It’s been a long night at the Manhattan Center. Yesterday, we
welcomed hundreds of hackers for my favorite Spring tradition — the Disrupt NY
Hackathon. Some of them were participating in our event for the first
time, while others were regular hackers. Their challenge was to come up
with a neat, funny and smart hack in just 24 hours. We could all feel
the excitement in the air when the 106 teams took the stage to present a
short one-minute demo to impress fellow hackers and our judges.
But only one team could take home the grand prize and $5,000. So, without further ado, meet the Disrupt NY 2015 Hackathon winner.
The team didn’t use any third-party backend to handle the live streaming code on the iPhone and server. In addition to being a very useful hack, Witness is also an impressive tech achievement. Read our separate post for all the information about Witness.
Lisa is the co-host of StartUp, a documentary-style, serialized podcast focused on entrepreneurial life. The podcast is produced by Gimlet Media. Before joining Gimlet, Lisa worked as a senior editor at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s re-launched site at ESPN. She has also reported for NPR’s Planet Money, This American Life, Marketplace, and New York Public Radio. She has a BA in applied mathematics from Brown and an MBA from Columbia.
Haytham
is the cofounder of Kinetic, a wearable device startup aiming to reduce
costly injuries amongst industrial workers. He was the director of City
College’s Zahn Innovation Center, NYC’s first hardware startup
incubator and is the founder of the NY hardware startup meetup. His
professional experience includes developing medical robotics at both
Philips Electronics and Harvard Medical School.
Haytham has a PhD from Imperial College London and a Mechanical Engineering degree from University of Navarra in Spain. He also reviews theater for the blog site Theatre is Easy and loves to do improvised comedy, although admittedly he’s not very good.
Benjamin
is a General Partner at HAX, the world’s No. 1 accelerator for hardware
startups. With 15 years experience across China, Japan, Korea and US,
he is a recognized expert on innovation ecosystems.
A
veteran member of our Hackathon judging crew, Charlie O’Donnell is the
sole Partner and Founder at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and loves it that
way. The fund makes seed investments and the first venture firm located
in Brooklyn–where he was born and raised. The longest he has been
outside of the five boroughs of New York City is three weeks.
Charlie has a reputation for being early to identifying important companies. Nick Bilton identifies him as an influence on early Twitter investors in his book, Hatching Twitter. Dennis Crowley credits him as having helped kick off the first funding of Foursquare before other VCs had said yes. At First Round Capital, he sourced the firm’s investments in Singleplatform (sold to Constant Contact) and GroupMe (sold to Skype). Charlie discovered GroupMe at the hackathon where the service had been built. He also sourced investments in Backupify (which was an idea he had tweeted to the founder, a friend of his), chloe + isabel, Refinery29, Docracy, and Salescrunch.
But only one team could take home the grand prize and $5,000. So, without further ado, meet the Disrupt NY 2015 Hackathon winner.
Winner: Witness
Witness is a panic button that takes advantage of everything your phone can do — and yet, it remains very easy to use. To activate Witness, you just need to launch the iPhone app and press the big red button. As soon as you activate it, it will call and text your emergency contacts.
In addition to alerting your friends and family, Witness will record your location, camera and microphone activity, and stream it over cellular and wifi to your emergency contacts in real time. In the meantime, your screen fades to black so that nobody can notice that you are streaming what’s happening.The team didn’t use any third-party backend to handle the live streaming code on the iPhone and server. In addition to being a very useful hack, Witness is also an impressive tech achievement. Read our separate post for all the information about Witness.
Runner-Up #1: Picorico
Picorico is a hardware device for modern downhill bikes. Today’s bikes have a lot of adjustability, but their performance is hard to measure. That’s why the team behind Picorico built an open-source telemetry system.
The team used off the shelf sensors and built a string encoder using a retractable key badge with a capacitive encoder. It’s quite impressive to see your suspension compression rates in real time while you play with the bike.Runner-Up #2: MoolahMe
MoolahMe is a replacement for ATMs. The app allows you to broadcast cash requests to nearby users, and users around you can respond to your requests. After a cash hand-off, money is automatically settled on the cloud through a peer-to-peer payment service.
Hackathon Judges
Lisa Chow
Lisa is the co-host of StartUp, a documentary-style, serialized podcast focused on entrepreneurial life. The podcast is produced by Gimlet Media. Before joining Gimlet, Lisa worked as a senior editor at FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver’s re-launched site at ESPN. She has also reported for NPR’s Planet Money, This American Life, Marketplace, and New York Public Radio. She has a BA in applied mathematics from Brown and an MBA from Columbia.
Haytham Elhawary
Haytham
is the cofounder of Kinetic, a wearable device startup aiming to reduce
costly injuries amongst industrial workers. He was the director of City
College’s Zahn Innovation Center, NYC’s first hardware startup
incubator and is the founder of the NY hardware startup meetup. His
professional experience includes developing medical robotics at both
Philips Electronics and Harvard Medical School.Haytham has a PhD from Imperial College London and a Mechanical Engineering degree from University of Navarra in Spain. He also reviews theater for the blog site Theatre is Easy and loves to do improvised comedy, although admittedly he’s not very good.
Jodie Fox
Jodie
is the Co-Founder and Co-Chief Creative Officer of Shoes of Prey. From a
background in advertising and law, Jodie now applies her communication
savvy and sense of style to her true passion: outfitting women around
the world in beautiful shoes. Her role encompasses product development,
public relations and being the global face of the brand.
Jodie’s work on Shoes of Prey has been recognized many times over, including receiving the national Telstra Business Women’s Awards Winner (Australia), Hudson Private & Corporate Sector, 2014 Top 30 most influential women in Australian retail, 2014 Top 10 Australian female entrepreneurs and 2015’s top 8 entrepreneurs to watch.
Jodie’s work on Shoes of Prey has been recognized many times over, including receiving the national Telstra Business Women’s Awards Winner (Australia), Hudson Private & Corporate Sector, 2014 Top 30 most influential women in Australian retail, 2014 Top 10 Australian female entrepreneurs and 2015’s top 8 entrepreneurs to watch.
Benjamin Joffe
Benjamin
is a General Partner at HAX, the world’s No. 1 accelerator for hardware
startups. With 15 years experience across China, Japan, Korea and US,
he is a recognized expert on innovation ecosystems.
Benjamin is also an angel investor in 12 startups and a frequent
speaker in tech events such as TEDx, SXSW, LeWeb, TechCrunch Disrupt,
GMIC, as well as an occasional lecturer at Berkeley and Stanford. He
speaks English, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Spanish with a French
accent.
Katie Notopoulos
Katie Notopoulos is a senior editor at BuzzFeed News. Since joining the editorial team in 2012, she has covered internet culture and technology, and co-hosts the new BuzzFeed’s Internet Explorer podcast. Katie has also written for Gawker, The Verge, Modern Farmer, The Fader, Paper Magazine, and BusinessWeek. She is one of the organizers of IRL Club, a Brooklyn-based speaker series about the internet. She first saw the dress as white and gold, but then saw blue and black. Taylor Swift once favorited one of her tweets.Charlie O’Donnell
A
veteran member of our Hackathon judging crew, Charlie O’Donnell is the
sole Partner and Founder at Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and loves it that
way. The fund makes seed investments and the first venture firm located
in Brooklyn–where he was born and raised. The longest he has been
outside of the five boroughs of New York City is three weeks.Charlie has a reputation for being early to identifying important companies. Nick Bilton identifies him as an influence on early Twitter investors in his book, Hatching Twitter. Dennis Crowley credits him as having helped kick off the first funding of Foursquare before other VCs had said yes. At First Round Capital, he sourced the firm’s investments in Singleplatform (sold to Constant Contact) and GroupMe (sold to Skype). Charlie discovered GroupMe at the hackathon where the service had been built. He also sourced investments in Backupify (which was an idea he had tweeted to the founder, a friend of his), chloe + isabel, Refinery29, Docracy, and Salescrunch.