Disruption hits SF

Posted on October 1, 2010 by

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The fate of our Internet, mobile-centric lives depend on the techie nerds that disrupt. The second annual technology and startup conference, TechCrunch Disrupt was held at the SF Concourse Design Center this past week. The event brought together CEOs, founders, and investors of some of the biggest names in the game such as Paypal, Google, and Twitter among others to weigh in on the state of the Internet experience and the changes it is rapidly moving toward.

The three-day conference also showcased the most innovative ideas in the “Startup Alley” where startup hopefuls battled for audience votes to get on stage to pitch against finalists in the “Startup Battlefield” for a grand prize of $50,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup. An expert panel of judges from the industry were pitched to by 27 startups that are at the brink of rocking our worlds.

There was no shortage of enthusiastic startups in the competition, from gamer targeted dating site, GameCrush to real-time social media curation platform, DataSift. Other notable mentions were website performance and security service, CloudFlare and free text and voice calling provider, Pinger. But the one that rose to the top of the competition and beat out over 800 applicants went to Palo Alto based, Qwiki. They impressed the judges and audience with their presentation of an innovative platform for experiencing information through rich media content and comprehensive verbal text from different web sources. The platform presents the information through interactive video created on the fly without human intervention as an intuitive way of experiencing information.

To check out more about the startups from the competition visit http://tcrn.ch/d5eKxo

Christian is a Senior at the Academy of Art School of Advertising, follow at @christiandean