TechCrunch Disrupt NYC ...

Hundreds have entered. But only one will walk away with the coveted Disrupt Cup. Who will it be? Stick around to find out but in the meantime we’ve got a rockstar lineup on our final day, including a sit down with a handful of local maker types, Chi-Hua Chien and a Hollywood star. If you’re just joining us be sure to check out previous coverage of the show here . Here’s what’s on tap for today: Wednesday, May 23rd 9:00am – 9:10am Opening Remarks 9:10am – 9:40am Brooklyn Makers:  Ayah Bdeir  (littleBits), Duncan Frazier (Bit Banger Labs),  Amol Sarva  (Peek), Peter Semmelhack  (Bug Labs),  Bre Pettis  (Makerbot) 9:40am – 10:00am Founders Stories with  Cyrus Massoumi  (ZocDoc) 10:00am – 10:25am Revolutionizing Beer with Churchkey Can Co.:  Adrian Grenier ,  Justin Hawkins ,  Ryan Sowards 10:25am – 10:35am Special Product Announcement 10:35am – 11:00am Government Innovation : Why Tech Companies Need To Pay Attention with Greg Ferenstein; Todd Park (US Chief Technology Officer) and Steven VanRoekel (Chief Information Officer) 11:00am – 11:20am BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 11:20am – 11:40am Fireside Chat with  John Lilly  (Greylock) 11:40am – 12:00pm Power Play with  David Lawee  (Google) 12:00pm – 12:30pm Investing: It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst of Times:  Mike Abbott  (KPCB),  Josh Kopelman  (First Round Capital),  Charlie O’Donnell  (Brooklyn Bridge Ventures),  Greg McAdoo (Sequoia Capital) 12:30pm – 1:45pm LUNCH and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 12:30pm – 1:30pm Charity Auction hosted by  Outbid 1:45pm – 2:05pm Fireside Chat with  Dan Huttonlocher  (Dean of Cornell University Tech Campus) 2:05pm – 2:15pm Hackathon Hightlights 2:15pm – 2:30pm Startup Battlefield Alumni 2:30pm – 2:55pm Fireside Chat with  David Kirkpatrick  (Author, The Facebook Effect) 2:55pm – 3:15pm Fireside Chat with  Chi-Hua Chien  (KPCB) 3:15pm – 3:30pm BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 3:30pm – 5:30pm Startup Battlefield Finals 5:30pm – 7:00pm Cocktail Reception hosted by  Hatch/IAC 7:00pm – 7:30pm Closing Awards Ceremony and Passing of the Disrupt Cup

Vinylmint Is A Jammin’ ...

Vinylmint is a Norfolk-based startup that aims to assist musicians in creating their music. It’s essentially a recording studio in the cloud. You record uncompressed audio right into the computer, the service uploads it to the cloud, and then you can listen to and edit tunes in your browser. Think of it as a mixing board with microphones all over the world. “Musicians can seamlessly store and manage their music projects from a single location,” said CEO Byron Morgan. “Whether it be a professional or amateur musician, Vinylmint easily fits into your existing production methods. Vinylmint enhances the creative experience ultimately providing our users efficiencies in speed, cost, and productivity.” The service is launching today and there are plans for a freemium model that offers faster turnaround and more storage space. All of the founders are avid musicians who just wanted to make the process of jamming online a little better. Click to view slideshow. Q & A: q: I think you did a fabulous job telling the story. I love that you’re tapping into trends that are out there. Collaboration is happening all around us. And the human desire to be on the internet is just as strong. Where do you see the business in two or three or four years? Who pays you, and how do you build revenue around that? A: First and foremost, accessing VM is subscription based. the other part is that the underlying tech allows individuals to share raw data files at a quick rate. That’s a scalable technology. Media and film and 3D modeling industries are looking to transfer raw data files as well as allow two remotely different systems to communicate and collaborate with one another. That’s where VM sees an evolution. Q: What are the barriers to entry? A: Our API fits into those systems. It allows us to tap into their users so they can collaborate and then create content through that. It also functions as a repository for that content. Our API also allows individuals to customize the solutions to their needs. They can add productivity tools to the system, and other collaboration functionalities and add-ons. We then function as a project management tool. Q: But what is the barrier to entry? If you discover a huge market and Apple says that they like the idea, why can’t they do it themselves? Well, Apple confines themselves to their own devices. There are other tools that users are always trying and using and that’s where we lie, outside of the Apple universe. New tools continue to arise every day. What kind of feedback have you had from musicians, and what’s most surprising? I’m a music producer myself, and working with other music producers across the world, I’ve learned that the issue is wanting to be able to reach or access sounds in other places. Because that’s where new things develop. There needs to be a central location where people can access each other and collaborate and that’s essentially where VM built its niche early on. We’re saying here’s a tool where you can now manage your products you’re creating with each other and collaborate in real time and overcome any technical obstacles you may be having like bandwidth speeds, etc. Q: Is there a discovery aspect of this? If I’m in Namibia and want to connect with a drummer in Munich, can I do that on the site? A: We’re in our early development but that’s part of an update in Version 1. Q: You talked about this being subscription based. Are you planning on charging subs straight from the get-go or making it free and then charging subs? A: It’ll be a 60-day trial period. From there, a user would pay for a container of 30 projects for $10. They can put as much as they can in that container until they have to upgrade. Q: Why doesn’t the product exist now? A: Competitors want to confine people to different recording systems called DOS. These sites are confining individuals to these DOS systems. We don’t want you to learn anything new. Use the tools you’re comfortable with to create your content. That’s where our value add is. Q: Once someone has collaborated and created music, what tools do you provide for editing, exporting and format? A: What’s currently in development is allowing them to render files from our platform. In the meantime, you can download tracks from the recorders. Then they can use ProTools or Reason to render the files and edit the files outside of the recorders. We give power to the users. Q: Have you thought about helping musicians promote their music after they use the platform? A: One of the cool things we’re interested in is using crowdsourcing initiatives and using the power of our content creation community to teach people who are using the site and help advertising campaigns to better promote them and our platform. Q: Have you thought about distribution? A: We’re currently in talks with digital distribution partners. There’s a supply chain there, and we’ve identified a place where we fit in the supply chain until we can continue to grow.

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC ...

Welcome to Day Two, folks. If Day One wasn’t enough for you, then you’re in for a real treat. We have a special product announcement at 11:20, Design Office Hours and an incredible list of Day Two Battlefield contestants. If you’re wondering what happened yesterday, you may want to check out this , that and  this ! And don’t forget to follow along as we unveil a brand new batch of Startup Alley contestants. Follow the team’s coverage here . If you’re unable to attend don’t worry, you can join the conversation on Twitter by following  #TCDisrupt . And here’s how the second day breaks down: Tuesday, May 22nd 9:00am – 9:10am Opening Remarks 9:10am – 9:30am Fireside Chat with  Jeff Jordan  (Andreessen Horowitz) 9:30am – 9:50am Power Play with  John Borthwick  (Betaworks) 9:50am – 10:15am Fireside Chat with  Harjeet Taggar  (Y Combinator) 10:15am – 10:40am New Media: Where We Go Now That We’ve Won:  Jonah Peretti  (BuzzFeed),  Gabe Rivera  (Techmeme), Henry Blodget (Business Insider) 10:40am – 11:00am Fireside Chat with  Roelof Botha  (Sequoia Capital) 11:00am – 11:20am BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 11:20am – 11:30am A Special Product Announcement 11:30am – 11:55am Fireside Chat with  Ron Conway  and  David Lee  (SV Angel) 11:55am – 12:30pm Design Office Hours with  Mimi Chun  (General Assembly),  Jamie Divine  (design expert),  Jason Morrow  (Betaworks),  Leland Rechis  (Etsy) 12:30pm – 2:00pm LUNCH and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 2:00pm – 2:20pm How Social Advertising is Working:  Tim Armstrong  (AOL),  Melissa Brenner  (NBA) 2:20pm – 2:30pm How the Battlefield Works 2:30pm – 3:30pm Startup Battlefield: Session 4: Disrupting Local Judges: Cyan Banister Stephen Messer David Rosenblatt Bijan Sabet 3:30pm – 3:45pm BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 3:45pm – 4:45pm Startup Battlefield: Session 5: Disrupting Collaboration Judges: John Auerbach Tracy Chou John Frankel Greg McAdoo 4:45pm – 5:00pm BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 5:00pm – 6:00pm Startup Battlefield: Session 6: Disrupting Identity Networks Judges: Michael Abbott Soraya Darabi Pat Gallagher Charlie O’Donnell 6:00pm – 7:30pm Credit Suisse  Networking Reception 6:00pm – 7:30pm Browse Startup Alley 9:00pm – midnight After Party hosted by  AT&T Hudson Terrace 621 West 46th Street Conference badge required for admission

Open Garden Lets You Cr...

What if you couldn’t just share your Internet connection with the few WiFi devices tethered to your phone or hotspot, but with pretty much everybody around you? Open Garden , which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, lets you create a mesh network that ties together all the Open Garden-enabled devices around you into one large network that then automatically shares Internet access and bandwidth between all of these devices. Basically, Open Garden wants to become a crowdsourcing platform for mobile connectivity. For now, Open Garden works on Android, Windows and Mac (it will be available in the Google Play store after today’s Disrupt demo). In the long run, Open Garden also hopes to make an iOS application available. The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2011 and has assembled quite an impressive team. Co-founder Micha Benoliel, for example, worked at Skype before starting his own company, and co-founder Stanislav Shalunov has a deep background in Internet infrastructure, including work at Internet 2 and BitTorrent. The company’s third co-founder, Greg Hazel, was previously the lead programmer of the popular BitTorrent client μTorrent. One especially nifty aspect of this project is that Open Garden used its own networking and P2P expertise to built (and patent) its own discovery mechanisms so devices that run its software can easily detect each other. Given the proprietary nature of this, the company doesn’t talk about the exact details of how it does this publicly, though. Right now, Open Garden only uses one Internet offramp for the whole mesh network (though it’s worth noting that it breaks down large networks into smaller ones with about ten nodes as well). If the network detects multiple offramps, it currently selects the fastest one available and switches to another one if that node goes offline or slows down. Soon, says Benoliel, it will also support multi-channel bundling to create a higher data throughput by using multiple on-ramps. Ideally, this could even work if your phone isn’t on a mesh network, as it would allow you to use a WiFi and 3G or 4G network simultaneously. For now, though, the company’s focus is squarely on getting its beta out into the market and making the overall experience as seamless as possible. The obvious question about a project like this, of course, is about how the carriers will react. Benoliel told me that he isn’t too worried about this, though. He likened it to the arrival of VoIP, a technology that the carriers have now embraced. Carriers will just have to adapt to concepts like this and figure out the best ways to make use of them. The Open Garden team believes that, in the long run, the carriers will understand that they can benefit from being part of Open Garden’s open network. Ideally, of course, an ad-hoc mesh network like this could also help carriers offload more data from their 3G and 4G networks. While the company didn’t disclose any details, Benoliel told me that Open Garden already has an agreement with one “forward-looking European carrier.” Other companies that will likely have a hard time appreciating this project are paid WiFi networks like Boingo or GoGo. A phone running Open Garden, after all, could easily provide basic web access to everybody at an airport gate or even on a WiFi-enabled plane. The company, which is probably one of the first to be based on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, has raised some money in a seed round so far and expects to add on to this round or raise a larger VC round soon. Disrupt Q&A Q : Is the plan to sell the app? A : We want to keep it free. Shooting for a freemium model with extra features like VPN access for business users. Q : What about security and privacy? A : The mesh network is encrypted. The device doesn’t let you monitor the traffic on the network. Q : What about the implications on battery power? A : Most of the power consumption comes from the data transmission. Open Garden can also help you save some battery by offloading to WiFi, which uses less power than a 3G or 4G connection. Q : How do you get around the freeloader problem. A : Open Garden has been thinking about moving to a credit system. Q : Do you have competition today? A : We have built a lot of IP. We have a strong competitive advantage there. Competition is in the carrier network offloading business. That’s mostly hardware manufacturers building femotcells etc.

Hyperlinks Are Dumb And...

Editor’s note:  Oliver Roup is the founder and CEO of VigLink, a service that makes it easier to use affiliate programs on your blog or website. When an email hits our inbox, we know not only who it’s from but their entire web imprint . LinkedIn can point out the profile of the woman you interviewed for a sales role last week and the gentleman you spoke with earlier in the year at a conference. And rest assured that the dining room set you checked out over the weekend at CrateAndBarrel.com will haunt your online experience for the forseeable future. Data — its collection and manipulation at scale — has revolutionized how we interact online. Homepages, banner advertisements and what we see in our Facebook timeline are all tailored-to-fit the reader, and we don’t give it a second thought. But the hyperlink, the key feature that distinguishes hypertext from text has remained largely unchanged since Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web. Websites generally, and search and online advertising specifically, would be barely recognizable today by their younger selves. But hyperlinks — their structure, how they’re authored and how we use and track them — have barely changed in 20 years. Consider: Inserting links by hand is a labor intensive process and has few tools. How about a recommendation engine to augment our own efforts? (Note: companies like Zemanta are a first step in this direction.) If a link is never clicked (i.e. 0% of the world finds it useful), why does it remain in content, distracting from meaningful / useful links indefinitely? Keywords in referrer logs have been mined to great effect by companies like BlueKai . (Although Google is slowly but surely taking that information away .) Isn’t where a user clicked out to just as informative? Why are we almost always ignoring it? Why do website visitors in Asia see links to online merchants in North America they are unable to purchase from, let alone access? Hyperlinks, in many ways, are dumb. And as a result, harming your user experience and potentially bleeding money from your company — when they could be a tool for better engagement, increased revenue, and deeper analytics. Now, there are a cluster of companies innovating by recognizing the power of the link — Omniture , Vibrant Media and Yieldbot , to name a few. But, this isn’t a problem companies can hold off on thinking about until the perfect tech pops up to solve it. There was a time when SEO was considered a “pro-tip” — a way for startups to get ahead of the game. Today, it’s standard best practice — and companies that don’t think strategically about the way search engines view their sites are at a strong disadvantage. Hyperlink optimization is similar. While link optimization might be a “pro-tip” now, it won’t be for much longer. Companies that aren’t thinking strategically about link placement, closely tracking results, and taking subsequent action, will find the companies that ARE doing these things at an advantage. The most critical areas to spend time on are tracking outbound hyperlinks, building a linking strategy, and refining it based on results. Let’s briefly dive into each. Track your Outbound Hyperlinks The first step to optimizing a site’s outbound traffic is to understand what that traffic looks like. Where do visitors go when they leave your site? What do they do on those other sites? While there is still a lot of room for growth within the outbound analytics space, Omniture (paid) and Google Analytics (free — but requires a modification to the standard Analytics code you add to your site ) both offer tools to help you understand what happens when a reader leaves your site. VigLink (disclosure: I am the CEO there) also offers an outbound analytics suite as part of its content monetization solution. Build a Hyperlinking Strategy What do you want your outbound hyperlinks to do for you? Do you want them to earn you revenue? Do you want them to serve an SEO purpose? Be purely informational? Should they be scarce (keeping readers on your site)? Or abundant (allowing readers to exit as it is helpful)? Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a plan for when your team includes a hyperlink, and when it does not — opening up opportunities for a better reader experience, and deeper engagement. Refine, Refine, Refine Combine a plan with data to track that plan’s performance and you’ve got a gold mine on your hands.  Notice a link that is never clicked and your plan requires that links must be useful to readers? Take it out. Or, a heavy percentage of links pointing to non-eCommerce properties, and your goal is monetization? Incorporate fewer links to those non-commercial sites. Refining your hyperlinks will improve reader engagement and overall site performance. Do It, and Make the Web Better Hyperlinks should make the web better — more connected, easier to navigate, and intelligent. Hyperlinks should make your site better — more actionable, insightful and profitable. Today, hyperlinks are falling short. They’re static and largely untracked. Sometimes useful — but often not. As the web becomes ever more crowded, and an organization’s site optimization toolkit begins to produce diminishing returns, the hyperlink is obvious low hanging fruit. What that means to site owners: It’s time to plug the outbound data leak. Implement a tool today that will track your outbound traffic. Choose a hyperlinking strategy and share it with your team. This is at least as much a human problem as a technology one – deciding what you want is always the first step. Be on the lookout for technology that addresses these issues. There are already solutions to track your outbound clicks and the value they deliver but 2012 is going to be the year the hyperlink gets smart.