyway (although the Google Voice website is a mess on the iPad). I haven’t been using the data connection on my other phones that much since the iPad, so losing those features doesn’t matter much.

And really, for certain social situations, like dinners, all this phone activity needs to stop anyway. If you can’t check into Foursquare or Gowalla with your phone, you definitely won’t be. I found I was having actual conversations with people instead. While my tiny prepaid phone sat lightly in my pocket, humming on a full battery charge.

So there you have it. A one time Cult of iPhone charter member, who abandoned Apple for the promise of Android and Google Voice, is now a hard core LG 100 prepaid phone fanatic.

And I’m going to stay that way until June 4, when my failing sense of self control will walk me into a Sprint store and purchase a HTC EVO. I’ll probably forget all about the LG and leave it at the checkout or something. Because love is fleeting, and shiny stuff, after all, is cool.

But until then, if you see me at TechCrunch Disrupt next week, ask to see my phone. You’ll want one, too. If you think “uh gawd” every time someone pulls out their iPhone, which is more of a fashion statement than a mobile phone, you may just be the person to help start the newest trend in mobile – full on retro (as long as you have an iPad close by, you understand).