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Best of TechCrunch Disrupt Hack Day Demos

When people hear the world "hack", they think of something negative: a spammer or troll trying to get at your personal information. But a hack, in the context of Hack Day, means to build something interesting in a short amount of time.
Written by Andrew Mager, Inactive

When people hear the world "hack", they think of something negative: a spammer or troll trying to get at your personal information. But a hack, in the context of Hack Day, means to build something interesting in a short amount of time.

TechCrunch's first Disrupt conference began with a Hack Day; I've been taking photos all day and night.

Over 60 teams presented today. Here are some interesting hacks that were demoed:

Never Alone Again - A simple service that basically allows you to connect to Facebook, add your cell phone number, and location. You will then see a list of people in the same situation. No one actualy sees your number either.

Future Mario

Greenest Loser - Instead of getting badges for doing dumb things, you can get one for doing something good: helping the environment. You can set goals like 10% energy savings.

Welcome Mat - This is a cool welcome mat that welcomes you when you step on it. It knows your Foursquare checkins, your Twitter tweets, and who you've been hanging out with.

Hack Day

Groop.ly - Real-time communication system that works on any mobile phone. You can create plans and send text messages to your friends. It creates a chat room that you can use on your phone with all of the people involved in the event.

Hack Day

Twitter Demographics - This hack for TechCrunch Disrupt searches through Twitter for keywords and determines the location of the authors. The users' locations are converted into demographic information based on their lat, lon, zip code and then the aggregate information is returned. The idea behind this hack is to go beyond just location and start to find out who people are rather than just where they are.

Flymodo - Tracks Twitter users and their tweets in real time as they fly. You can checkin to Flymodo using a hashtag. When you click on the flight, it shows all of the tweets for everyone on that particular flights. There is information about the gate, baggage claim, and more. Useful and kinda scary.

Dogshare - This is a Facebook app that lets people walk dogs. If you want a dog, but can't afford one, you can walk someone else's. If you need someone to walk your dog, it's easy to setup this service:

APPSiGOT - Gives you a way to find out which apps your friends have on their iPhones/iPads. It will find your friends though Twitter and Facebook. The app uses Adobe Air to get data from iTunes. It sorts them by which apps are most popular.

Web HD - A different approach to web design. They basically redesigned Twitter and Google.

Hack Day

I really like the Google HD:

Class.IO - If Craigslist had an open API, what cool things would be created? These guys created an open API for classifieds. DemoGraph is a sample app using the service. Very cool.

Shallow Dating - Instead of matching people with their interests, these guys created a site that matches people based on their physical attractiveness.

Worst Phone Ever - Digs through your log files on your phone to tell you how many dropped calls you've had, and how many times apps have crashed. It's a crowd-sourced class action law suit generator.

News Cred

Humans Know Best - Using Twitter to ask questions based on images.

Social Junkie Meter - Shows you how much time you've spent on Facebook, using the RescueTime API.

API For The World - Turns anything with a plug and a cord into a networked object.

Imagine your grandmother speaking to a bedside lamp, but her family is on the other side. This lamp could also order lightbulbs with this API, and have them sent to your home.

Grandma turned her bedside lamp OFF. She's still alive, yay! Sun, 23 May 2010 08:52:24 -0700less than a minute ago via Twitter4R

Hack Match - Hackers list their skills, startups list their needs, and this app finds the probability of a good match. It uses the command line right now.

I Wanna Volunteer - Collects data from various sites to build a volunteering search engine. Type in your location and find events to volunteer at.

Product Bar - On most review sites, you can't actually buy the product you are reading about. This service adds a toolbar that lets people sell stuff on review sites.

Author's Only - A bookmarklet that hides all comments except those from the author. Simple, but very useful, especially if you don't want to hear people rant about nothing.

Miss Tweets - You miss a lot of tweets throughout the day. This app gives you an RSS feed of the top 50 most interesting tweets of the day.

Home Dictator - Hands-free, always on, speech driven application for the home. Imagine Mom speaking aloud, "buy milk", and it will be delivered to your house.

Likealytics - Social analytics engine. What's happening with the Like buttons that you are using on your website? Real-time too.

FitBitFan - Takes your current weight and tweets it out for you.

Skimbuzz Real-time odds based on what people will click on. Uses eBay and Etsy API.

Bounty - Allows people to pay and get paid to Retweet. You can pay people per retweet, or set a bounty which works like a founders fee.

My City Gov - All of your government services in one app. Your one stop shop for everything related to your city.

My City Gov

iPad Suction Cups - So you don't drop your iPad:

iPad suction

PlanTweet - A Google Chrome extension lets you select any piece of text on a page and do a Twitter search on it. Really clean and it doesn't interupt the flow of usage.

Rock, Paper, Scissor... Shoot - It's roshambo via email.

ChatFe - It's Chat Roulette for phones.

IMG_0523

iPhone from scratch - This guy put together an iPhone in 48 seconds. I am kinda confused how this happened, but apparently TechCrunch has a video of it.

I did snap a picture of all the parts though.

iPhone disassembled

Venuit - A fan-driven marketplace gives power of the fan to persuade events to happen in your area.

Blue Plate - An open API that allows you to direct different feeds into one central repository.

Want To Know - If you want to buy something, you can use your Facebook friends to contribute to this decision. In real time.

Disrupt Me - Mobile browser, location-aware, real world scavenger hunt. In the game, you are a genius hacker whose project was rejected by TechCrunch. Your new plan is to meet all of the conference speakers, and convince them to support you

Disrupt Me

City Tracks - Local search for people who don't drive. Avoids highways and such.

Mr. Stabby - NYC Resistor created this monster:

Stereo Scanner - 3D laser scanner. Easy way to visualize 3D space. All you need is two webcams. Interesting.

Scanner Bot

Campus Checkin - A Foursquare clone for college.

Meetup Everywhere API - It's like Facebook Connect for Meetup.

FRM - A CRM for your friends. You can set future events that remind you to call your friends. These guys are porting their app into an Android app pretty soon.

Real-time check-in analysis. Gets a list of the top places around you, all the users, and feeds their profile photos into the Face.com API. If you want to find a party with ladies or nerds, you can use this app to narrow down your decision.

YouTube Builder - Basically a better interface to YouTube. Feels like a desktop app almost.

Unfriender.net - Login to Facebook and see who un-friended you.

Intate - Find out what your friends like on Etsy. It's based on what your Facebook profile says. Very cool! This is one of my favorites.

Winners announced

Don Dodge from Microsoft Google was here to announce the winners.

Don Dodge

And the winners are: Future Mario, Twitter Demographics, and Worst Phone Ever.

iPad Safety Strap and Mr. Stabby got honorable mention.

Mike Arrington explains the Disrupt Cup:

Disrupt cup

I had a lot of fun at Hack Day. So many people impressed me with their ideas and innovation. I was surprised how quickly teams were created and how well they worked together. I am even more excited about the rest of the conference. I will be covering it right here on this blog, so stay tuned next week!

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