Seventy five tech and mobile industry enthusiasts attended the first ever Disruptathon at Qorvis Communications headquarters offices in Washington, DC on October 28th. The event featured eleven presenters who had five minutes each to demonstrate their App while the attendees rated them using an iPhone App, SMS or Twitter. The audience could easily watch the smartphone demos on a big screen through a real-time image capture device designed by PointAbout.
|
Steve Obenski of WanderMobile receives his trophy and congratulations from Disruptathon organizer Pete Erickson left and Sze Wong of Zerion Software
The eleven presentations ranged from serious business productivity tools to education, games and music Apps. Steve Obenski of WanderMobile was the highest point recipient with his yet to be released App “WanderMark”. The App provides an intuitive way to document and share personal and professional travels and experiences with tight integration with Facebook. First runner up was Samir Roy with a pre-released mind game called “36 Minute Puzzle” and second runner up was Todd Moore of TMSoft, with the full motion interactive video game “Bar Fight” due out in late December. The “Perfect Score” award for the most 5 point ratings of all presenters went to Scott Suhy of PointAbout and the “Founders Choice” award was given to Greg Shepard of iMotion.
|
All presenters listed in the order they presented were:
 John Steedman of gWhizMobile presented Kaplan GRE. gWhiz is a suite of mobile productivity and learning tools that provide on-the-go planning, learning, fun, and collaboration. The GRE App is based on gFlash+ (found in “Top Free”, “Education”, at #46) a free flashcard application which allows customers to easily create their own flashcards with Google Documents or download others from the the gWhiz catalog. They support iPhone, BlackBerry and Android.
|
 Eric Madison presented FraternalSoft, a platform for creating software to connect members of fraternal, civic, support and other organizations to each other. Over 75 million people in the US and over 2 billion worldwide are members of organizations and most want or need to meet other people in their organization. Eric demonstrated the “Masonic Traveler” App which was built using the platform and is soon to be released in the iTunes App store.
|
 Steve Obenski of WanderMobile won the most total points of the Disruptathon presenting “WanderMark”, an intuitive way to share your travels and experiences with those you care about most. Their demo included views from a laptop and iPhone and showed how the two interact with one another as well as third party applications such as Facebook. The App is due out soon in the iTunes App store.
|
 Zdenek Becka of RomanDuck Software presented “Moon Phase”. MoonPhase which provides a wealth of information to the many people in the world who rely on knowing the phase of the moon and direction of the sun. The App even provides historical data back to 1900 and into year 2100. It is currently available for the iPhone. Located in Washington, DC, RomanDuck brings fun and quirky apps to your iPhone or iPod touch.
|
 James Quigley of Canvas demonstrated how their core platform eliminates out-of-date, costly paper based forms and surveys and transforms them into do-it-yourself applications for your Smartphone. Canvas saves money, time and speeds up the flow of information from staff, customers, and partners. During the presentation they built a new form on the fly using a laptop and used a Blackberry to input data into the form.
|
 PointAbout received the “Perfect Score” award for the most 5 ratings of all presenters. CEO Scott Suhy demonstrated how the AppMakr platform can help content providers build native iPhone or Android applications in just 27 seconds using RSS, XML feeds and existing web content. Scott showed proved just how easy the platform is to use by building an iPhone App in real-time for MacLife magazine.
|
 Rolf Hendriks of ZipTunes presented his pre-released ZipTunes App which provides a quick and easy way to manage music on the iPod Touch and iPhone. ZipTunes enables many advanced features not included with the native iPod application such as on-the-fly play lists, one touch timer and customized genre building. The App is in the approval process at Apple and updates can be found on the ZipTunes Facebook page.
|
 Independent developer Samir Roy was first runner up in total points presenting his latest mind game App href=”http://www.36minpuzzle.com” target=”_blank”>36 Minute Puzzle. Samir specializes in creating advanced games and applications. The objective of the puzzle is to turn the seconds on each clock in the grid to zero. Tapping on a clock turns it back by 15 seconds, but it also turns back the four clocks adjacent to it in the grid. There are three modes of play and if it sounds easy, it isn’t.
|
 Vincent Buscemi of MindGrub presented five of their leading mobile Apps in under five minutes which was an amazing feat in itself. His presentation included their leading 600Block App as well as Geico’s claims management App of which they were involved in the development of. Mindgrub specializes in Flash, Social Media and Mobile applications for iPhone, Blackberry, Google Android, Palm Pre and Symbian.
|
 Greg Shepard of iMotion won the “Founders Choice” award for his suite of mobile Apps that recognize movement as a form of communication. Through the App a user can design a new motion and associate a communication for it. Greg demonstrated how motion based communications is a big part of how we currently communicate and that the accelerometer within the device now makes it possible for us to capture an important dimension to how we interact.
|
 Todd Moore of TMSoft received the third highest point total for “Bar Fight”, a 3D full motion interactive game that is due out in December. Todd is one of the few developers in the world who has had two Apps break into the top 20 paid Apps in iTunes store at the same time with “White Noise” and “Card Counter”. The 3D animation platform Todd is developing for Bar Fight will be open sourced so that others can use the framework to build on.
|
In addition to host Qorvis, several sponsors played a key role in the event. The ratings system and iPhone App were powered by Zerion Software, which worked with Distributive Networks to integrate SMS into their platform. DubMeNow setup a SmartDev group allowing attendees to connect with one another and Mobients provided user experience consulting for the rating process. There was also a “best tweet” contest sponsored by PointAbout with the winner taking home an iPhone2Projector device.
|
Sponsors included:
The next public Disruptathon is scheduled for January 20th and will be hosted by Teqcorner. The event will be open to all technology categories and registration will open soon.
|
Category: Uncategorized
