San Francisco, CA | September 8 - 12, 2012
The great thing about Hardware Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt is – apart from the fact that it seems to grow bigger at event event – is the sheer variety of companies exhibiting.
There’s pretty much anything you can imagine, and only two feet can separate a robotics company from a mobile gadget. But it’s the opportunity investors look for I guess. Here’s a list of the companies featured in this… → Read More
With the rise of cheap and affordable manufacturing facilities, combined with new sources of financing such as crowd-funding, hardware startups are hot once again.
And there is no better evidence of this than a quick dash through the Hardware Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt last week in San Francisco.
We started with a new kind of connected coffee maker and ended with a startup that lets you… → Read More
Not only were there country pavilions at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week, but also themed ones like Hardware Alley and the Impact Pavilion.
Here, you could peruse startups in the themes of health, energy and transport, a few of which were put together by the Greenstart accelerator programme and Solar Mosaic.
We caught up with the guys to hear what they had on display.
Here… → Read More
In the last of our three part series of video highlights from Disrupt SF, we focus on Wednesday when YourMechanic won the Startup Battlefield competition.
Earlier in the day, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick explained how he goes up against regulators trying to block his disruptive business model. Yammer CEO David Sacks was asked whether his company was ever in serious acquisition talks with… → Read More
The Chilean Pavilion joined the roster of other Latin American startups at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco last week.
Our task was to show you as many of them as we could in as short amount of time as possible – that meant a fast run through with a camera.
Thus we found companies doing facial recognition, ad retargeting, opinion polls, algorithmic trading and a social network for… → Read More
Continuing our look back at the SF Disrupt conference video highlights, Tuesday featured the standing-room only interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In his first interview since the IPO, he called his stock performance disappointing and talked about his biggest mistake. Investors focused on the positive comments, including progress in the mobile business, and Facebook’s market value soared… → Read More
Want to catch up on some of our Disrupt conference highlights that you might have missed? This weekend, we’ll be posting videos from each day of Disrupt.
Monday’s agenda featured a keynote from Twitter and Square Co-Founder Jack Dorsey who told the audience he “never wanted to be an entrepreneur.” Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz warned about how IPOs can change a company. We also heard… → Read More
Almost a week ago, we kicked off our Hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt. Before the event started, Ford had already picked a number of teams that would get access to the otherwise closed Ford AppLink API. The winner of this challenge was BeCouply, which developed the Dates.fm app for suggesting interesting dates to Ford’s in-car interface. Date.fm, the team says, “lets you tune in to nearby date… → Read More
Argentina’s tech startups scene continues to bloom and we saw that at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.
Despite a still nascent VC scene, there’s plenty of talent, some key universities and a growing number of success stories.
Three Melons, the Argentinean game studio that created Bola Social Soccer, was recently acquired by Playdom for instance.
We did a fast dash through Startup… → Read More
The great thing about country-based pavilions at TechCrunch Disrupt is that one can see innovation and new tech companies coming from countries you might not have associated with startups before. As you will have read in this guest post by Eduardo Serrano last week, the shift toward emerging markets shows that Mexico is on its way up in tech. Mexico’s economy is growing 40 percent faster than… → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Wallwisher showed us the new version of their web application. Wallwisher allows user to write, collaborate and share content on an empty canvas.
The idea is deliberately simple in order to allow many uses for the service. For example, you could create noticeboards, scrapbooks, playlists, charts, polls, use it to brainstorm or to manage events. Usage… → Read More
Online dating is a huge business, but most dating sites are still stuck in the 90s. They don’t take advantage of developments in video and social networking, and they don’t have good mobile experiences.
Here are a few startups I met at TechCrunch Disrupt SF that want to bring online dating into the modern era. → Read More
When I read Spestle’s pitch for Startup Alley I thought it was either a prank or a goofy placeholder for a stealth startup: “Spestle lets you create custom seasoning & herb blends.”
But Spestle is real and serious. It’s a service that enables you to create a custom seasoning blend, complete with your own packaging, and sell it online. When someone buys your spice mix, Spestle will make the… → Read More
After nearly three days and plenty of pitches, our list of 30 hungry startups was trimmed down until there were only seven startups left standing: Expect Labs, Gyft, Lit Motors, Prior Knowledge, Saya, YourMechanic and Zumper. Their task? To take the stage one last time in front of our amazing panel of expert judges — Mike Arrington, Roelof Botha, Chris Dixon, Eric Eldon, David Lee, Marissa… → Read More
Brazil is rapidly taking its place in the tech world as a fertile place for startups. Evidence of that was clear at TechCrunch Disrupt this week in San Francisco.
In order to give you a sense of the sheer scale of the Brazilian presence, we came up with a new format — rapid-fire one sentence pitches. Check it out. → Read More
Pick1 has raised $1 million from private investors for its opinions database and automated market research platform that serves as an open graph for opinions.
The investment is what the founders say represents a bridge round for future funding. It includes a $535,000 investment led by ChileGlobal Angels that brings the aggregated investment raised to date to $1 million. Among the investors are… → Read More
Right after the Apple press conference, an all-star panel took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. Jim Dalrymple (The Loop), John Gruber (Daring Fireball), Tim Stevens (Engadget), MG Siegler (TechCrunch columnist) and Jason Snell (Macworld) told Darrell Etherington and the audience their first impressions on the new iPhone. Among the famous Apple writers, The Loop’s Dalrymple… → Read More
The legendary mentor Vinod Khosla criticized accelerators like Y Combinator who produce startups with overly slick pitches that he says garner “so much hype that they get valuations that no one who will help the team are going to pay.”
During his TechCrunch Disrupt talk, Khosla explained that the key role of early investors is not funding, but personal attention and guidance. But generating… → Read More
The legendary* Vinod Khosla spoke with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington at Disrupt SF today and discussed some of the unordinary startups he has invested in, including an efficient lettuce picker, dairy-less cheese, and high-tech beef.
Khosla said one of the companies is trying to develop salt that is “as salty as salt” but with 50 percent less sodium to combat high blood pressure and other… → Read More
Michael Arrington hopped on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF for a fireside chat with Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. The two discussed Khosla’s perspective on how companies within his firm’s portfolios get the most out of working with the team.
Khosla is very passionate about assisting his companies with recruiting, even suggesting that talented folks send him their resume. Khosla went on to… → Read More
This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt, I interviewed Uber CEO Kalanick backstage and got him to elaborate on a few things he mentioned during his interview earlier in the day — mainly on competition that Uber is seeing from new low-cost ride-sharing services like Sidecar and Lyft. One key takeaway is that Uber, too, could introduce its own ride-sharing model, likely testing it out in one of the 17… → Read More
Israel has been called “The Startup Nation” by some and, indeed, that was even the title of a fascinating book by journalists Dan Senor and Saul Singer.
Israel’s ability to churn out technology companies is the stuff of legend and, as usual, this year’s showing by companies from the country at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco is as strong as ever.
Here’s a run-through of the companies on… → Read More
How often do you finish reading an article and want to chat about it with someone right away? Especially if it’s a politics piece that I feel strongly about, I’ll be feverishly curious about how anyone could possibly disagree with the argument. Well, now you can find the perfect debate or conversation partner: video chat pairing service, Airtime, has launched topic-specific chatrooms exclusively… → Read More
Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt today to discuss Medium, their new online publishing platform coming out of Obvious Corp with YouTube’s Hunter Walk. Maybe the most interesting statement of the session came from Evan Williams, though, who candidly noted that Obvious is taking things slow with its API. An API, he said, needs to have a purpose and… → Read More
Fewer than three months after Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion, founder David Sacks says that it is preparing to announce the first signs of integration “soon.” Speaking on the sidelines of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Sacks said that product announcements are being prepared for Yammer’s cloud-based enterprise social networking platform to appear in several Microsoft products. These… → Read More
Ev Williams went through a phase after he left Twitter. He became a ski bum. It turned out he was not very good at it.
Williams and Biz Stone appeared on stage today at Disrupt San Francisco 2012 to talk about their new venture – The Obvious Corp.
Williams said he and his wife decided that it would be great just to be outdoors. He grew a beard. → Read More
One of the more interesting paradoxes of the last five years on the consumer web has been how small teams of developers have been able to build products that reach tens or hundreds of millions of users. Yet few, if any of those users, get to own equity in the companies that they contribute so much to ahead of a large liquidity event like an IPO.
Loyal3 is hoping to start changing this by… → Read More
In June, Microsoft closed its acquisition of Yammer, the hot young enterprise social network that got its start at TC50 back in 2008. It was a big exit for the company, which sold for a whopping $1.2 billion. CEO and founder of Yammer David Sacks took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF to talk to Mike Arrington about the past, present and future for the network.
Arrington started by asking… → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt today, our own Greg Ferenstein interviewed Mitt Romney’s Digital Director Zac Moffatt. The discussion touched upon a wide variety of issues, ranging from the importance of online ads in political campaigns to the allegations that the Romney campaign bought Twitter followers. As Ferenstein noted at the start of the panel, politics is becoming very important for technology, not… → Read More
As car service Uber continues its expansion across the U.S. and beyond — its business is growing 26% month-on-month right now — it has found itself on the wrong side of rules and regulations, and in the firing line of the Taxi Establishment. Today, the company’s founder and CEO, Travis Kalanick, came out swinging with fighting words for his competitors and the bodies that regulate all of… → Read More
