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The countdown to the official launch of TechCrunch Disrupt in New York is down to the last several hours. Things kick off Monday morning at 9 am EST with Charlie Rose and John Doerr, and we run from there for three days.

Half of the event is a startup launch battlefield where 22 new companies and products will show their stuff to the world for the first time on stage. Startups are eliminated over three rounds until we have a “final four” for best of show. Eventually an overall winner will be chosen.

The winner receives a cash prize of $50,000, although that has paled in importance to the massive press and user awareness that the companies will get from their time at Disrupt.

But we’ve also decided to add another award into the mix – The TechCrunch Disrupt Cup. This is a 16 inch tall sterling silver cup trophy weighing in at nearly six pounds – more than five pounds of pure silver. It holds 15 pints of your favorite beverage.

Like the Stanley Cup in hockey, this is an award that the winner will only be able to keep until someone else wins it. In our case, for 3-4 months until the next TechCrunch Disrupt (which will be in September 2010 in San Francisco). Winner’s names will be engraved onto the trophy and it will be handed down from winner to winner over the coming years and, hopefully, decades. We will have replicas of the trophy made for the winners to keep forever as well.

There’s a fascinating history behind this trophy as well. It was created by the Gorham Manufacturing Company in 1920 and awarded in 1934 for a bowling championship.

After a very long search for the perfect Trophy Cup, we found it and bought it.

We’ve had the initial engraving removed by Jeffrey Herman, the founder and executive director of the Society of American Silversmiths. The Disrupt Cup will be re-engraved with the TechCrunch Disrupt master logo next week. Until then, we’ve slapped a TechCrunch Disrupt sticker on it.

If you’ve been to our annual Crunchies event you know we like to give crazy awards away. We’re hoping the Disrupt Cup will be an exciting award for Disrupt startups to aim for. And for those winners, we hope that it serves as a good luck charm extraordinaire.

You’ll see lots of pictures of the Disrupt Cup over the next few days. Now you know the story behind the award.

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.