Meet The Disrupt NY 201...

It’s been about eight hours since our big Disrupt Hackathon kicked off , and all of our intrepid hackers have been busy letting the code (and the caffeine) fly ever since. I managed to tear a few of them away from their work (these folks are pretty motivated, so it took a bit of doing) to tell us a little bit about themselves and what they be trying to crank out during the wee hours of the morning. Devon Peticolas Devon is a senior at Rutgers University (and the newly-minted president of the school’s undergrad CS club ). As you might imagine, he’s no stranger to hackathons either — he can’t quite put his finger on it, but he’s probably in the “double digits” at this point. He’ll be spending the night working on a mobile web app that allows users to find their friends in a crowd through sort of a hot-and-cold approach — if all goes well, a phone will vibrate when it’s pointing in the direction of a user’s friend, and will vibrate even stronger as the two people get closer to each other. Peter Verrillo Peter is the CEO of a company called EnHatch, and during the day he works on creating apps to help promote, demo, and sell medical devices for use in surgery. He and his team specialize in creating those 3D apps for the iPad, but he’s looking to spend his time at the Hackathon bringing that 3D experience to the iPhone. The app he’s working on tonight deals with slightly less gruesome fare — instead, it aims to walk users through the process of putting together Ikea furniture. “If Ikea had a good app, this would be it,” he told me. Dasara Kushi This is Dasara’s second Hackathon (her first was a photo-centric event), and this time around she and her partner Ronn have decided to spend their night building a web app that uses a computer’s built-in webcam to analyze a user’s face and suggest places for them to go in real time. “If you look sad, it’ll tell you to go to a comedy club,” said told me. Their project makes pretty extensive use of the faceAPI, but there’s still plenty of work to do — they’re both still looking at pulling in new data from different APIs, to make the service more robust, but thankfully the night is still young. Jared Zoneraich Jared is a 14-year old hacker who attends Bergen Academy, and he’s quite excited to stay up and have fun here at his very first Hackathon. His project of choice? Nothing less than an ad delivery service, of course. “If I weren’t doing this, I’d be doing homework,” he said. His hacker idols include Mark Zuckerberg as well as seasoned iPhone cracker George “geohot” Hotz, who just so happened to attend Bergen back in the day as well. Pavan Krishnamurthy Pavan and his teammates are cranking away on an iOS app that will tell you what sort of music people in different cities are listening to – a noble and clever goal. Cities that tend to listen to faster-paced music on Rdio are labelled ‘hot,’ while more laid-back cities (Chicago in their mockup) are tagged with the “chill” label. His team’s mockups look pretty darned solid, but we’ll soon see if the finished product lives up to their ambitions. When he’s not hacking, Pavan works at Bloomberg and (like Jared) looks up to Mark Zuckerberg as his own hero hacker. Jon Gottfried Jon works for Twilio (during the day) and dons his hacker cape when night falls. He and his buddies are working on a system for A/B testing Amazon products tonight — not the sexiest idea the in the world sure, but that system is only part of his team’s plan. They hope that their testing system can be used to determine consumer desires, and use that information to whip up a subscription service — Thingscription — that’s focused on delivering those goods to people on a regular basis. Octavian Costache The royally-named Octavian (or Vivi, as he’s also known) and his teammates are working on a second-screen app that provides users with additional context they watch Game of Thrones , which is probably one of the geekier endeavors we’ve spotted today. Need to figure out why that guy just got stabbed? Or some lesser-known facet of some clan’s convoluted family tree? Keep your eyes peeled on this guy. Incidentally, he is totally in love with the Khalisi (because of the dragons, not the other thing) and his Twitter is Okvivi . Karina Ruzinov Karina goes to Rutgers (there’s a pretty large contingent of Rutgers kids, it would seem) and is spending her summer interning for Refinery 29. She studies Computer Science and Math and she says the student parties are real ragers. She and her team are working on a app that helps people come up with names for their Hackathon projects. It’s not quite ready for primetime yet, but when it is, it aims to inspire people by providing synonyms and rhymes for words that embody their particular project’s spirit. Victoria Mo Victoria is a Master’s Student in Computer Science at Columbia University and her tech role model is none other than Google’s Marissa Mayer. She and her team are working feverishly on an app that helps users find the hottest clubs in town (and not the hottest clubs in Ontario, as it sounded when we first heard the pitch). They aim to accomplish that by posting images and videos of the clubs’ exteriors so people will be able to quickly determine how popular a particular venue is.

Personalization Is Not ...

Editor’s note: Scott Brave is the CTO and co-founder, Baynote . We’ve all watched from the sidelines as companies have come out in a burst of glory, and then, two years later, spent their venture capital, lost their user base, and failed to monetize. This begs the question – what are the factors that drive a company’s survival, differentiate it, and ultimately make it a winner? In today’s online world, personalization is increasingly making or breaking companies. The companies that win are the ones making personalization a key company value – not just a feature. In the early days of the web, consumers were happy just to gain access to information. However, as technology became more sophisticated, and as more consumers and companies came online, we quickly moved out of the access age and into a state of information overload, often leaving consumers frustrated and confused. Companies that helped consumers cut through the clutter to reveal relevant information had a critical and sustainable competitive advantage in their respective areas. The concept of relevance is critical to the success of Google, for example. Personalization is not new. Popularized by Amazon and Netflix more than a decade ago, personalization is the practice of tailoring information to people based on what they are looking for, what they have found interesting in the past, what their friends have engaged with, or based on explicit inputs like their interests. Personalization has gotten a lot of positive attention recently because it can be used to great effect to organize the web’s information overflow into relevant, meaningful experiences. Winning companies approach personalization as a core value of how they do business – a “customer-centric” philosophy – rather than an add-on “feature.” As proof, here are some examples of companies that have built their businesses around personalization and the competition that they left in their wake. News: Flipboard vs. Yahoo! News In 2001, Yahoo! launched Yahoo! News , providing a repository for news articles that became the first-ever most-emailed page on the web. However, Yahoo! News neglected to treat personalization as a core value – and in so doing missed out on the opportunity to tap into the social graph of personal information to personalize and curate content for users based on their interests. With Yahoo! treating personalization as a feature and not a core value, by 2010, consumers moved on to new, more personalized content curation services that were specifically designed for consuming media. One example of such a personalized news source is Flipboard , which works across Apple devices, and allows users to “flip” through their social networking feeds and feeds from partner websites to find the news articles that are most interesting to them. Within a year of its founding, Flipboard had amassed a $200 million valuation. Today, the company’s valuation and user base continues to skyrocket, while Yahoo!’s continues to hemorrhage. Flipboard won because it applied personalization to consumer choice for news articles that other news providers hadn’t accounted for, sparking the beginning of the content curation boom. Interestingly, Yahoo! recently announced plans to eliminate many of its online properties in order to focus on its most popular ones and make the content on those sites personalized to the user. It seems Yahoo! has finally caught on to the fact that users like personalized content and will engage with brands and services that provide content tailored to their interests. Music: Pandora vs. Internet radio This example seems counter-intuitive – wouldn’t people want to listen to their favorite radio station online? This just never took off. Why? Internet radio contained way too much content – it wasn’t focused or specific enough. Consumers had to work too hard to find the music they liked. Once consumers were introduced to a better way to curate and listen to music, they were never going back. When Pandora allowed users to input their music preferences through both explicit selections and implicit actions to help shape their content stream, it changed the listening experience. Pandora made listening to music online personal. After Pandora, just listening to the radio online seemed like a waste of time. Dining: Alfred (Google) vs. Opentable OpenTable provides a free service that lets users make reservations online. The company first came on the scene in 1998, and has steadily built up its business – today over 25,000 restaurants are signed up with the service. While OpenTable provides restaurant recommendations along the side of the screen based on location, it is a feature rather than being core to the experience. Alfred, on the other hand, is a mobile app developed by Clever Sense (purchased by Google in December) that delivers dining recommendations based exclusively on your inputs and your Facebook check-ins and profile. By offering recommendations for restaurants that are personalized to consumer’s inputs and behavior Google could become a leading provider of time-critical dining data, and a big player in the multi-billion dollar restaurant industry. These examples have all shown how companies that embrace personalization as a core value, and not just a feature can win. In today’s consumer-driven society companies that don’t pay attention to what people want most at any given moment risk losing significant market share to competitors that have built a culture around delighting customers with a highly personalized experience at every turn.

comScore: 1 In 5 Videos...

According to online analytics company comScore , Americans watched 37 billion online videos on sites like YouTube, Yahoo and Facebook in April. In total, 181 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 1,307 minutes of online videos last month. Those numbers are virtually unchanged from last month, but one area that has seen pretty spectacular growth over the last few month is online video advertising. According to comScore, U.S. Internet users watched almost 9.5 billion video ads last month. That’s about 60 ads per viewer. What makes this number even more astonishing is that it was only in March of this year that the number of video ads topped 8 billion for the first time. Overall, the number of overall video views and the number of minutes they watch online video has remained pretty stable. There are some small changes at the bottom of comScore’s top 10, with Amazon making a reappearance in seventh position with 30 million viewers and Turner Digital dropping out of the list. Google’s sites, of course, continue to dominate the charts with 158 billion viewers, followed by Yahoo (53 billion) and VEVO (49 billion). Facebook, which is obviously having its day in the sun today, saw the number of video viewers on its site drop a bit from 45 million to 44 million, but in return, those viewers stuck around for 27 minutes now instead of just 21.3 minutes last month and also watched more videos per viewer than the month before (264 million). As for video ads, Hulu leads the pack here with 1.6 billion ads streamed last month (though that’s down quite a bit from 1.75 billion the month before). Google is a close second with 1.3 billion ads delivered, followed by BrightRoll and video ad exchange Adap.tv. With 48.6 ads per viewer, Hulu, also delivered a higher frequency of ads than any other service. YouTube, for example, only showed its average viewer 17.7 ads. In total, video ads reached almost 52% of U.S. Internet users.

Woot! A $200 32GB HP To...

Yeah, it’s not $99 and it’s refurbished but it’s still a TouchPad. The tablet was once heralded as an iPad killer. Now, I’m not sure if it could even kill a Notion Ink Adam in a head-to-head sales battle. But still, thanks to an honestly smart move from HP , the TouchPad and webOS is valuable to some in the development community. But you better act fast like previous TouchPad offers. This deal is up on Woot , where the Amazon subsidiary only has a limited number of items. The price is $195 for a 32GB WiFi TouchPad — not a bad deal for a slightly bulky tab capable of running Android. HP debuted the TouchPad as a true iPad competitor when it hit stores last summer. But for $500 it was a tough sale even though it was a capable device. Consumers apparently agreed as HP killed the product after just 49 days and eventually cleared out the remaining stock with a $99 firesale. Since then, HP released webOS to the open source community and essentially gutted the departments. This Woot sale might be the last time you can grab an HP TouchPad.

Pulse Is Getting Ready ...

Pulse , the popular free mobile news reader for iPhone, iPad and Android, could soon get ads. Until now, Pulse, which launched its first app in May 2010, was ad free and the company focused more on user acquisition than monetizing its service. A new job posting on Pulse’s site , however, clearly spells out the company’s plans to start making money through advertising in the near future. The company is currently looking for its first sales executive and says that it is “building innovative and disruptive ways of empowering brands to share their content and tell their story in a way that’s natural and native to Pulse.” Even though it’s now been more than two years since its launch, the company never revealed its monetization plans beyond a few glimpses here and there . Now it looks like some form of advertising is definitely coming to Pulse. Judging from this announcement, though, those ads won’t be standard mobile ads. The job posting stresses that Pulse is not looking to sell standard ad units and is instead “reinventing what marketing can be and should be on mobile devices.” Pulse notes that, in the long run, it plans to build a global sales organization, but for now, the new sales executive’s job will be to establish the company’s relationship with brands and agencies and to evangelize the Pulse platform and the company’s approach to marketing. Asked about the job posting, Pulse CEO Akshay Kathari told us that Pulse ads won’t look and feel like ads. Instead, they will “resemble the high-quality content that keeps users coming back to the app.” As the product is still a work in progress, though, he wasn’t in a position to say more about it at this time. So far, Pulse has raised $9.8 million . Its mobile apps had about 11 million users by the end of 2011 (up from just 1 million a year go) and the company was seeing a new download every 2 seconds. Pulse also comes pre-loaded on a number of devices, including Amazon’s Kindle Fire. It’s worth noting that, for a short time in 2010, Pulse was actually banned from the App Store for a few days after the New York Times complained that the app was using its content and making money off it (at that time, Pulse for iPad was still a $3.99 app). It’ll be interesting to see how Pulse plans to avoid similar issues once it starts selling its own ads.