Over this weekend TechCrunch sponsored Disrupt Hackathon in San Francisco. Idea is to gather hundreds of developers, entrepreneurs, and UI designers in large warehouse with well-stocked Red Bulls, sodas and pizzas over night, and see what cool ideas come out from 20 hr long collaboration. After all night long hacking and coding proof-of-concept, every team of two or three participants came up to podium to pitch their idea with demo in 60 seconds.
Well, it was originally supposed to be 90 seconds, but there were too many groups (86 teams, TechCrunch says) and to preserve judges' sanity organizers had to cap the time at 60 seconds.
The event was great. I could not remember the last time I was with warehouse full of energetic and creative crowds (maybe it was first time!). I have to give tip of the hat to TechCrunch for sponsoring the event to galvanize young startup community.
It was interesting to see a few common themes across many pitches. The most dominant theme was, not surprisingly, social network. Whether it be photos, quotes, product location and review, indexing and sharing these information were recurring theme. But there were also other creative ideas such as
Blekko the reverse URL link tracker,
flotype multi-touch picture browsing UI built on HTML5,
WiseDame the personal blackbox recorder iPhone app, and Ostrich the twitter-style-tags in email.
After event, I asked Andy Brett, TechCrunch engineer and the event organizer of Disrupt SF Hackathon, and he said there are more hackathons being planned. Even multiple events per year. That will be a good thing for young entrepreneurs in San Francisco.
