Last year it was pretty clear that the Battlefield contest was between Getaround, the peer-to-peer auto sharing service, and BillGuard, the crowdsourced fraud detection startup. TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 was anybody’s game.
Sunglass’s collaborative CAD app was exciting. Open Garden had serious technical chops, and Fred Wilson thought it would help his family get a WiFi connection at the airport. Uberconference, reworked legacy audio conferencing with a useful cloud-based app. And Gtar would make me and millions of others realize our air guitar ambitions through guided string strumming.
Uberconference, of course, won the Battlefield, and took home $50,000 in war booty. I was a little surprised, though conferencing can surely use a sharp poke in the codecs. The judges inclination for practical apps that can disrupt a substantial existing markets (and provide an assured return for investors) ultimately won the day. Congrats to the Uber team!
After three days of trekking around the Pier 94 hangar, I was ready to hang up my TC Disrupt press badge for another year. I had seen my share of beautifully designed quirky social apps–I’m talking to you StockStock and Hmmmm. For a nice change, this TC Disrupt marked the introduction of hardware startups.
I was excited and puzzled–it’s an age thing–by incantor, a virtual reality World of Warcraft-like game with its own wand. Incantor, by the way, is looking for kickstarter funding. I also had a house key made for me by MinuteKey, the locksmith in a box. And I greatly enjoyed Sobi, the social biking startup, which brought a few of their cycles for attendees to gaze upon.
I’m hoping that at next year’s Hardware Alley someone will be there with a Makerbot-like box that lets you design and mill a foldable mini-bike–just thinking out loud.
My last meeting at the conference was with an 18-year old Australian entrepreneur, Max Mitchell, who was there to talk about his company BuzzCard. Alex was accompanied by his COO and Dad, one Paul Mitchell. Anyway, Buzzcard has a cute service that’s let you brand a Youtube or other video. In their demo for me, they were able to pull in the TvB logo and have it splash across the screen.
Buzzcard is a nice tool for small-medium businesses that don’t want to spend a lot of cash on video production.
And that reminds me, it’s about time to go through our files and come up with another TvB favorite SMB app post.