Disrupt

TechCrunch named the final seven winners of its 2011 version of the TechCrunch Disrupt show in San Francisco, handing the crown to Shaker, an avatar-based chat room based on a user's Facebook profile.

The winner of the Disrupt Cup won $50,000. The runner up was Prism Skylabs, which taps into a company's video cameras for real-time footage and analysis. The Audience Choice award went to Vocre, a real-time translation app for the iOS platform.

TechCrunch founder invested in Prism Skylabs via his Crunchfund, and is a pending investor in Shaker, according to TechCrunch.

The final seven: Bitcasa, Shaker, CakeHealth, TalkTo, Prism SkyLabs, Farmigo, and Trello.
Bitcasa claims that it will change the way in which people use their data and their computers with regards to consumer data. "What happens when you run out of space? You buy another USB stick, another hard drive, another DVD," said Tony Gauda, co-founder and chief executive officer, in perhaps the most enthusiastic presentation of the afternoon.

In 48 hours since the company launched on Monday, over 45,000 users signed up.


What if you could access your data anywhere in the world anywhere you wanted it, with infinite storage? That's the Bitcasa promise. "This folder is infinite. This desktop is infinite," Gauda said. "Your desktop, your primary storage, is now the network. Your primary hard drive is now a cache," Gauda added.

According to Gauda, all of a user's data can be stored online (inluding application data, like Word, Gauda said). For $10 per month, you can store as much as you'd like online. Gauda said that the company has done extensive research to determine that files that can be cached on a user's hard drive are generally small, and larger files (like video) are usually formatted in such a way so that they can be streamed. To demonstrate, Gauda streamed a pair of HD video files simultaneously. Obviously, a user has to have the right bandwidth to make this work.

Shaker hopes to redefine the social" network. With Shaker you wil be able to socialize online much like you can in real life, an avatar-driven chatroom based on a user's online friends. "Walking" closer to them allows a user to engage in chat and to check them out. A "live wall" projects the likes of the users in the room, and clicking on it can reveal who likes it. Shaker has received overwhelming demand in Israel, Yonatan Maor, the site's chief executive, claimed.

Maor claimed that the site is just for flirting, not really for dating. But since these are real people, he said, users will quickly move off of the virtual dance floor and into real life.

You might think that CakeHealth would have to do with baking. Wrong! CakeHealth helps you manage your online health care. When you go to Cakehealth, tell them your health insurance information and your login information, and the site will provide insights into your healthcare spending, sort of like Mint.com tracks your spending.

CakeHealth helps you track expenditures versus a deductible, and remind you about prescriptions and preventative care. Vision, dental, and flexible spending accounts (FSAs) are also tracked. Users can also take pictures of our paper bills (or download a free iPhone app) to see if the bill was covered by your insurance, or should have been. It will also recommend a health plan for you, said Rebecca Woodcock, the co-founder of CakeHealth.

The company plans to make money via referrals, Woodcock said, as well as well as taking transaction fees on paying and reporting bills.

The Talkto iPhone app (in beta) wants to make it easy to text any local business as easy as it is to talk to your friends. But it's not about getting reservations; it's about communicating with local businesses. In an onstage demonstration, Stuart Levinson, a co-founder of the company to text a local performance troupe to check performance times.

Talkto learns how businesses want you to contact them, and routes them. It either uses an email, text, or a live customer service operator on the back end, then tries to automate it going forward. The app also shows you businesses that are online and ready to chat. What happens if the local dry cleaner only has a phone? If users pay for a premium plan (price undisclosed) the company's call center will keep calling for you.

Prism Skylabs lets companies share their real-world places online through an existing network of cameras. A business or place simply downloads a piece of software, which looks for local cameras and links them to the cloud in real time, albeit anonymously. It's a way for a business to use real-time video from video cameras. It can also be used by the business to get an idea of what customers are circulating near a new promotion.

Ron Palmieri, the founder of Google Voice and Prism, explained: at a high level, the company takes grainy, noisy video and processes it to improve dynamic range and eliminate that noise. The company also preprocesses foreground activity to anonymize customers via silhouette. Prism was invested in by the Crunchfund, Michael Arrington's new venture fund.

"Yesterday I went to the farmer's market," said Benzi Ronen, the founder of Farmigo. "It was locally grown organic and it was harvested about 24 hours ago…What if we could get this produce at the price and convenience of the supermarket?"

Farmigo creates a direct relationship between you and the grower. For each pickup location, Farmigo provides a catalog of different providers, which you can subscribe to on a subscription basis to provide some stability to the food chain. All the members of a pickup location have a shared interest in that provider, as that provider will need a minimum number of subscribers. Already, over 40,000 families are delivering produce to the system to 1,500 pickup locations; Farmigo takes a small cut of the revenue. Farmigo also provides analytics for the producers themselves.

Trello is project management software, a category that Joel Spolsky, the chief executive of Trello, acknowledged has been tried before. Projects are organized into cards, which can be "flipped" and commented upon. Dragging icons of a company's employees onto the card assigns them a task.

Nothing is hard-coded, Spolsky said, so list can be managed and altered. The site has pulled in over 20,000 users in 24 hours.