This week in TechCrunch Disrupt and other topics of New York start-up interest:
DISRUPT HAPPENED. New York’s tech scene was very well-represented at all levels of the three-day tech conference known as TechCrunch Disrupt: New Yorkers made it into the hackathon finals, Battlefield finals and office hours with Paul Graham and lined the Startup Alley tradeshow: Battlefield finalists Sonar.me and BillGuard both had impressive demos and got a flood of user sign-ups. But there’s a new tech underdog on the map. BillGuard is only half-New York–CEO Yaron Samid is based in “New York and Tel Aviv.” Another finalist, Doat, is also Israeli. Good show, considering that by our count there were only five Israeli companies in the Battlefield competition.
ENTREPRENEURS AT LARGE. Aaron Price, organizer of the Hoboken Tech Meetup, has been named entrepreneur-at-large for DFJ Gotham. “I’d be happy to talk with you about your ideas or the VC process in general,” he said in an email to the group. Also, if you missed it: The city is looking for an EAL of its own.
TECHSTARS DEADLINE. Applications for the summer session are due today. Director Dave Tisch said yesterday he expects to end up with 1,000 applications, close to double the number that came in the first time.
UNDER-SERVED COMMUNITIES. GroupMe pushes in-app chat, bug fixes, push notifications, photo sharing and a new interface to its BlackBerry app.
ZOMGS. Airbnb is about to launch a sublet service, which excited New York techsters very much. Cool your jets, kids–there’s no guarantee it’ll launch here anytime soon.
WHY? PeekYou, which is building a social graph based on public data, just dropped a “social analytics” API. “Rather than matching together mutually relevant URLs and keywords, as Google does, PeekYou matches any given URL to the identity of the person who created it, or whom it is about. To date, PeekYou has identified over 250 million people as the authors of over 3 billion public URLs.”
Got an announcement for the start-up news roundup? Email tips@betabeat.com.
