#TCDisrupt: Tacos, Top Code and Twilio-Powered Hacks

#TCDisrupt: Tacos, Top Code and Twilio-Powered Hacks

Hackers from all over the world came out to talk shop, devour pizza, and inaugurate the future. With respect and prizes up for grabs, there was good reason to choose coding over sleeping.

Let’s take a quick look at the stats:

• • 300+ hackers
  • 151 apps built, 37 Twilio-powered
  • 150 Taco Bell tacos were devoured in under two minutes, a 4am delivery by Jeff Lawson
  • 112 karma and 50 comments racked up by MemStash on HackerNews
  • 78 APIs used
  • 9 Disrupt hacks were featured on TechCrunch, 5 of those were Twilio-powered
  • 1 new drinking game was created by Eric Allen

#hackath_n drinking game: everybody time somebody says “Twilio”, drink. #disruptsf

— Eric Allen (@ericpallen) September 9, 2012

Sleep is for Weak, Fourth Meal is for the Strong

Our CEO, Jeff Lawson snuck past security and delivered a well-earned late-night fourth meal to the DOers still up coding. Take a look at all those tacos! 150 to be exact that disappeared seconds thereafter.

The Results: Demos and Winners

The teams fought sleep deprivation, hunger, spotty WiFi, and even finger cramps from coding to make it to the final stretch: demo time.

Each of the API sponsors chose a winner for their individual prize, and the three overall winners each got a backstage interview and a one minute demo slot at the popular TechCrunch Disrupt conference going on this week. All of the teams who presented at the hackathon were awarded with free passes to the Disrupt Conference.

Pitchback lets users livestream any pitch and get realtime feedback with SMS. The practical applications of this really won us over – lectures, demo pitches, conferences, the list is endless. Built by Vladimir Gurovich, John Davison, and Jonathan Resner, this app utilized AT&T Cloud Architect and the OpenTok API in addition to Twilio SMS.

Take a look at the list of these top Twilio-powered hacks from Disrupt. You won’t be disappointed:

• Sirious Margritas is an SMS-powered Margarita Maker that uses Siri, electric imp, and Twilio to make some seriously delicious drinks. See the live demo by @TheSouryaRoy and @nicolasrenold, @Marcus1011.
• SafeHouse is a home security app created by Jean-Luc, David Leo, and Tse Andy Jiang that texts security updates using Raspberry Pi, Ninja Blocks, and Twilio.
• Inspired by N64’s Bomberman, Budlr is an SMS-controlled version of the game built by Travis Chen and Nolan Fabricius, using Twilio, Flixel, and 8-Bit-Weapon Sample Library.
• Advise.ly is a P2P advice network, like LinkedIn but for advice. The team, Nathanael Smith, Andrew Look, Uzair Ali, Parth Shah, and John Milinovich, used New Relic, LinkedIn, and Twilio.
• Memstash allows you to remember anything with a mashup of Evernote, Twilio, Sendgrid, and Pearson. Sina Khanifar, BC Broussard and Sohail Kahnifar, hit the top of hacker news with launch.
• Hashorder lets you check in and place an order all at once with SMS using Twilio, and Foursquare. The app was made by Sumeet Rohatgi, Prashanth Raghavan, Patrick Thompson.
• MobiSign provides simple document signing over phone using Twilio, and DocuSign. It was made by @playshak and @prathapnirmal. Watch the demo.

The overall winners of the 2012 TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon were Livebolt, Auctopus, and Heatdata. Read more about them here. Take a look at our Storify post on all the action at the hackathon. Lastly, thank you to TechCrunch, all of the sponsors, and especially all of the developers for making this a truly unforgettable experience. See you next time!