Sure, UberConference took home the Disrupt Cup and its accompanying $50,000 (giant) check. But it could be argued that Incident, makers of the gTar, had already won. The company’s Kickstarter project skyrocketed from $10,000 in funding before stepping on the Disrupt stage, to a current $220,000.

This is big, considering that Disrupt is a web/software conference and a hardware startup went all the way to the very end. Even Michael Arrington was impressed, which says quite a bit. But none were more impressed or intrigued than myself, which is why I wrangled the Incident guys together backstage and begged and pleaded to play the gTar.

Kindly, they obliged. I have no experience playing the guitar whatsoever, and my greatest claim to musical fame would be completing Free Bird on expert in Guitar Hero. Now, I won’t say my rendition of Blackbird a la gTar is the best in the world, but for having absolutely no practice or experience, my few moments with the hardware should be a testament to the gTar’s potential.

I also spoke with the founders about the difficulties of distribution, and more importantly, music licensing. Eventually the gTar app will come with a content store, from which you can buy different songs. For now however, this is a bare bones iteration that is sure to improve over time.

If you move now, you can get the gTar on Kickstarter for $50 off the expected retail price, at just $399.

To any member of the tech media, Techmeme is the first site you visit in the morning, and the last site you check before bed. It’s a thermometer of today’s news, with more context per headline than any single news source can offer. This is the beauty of aggregation, which some more traditional media outlets frown upon.

But founder and CEO Gabe Rivera has been doing this since 2004, and has incredible insight into the differences between old media and the young guns. I grabbed him backstage during Disrupt NYC 2012 after his panel on the tech media to see how he felt about new media’s dependance on sources like The New York Times, the myth of objectivity, the difference between click bait and link bait (if there is one), and his personal source preference when he sits down with a cup of coffee to read the day’s news.

“In the area we cover, I think we could do pretty well without [traditional media],” said Rivera. “It’s a very artificial experiment but if they disappeared overnight, I think that the remaining tech sites would cover everything just fine. I think some of the financial stories would be the exception to that, but all these blogs would reorganize very quickly to cover that.”

But one of the most glaring differences between new and traditional media is their views on objectivity. While old media holds true to a bias-less existence, blogs offer news through the filter of an expert, injecting opinion when necessary. Rivera believes that the beauty of aggregation (also new media) is that you can offer both point A and point B almost simultaneously and adjacently so the reader has as much context as they desire.

In the interview, Rivera also discusses the difference between link bait and click bait, and how Twitter makes it really simple to disguise a story within the headline.

Rivera said that his personal preference changes based on the content itself. Some days he doesn’t read very much news at all, despite the fact that Techmeme reads just about everything. But on days when he’s consuming current events, it all depends on the story type and who’s breaking it.

“The site that has industry people as its target readership will contextualize in a way that’s more meaningful to me,” said Rivera. “That’s usually TechCrunch or AllThingsD. Once in a while, the New York Times will uncover the story and have enough exposure to the details first so that they have the best account. For the first half hour, at least.”

Ok, maybe not a bouncy ball, but pretty damn close.

M-Edge came out with a SuperShell for the iPad towards the end of last year, but the idea of a bouncing iPhone seems much more appealing. The case comes in four different colors — black, blue, purple, and pink — and has a finely dimpled finish to it to help with grip.

Clearly, it’s not the slimmest case on the market, so if you’re into that minimalist thing you may want to steer clear.

At the same time, anyone who lives a rough-and-tumble life (or drops their phone more than the average bear) should consider looking into this. The corners of the case are bulkier than usual, which allows for a bounciness that you can view for yourself in the video below.

The cover is made of closed-cell foam that helps absorb shocks, and it wraps around the edges of the phone to fit securely. All ports are accessible.

If only it came in orange with black stripes we could call it the Tigger.

The M-Edge iPhone SuperShell is available now for $29.99 from the M-Edge website.

Every time I think TC Disrupt’s Startup Alley can’t get any better, it does. TC Europe Editor Mike Butcher and I ventured into the chaos, accosted at every turn by startups from across the world. We even had a startup, iLiftOff, fly all the way in from Mumbai on a 21-hour flight.

It’s almost a shame that we can’t have all the Startup Alley companies in the Battlefield, but at the same time, the beauty of the alley is that we can talk to them for far longer than six minutes. And we often do.

In this particular video, we checked out LocalBonus, LiveAll, Jaxx, ScreachTV, iLiftOff, ColourDNA, Snoozy, and Speaktoit. You can view all of our Startup Alley companies right here.

Shopping on the iPad is becoming one of the best ways to shop. You’re sitting on your couch, comfy as a bug in a rug, swiping through dresses, and t-shirts, and shoes! Oh my! But there’s one issue: you have to switch between all the different brand apps to enjoy yourself. Sure, you can hit up the Saks 5th Ave app and view multiple brands at once, but those brands aren’t offering the ability to reach out to you directly with their sales, content, and promotions.

But that’s why Buyou, the crowd favorite here at the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley (and thus one of our Battlefield members), has stepped onto the stage with its iPad app.

It’s a free online mall that aggregates various brands into one beautiful, easy to use interface. And while it’s great that the app begins learning your taste through your likes and dislikes, it’s even better that it relays that information back to its brand partners. This means that a retailer like Express will begin to learn the clothes you like and more easily target clothing you may enjoy directly to you.

Buyou offers up a Featured section, to highlight special products and promotions, as well as a Deal Feed, that throws together all the hottest deals within its retailer network so you can save a buck or two while iPad shopping. You can also shop by category, and save items to a wishlist.

Another pain point that Buyou addresses for retailers is their social presence. Retailers often produce a ton of content for Facebook and Twitter, and even though you may follow them, you’ve likely done so to unlock a deal or be a part of a promotion, not to surf through their content on a daily basis. Buyou filters all its retailers’ social media content through the app and presents it in an unobtrusive, thoughtful way.

The app is currently live in the App Store with 32 retailers already on the platform, including Express, Bonobos, Gap, Lands’ End, LEGO, Nine West, Oakley, and The Sharper Image. The company is currently working on adding new brands.

While customers love deals and coupon services about as much as they love money itself, merchants — particularly small businesses — tend to see things a bit differently. Often times they feel it’s bad for business (aka the Groupon effect), overloading the retailer with a non-regular clientele, which can make the company look a bit desperate with tacky deals.

But Mirth, which has just launched on the Disrupt NYC Battlefield stage, aims to change all that. Because it integrates with a loyalty card system called CardSpring, Mirth only requires a one-time sign-up with your 16-digit credit card number to get started. No app, no check-ins — all you need is your credit card.

From there just visit your favorite spots like normal. If you visit the same restaurant twice in a rolling 30-day period, you instantly become a regular, meaning you’ll not only receive 3 percent off every purchase you make, but that the merchant will have a direct line of communication with you.

The beauty is that users live their lives just as they normally would, swiping at restaurants with their credit card without ever checking into anything or even opening an app.

So let’s put this into a real-world scenario. Let’s say you own a restaurant called FoodCrunch, and I happen to come in about once a week. With Mirth, I’d only need to swipe twice to start receiving discounts, and as long as I continue coming in twice a month after that, I’ll maintain my “regular” status.

But for the merchant, Mirth is surprisingly attractive. Three percent isn’t much of a sacrifice; it’s about the same price as swiping a credit card. But the benefits are well worth it. You, as owner of FoodCrunch, can send me an email whenever you’d like to offer me a special discount, or to tell me that you have a new dish on the menu. Mirth gives customers discounts and in turn gives retailers a reliable line of communication to dedicated patrons.

Jeremy Philip Galen, Mirth’s founder, conceived of the idea a few months ago and has since brought on Phil Reichenberger as CTO. The company is entirely bootstrapped, and live in New York City.

If you want to sign up, you’re free to visit Mirth.ly and enter your info to start swiping yourself to regular status.

Disrupt Q&A

q: So i def agree with your comment with Groupon and deals. and Foursquare have fixed their model. How are you going to go after that.

a: We are going to start with a capable sales force for merchants that are feed up with the current companies. what’s nice with is it’s a it’s a one-time signup. They have very little work to do.

q: Local merchants have dozens of companies chasing them. Why sign with mirth? Isn’t there a saturation point at sometime.

a: There is probably going to be a saturation point at one time and we’re going to be the one’s that bring it to that point.

We’re are going to speak directly to their concerns. Restaurants have been pummeled. They have been very receptive with Mirth with the brand. We are are going to bring the right cliental to the merchant.

q: If I show up I look like everyone else if you just send me an email. How I look different as a Mirth user?

a: I think it would be an interesting problem to solve if we have so many Mirth users and merchense in a dense geography. We thought a lot about throttling the retailer’s messaging so they wouldn’t be able to send every 10 minutes, only once or twice a week. And then for the customer we thought a lot about letting them specify which types of offers they want to receive.

q: How are you doing customer aquications.

a: We thought we would launch at tc disrupt and see if anyone signed up. Second thing we are going to deputize our lovely merchants. They have an interest to promote this program. We believe they can genuinely give this to first, light users. And then bring them into the program.

q: Can you elaborate the discount model?

a:The discount is considerably smaller than the deal discount — 3% at a restaurants. Including our small fee, it’s the kind of small discount that will trigger loyalty logic and give the type of lift loyalty can offer.

q: Have you had any friction on people giving you their credit card info?

a: We are launching right now.

q: So real quickly, the value for the business will be loyaty and foot traffic. So how are you actually increasing the foot traffic?

a: We are not bringing new customers, we are giving businesss an opportunity to take the first time customer and getting them back again. And the second and third customers and bringing them back again.

When you live in New York City, there are certain expectations of what you should be able to accomplish easily. You can get almost anything delivered straight to your doorstep, whether it be food, groceries, toiletries, or pot. But there’s one service that is still stuck in brick-and-mortar land, and to be quite honest, it’s shocking that it’s stayed offline and off of our doorsteps for so long: Dry cleaning.

Sure, you can get a bag of clothes picked up, washed, and dropped back off, but there’s no service that aggregates all of your nearby dry cleaners and compares prices, available pick-up/drop-off times, and books it for you (Seamless-style). But no more — SpotlessCity is finally here.

The service asks you to input your zip code and address, and automatically pulls in all the dry cleaners in your area. You can then enter in a pick-up and drop-off time, based on the dry cleaner’s availability, and that’s all there is to it.

A delivery person knocks on your door, picks up your giant bag of wovens and delicates, and promises to see you again tomorrow (or whenever you have scheduled the drop-off).

What’s better, perhaps, is that dry cleaners go through an almost identical process to end-users in terms of signing up and getting started. The dashboard can be accessed online, and now through a brand new iOS app that was just launched on-stage.

SpotlessCity works with local dry cleaners to take a fixed percentage of all orders that come through the online service. Dry cleaning partners will not be allowed to mark up prices for SpotlessCity customers, nor will users ever be charged for pick-up/delivery or for the service as a whole.

Most dry cleaners, especially in New York City, are small mom-and-pop shops that don’t have the resources to have a robust online presence, if they have one at all. SpotlessCity works as the middle-man to bring in new customers for dry cleaners and offer an easy, seamless method for getting your dry cleaning done.

Founder Hissan Bajwa sees a bigger vision than “the Seamless of laundry” with this product. Along with providing an online platform to small dry cleaners, it’s worth mentioning that most people have no understanding of the various levels of pricing and quality at different dry cleaners. SpotlessCity will eventually offer an education to consumers, matching them with the right dry cleaner based on the type of clothing they wear.

After all, a banker probably needs a different dry cleaner than a college student.

SpotlessCity has thus far raised a $200,000 seed round from friends and family, and is now launching out of the pilot phase to expand past Brooklyn and Manhattan into the other boroughs.

Q&A

Q: Can you expand this with other services?

A: Yes we have plans to add services that are natural when you’re already shopping for a dry cleaner.

Q: What is the problem that you’re solving for dry cleaners?

A: When we talk to cleaners, they love the idea because in NY they have pick-up/delivery service. Phone is a noisy way to connect to customers and they want to get online because the phone takes time, people, and isn’t as quick. But since they’re small businesses they can’t build out that online platform with functionality.

Q: In Open Table there are a lot of restaurants to go to, but with dry cleaning people just always go to the closest one?

A: If you have a cleaner in your building, sure. But most people don’t want to lug around their stuff or get on the phone. Even in buildings with dry-cleaners, they may not like that cleaner. But they don’t want to shop around.

Q: Have you checked out if it will work outside the city?
A: Since we put up a beta site we’ve been contacted by dry cleaners all around the country. Right now we’re working on how to deploy to new cities, especially suburban cities that have a different delivery/pick-up model.

Q: What is the rate that you charge from dry cleaners’ sales?
A: We negotiate cleaners by cleaners. Our general rate is around 10 percent.

Q: Then it would take a lot of transactions to break even?
A: As we move into other cities we’re exploring more of a licensing franchising fee.

Q: So what kind of volume do you need to break even?
A: We have pretty good protections, and we’re on track to hit the volumes we need to break even.

Q: How are you finding customers? Through salespeople or dry cleaners?
A: Right now we’re very geographically limited. Three neighborhoods around town. So a lot depends on hyperlocal marketing. We have hit the streets, used refer a neighbor, and found that word of mouth has been great for us.

Q: You say you’re like Uber for dry cleaners. Have you thought about launching other categories as well?
A: We’ve thought about other household cleaning services. Things that make natural sense when you’re looking for dry cleaning. We want to focus on recurring services, so house cleaning. We’ve found that once people use SpotlessCity they keep coming back.

Q: You’ve chosen to focus on convenience above all else. Is there a reason why you choose that?
A: It’s still a bare bones site. We want to collect and add reviews but it needs to be done in a thoughtful way. If you’ve ever seen dry cleaners reviews, they’re often just rants. We need to keep them organized and meaningful, based on metrics so that they can educate consumers.

Q: Are you worried this will only work in a high density city?
A: We obviously want to deploy in similar markets like San Francisco, Boston, and D.C., but the encouraging thing is the fact that we’re getting contacted by cleaners in Denver and Miami. There is a marketplace there. It just has to be pivoted a bit for those markets.

Kickstarter is a great place to launch a product. Remember the Pebble smart watch, which saw over $1 million in funding in its first 28 hours on the site, and surpassing $3 million well over a month before their stated goal?

Disrupt, which just so happens to be underway as I type these very words, is also an excellent place to launch your product. We’ve seen countless companies rise to almost instantaneous success after stepping off of our stage, like Soluto, Mint.com, Redbeacon, and GroupMe.

So it should be no surprise that Incident’s now-famous gTar, which was launched both on the Disrupt Battlefield stage and on Kickstarter, has made upwards of $120,000 on Kickstarter since launching on our stage yesterday. Idon Beck, Josh Stansfield, and Franco Cedano had only tallied $10,000 before their impressive Disrupt debut.

Of course, Disrupt can’t take all the credit. TechCrunch’s sister site Engadget went hands-on with the gTar around 3:30pm yesterday, which could have only pushed more traffic to their company’s Kickstarter page. I actually went hands-on myself and, as a huge Guitar Hero fan, I can safely say that the gTar takes amateur wanna-be guitar-playing to an entirely new level.

I felt like I could actually, eventually of course, learn to play guitar for real, and that I wouldn’t want to slam my head into a table trying. Progress.

The estimated retail price for the gTar will be $450, but investors who back the product on Kickstarter will be able to get their own gTar for a discounted $350.

Everyone comes to Disrupt for the Battlefield. Of course, the panels are interesting, and few can resist a fireside chat between Fred Wilson and Michael Arrington, but the true gem of our massive conference is the Startup Alley. These companies are some of the most promising startups in the country, and with our Israeli Pavilion, the world.

This year’s batch, in particular, is above-and-beyond impressive. I caught up with a few different companies, and each one of them brings something totally different to the table.

Roaster Coaster, for example, is a coffee micro-brew subscription service that not only sends you various samples of different coffees, but educates you to the point of coffee connoisseur status. The idea is that you can be a coffee expert or a Folgers fan and still learn something new.

Runfaces enters the dangerous and crowded world of social, but with a little hand from something called video. Each user has a profile page, just as you’d expect, but all self-expression is done through video. The service is available on the web, with support for webcam and/or Vimeo and YouTube videos, with upload functionality coming over the next month. Runfaces also has an iOS app currently available in the App Store.

Speaking of video, LiveNinja is a video chat marketplace and monetization platform, which will basically allow therapists, doctors, teachers, or really anyone who makes money off of offering services via video chat, to be paid on a fully-integrated platform. The marketplace is fragmented for most of these people, who often use Google Hangouts and Skype and are then paid via PayPal. LiveNinja aims to solve that problem.

Another social network that has plopped itself down in our Startup Alley is all about the family. HatchedIt is a platform that allows family members to post a color-coded family calendar, complete with events and invitations. Parents can loop in grandparents and other relatives, and are also offered controls over which events they can see.

And if there weren’t enough social networks in the mix, Pictorious is looking to slip itself in between Instagram and Draw Something with a photo-sharing platform that fosters competition. So, essentially, users will create challenges like “planking” or “cats” and then friends will compete in the challenge by posting their best planking- or cat-related pictures.

And finally, Brayola. Perhaps it doesn’t sound so obvious, but it’s basically a bra recommendation platform. Little do men know, and women know far too well, that finding a good bra that fits is pretty damn difficult. Brayola lets you enter in information on bras you already own and love, categorize them (into buckets like sexy, everyday, and sport) and it generates a list of bras and sizes that should work for you. Oh, and you can buy direct.

We’ll choose one of the startups in the alley to participate in the Battlefield on Wednesday, and the companies you saw today will be replaced by a brand new batch of startups tomorrow.

Disrupt NYC 2012 begins in approximately 12 hours (tickets here).

But it’s been two years since Soluto, the software that will make your computer simply run better, took home the Disrupt Cup at the TC Disrupt NYC Battlefield in 2010. The company entered the competition with a total of $7.8 million, and after walking away with the $50,000 round, secured another $10.2 million in Series B from Index Ventures for a total of $18 million in funding under their belts.

It’s been a wild ride, starting with about 400 users as the then-stealth company stepped on stage, and only a few days later they were dealing with hundreds of thousands of users. In fact, CEO and co-founder Tomer Dvir said that the platform almost had trouble dealing with all the data being sent back by the flood of new users.

But, in his own words, “Disrupt is one of the best ways to release.”

Here’s the interview I had with Mr. Dvir in its entirety:

TechCrunch: What was it like to launch your product on stage at Disrupt?

Soluto: The amazing part was that we had about 400 users when we launched. It took a really long time to develop the product because it’s complicated and hardcore. It’s something that sits deep inside the OS. That 400 users was mostly friends and family and people we asked to install the product.

But just one minute after we came off the stage we turned it on, and suddenly were bombarded with quantities of users we couldn’t imagine before that. It was way beyond anything we were prepared for. It’s not just jumping into deep waters, it’s being pulled down into the deep water.

We weren’t really ready for that. We thought we were, but reality struck and we realized we had never learned to scale before. The challenge with our system is that every user’s machine starts sending us data. We were flooded with way more data than we had imagined. We knew that coming to Disrupt would get us some traction, and we expected maybe tens of thousands of users.

It ended up being around 50 times more than that.

It was a pretty awesome experience, launching on stage at Disrupt. We went from being with less than 1,000 users to several hundreds of thousands in a matter of days or maybe a week. We went from being nameless — no one knew what we were doing — to being known. We felt like stars at the show. People got connected to the idea, to the vision.

TechCrunch: You guys obviously won at Disrupt. It’s been two years, so what’s happened since, and how did Disrupt shape the past two years of your company history?

Soluto: I guess we learned what it means to be a company. Without Disrupt, it would have been the same growth but much, much slower. We might have gotten press here or there, but suddenly Disrupt was like a leap. A shortcut. I can’t even estimate how much time and money it would have taken to get to that state as quickly as we did.

Our biggest challenge since then has been scaling. We had to understand how to grow and not gradually, because on Day One it was already crazy.

We wanted to grow the company and get the right people. We got some amazing support, kept developing, and kept progressing and re-writing stuff.

We also had to learn how to answer reporters. We had to accelerate all processes in a company including growing our talent. We were around 20 people at launch, and now we’re at 50 employees.

Outside of the technical part, it was the first touch of the company with the press and blogosphere. The New York Times approached us. Everyone was suddenly approaching us. On Day One we were swimming with the big fish, and dealing with the press was just another thing we had to learn quickly.

TechCrunch: Do you think that winning Disrupt made it easier for you to get funded and/or bring in new talent?

Soluto: Winning or participating won’t get you funded, but it gets you the exposure you need to get there. If you have a good company you can get funded, but Disrupt works as a good foot in the door because you aren’t so nameless. VC’s meet a thousand companies a year, and after launching or winning at Disrupt you become one of the more interesting hundred or fifty, instead of just one of thousands.

TechCrunch: It seems that launching your product on a stage at a huge conference like Disrupt might be a little intimidating. Were you worried or do you think it served the company well?

Soluto: It may not fit everyone, but it was an awesome experience for us. There are several advantages.

The first is that you have a concrete deadline. It’s a good thing for a company to have something you can’t move. You can always move PR and even a TechCrunch post, but Disrupt is a freaking competition which people are trying to get into and people have bought tickets to. It’s going to happen no matter what, so you need to be ready on time.

In terms of timing, we came close to being able to release a product a few months before Disrupt and then we heard about the conference and it all aligned. It was perfect.

I don’t know if I would postpone a release for three months if it wasn’t the perfect opportunity.

Getting an on-stage launch also sends a company into the extreme. It forces you to be ready for an unexpected amount of users.

There’s also the advice you’re getting. Having Marissa Mayer and Michael Arrington see your product and give feedback, and sometimes tear it apart, it only pushes the entire company to get some awesome results on time.

It’s one of the best ways to release, I can’t think of anything to compare.

TechCrunch: I find the Battlefield to be intensely emotional. Obviously a lot of good came out of it for Soluto, but how did you feel up there on stage?

Soluto: All of us are going to remember it as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It took two and a half years to release the product. Working so long and putting it out into the world in a single day is an amazing experience.

TechCrunch: Care to share any user/download numbers with us?

Soluto: Well, currently we have two products. The original product was a local download, and since launch we’ve hit 3 million downloads. We’re not sharing numbers around our web product right now, but it’s been only four and a half months and we’re definitely impressed with the numbers. We’ve really had no paid marketing, ads, or PR, so we’re certainly pleased.

TechCrunch: What advice would you give to people about to present their products at Disrupt NYC 2012?

Soluto: Acknowledge that you’re sitting in front of senior people that see good and bad companies. You have to be humble. You’re listening to people who have a shallow view of the product, but they have instincts and insights, so you must be in listening mode.

Don’t think you have all the answers. It’s fine if you don’t. Try to give your insight but really, really listen and see if there’s something they might say which is smart. Some of the smartest people around are the ones who listen.

We saw many companies present before us and they were looking for fast answers. We thought about that and felt that it wasn’t the way. Listen, be open, and make sure they understand the service and product that you’ve shown and then it’s up to you to think about the different angles.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

With Disrupt NYC 2012 literally a day away (tickets here), it’s hard not to think about the past success of our former Battlefield startups. I’ve taken a close look at quite a few over the past couple weeks, and to be honest none have come as far as Mint.com. The company has rocketed to success since launching at TC40 in September, 2007, and subsequently winning the top prize at the Battlefield.

The personal finance service has raised a total of $38.1 million over the course of the past five years, and has gone on to be acquired by Intuit for a whopping $170 million in September of 2009.

When I spoke to VP and general manager of Mint, Aaron Forth, he said that two very specific things, the financial crisis of 2008/09 and a launch on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage, were the main factors of the company’s success, both in acquiring users and being acquired themselves.

Here’s what else he had to say:

TechCrunch: So tell me the story of Mint, from launch until now.

Mint.com: It’s been such a great run. We won TC40 in 2007, and that was the first time our product saw the light of day. It was an intense moment, debuting something we had put so much work into.

Winning gave us a great start. We hit 20,000 users within the first couple hours of the announcement. We’ve been on a crazy growth trajectory ever since, and we saw TechCrunch as a catalyst for getting out of the gate.

It’s a special place to launch, particularly for a service like ours. We were trying to disrupt the personal finance world. We were asking for sensitive information, and credentials to financial accounts. What TechCrunch gave us was access to a young, tech-savvy, comfortable-on-the-web readership that was excited about exploring the service. They didn’t get aggravated by security concerns.

It became a very viral growth process for us. We continue to spend very little money in marketing. Our growth is from word of mouth, and the TechCrunch crowd are great amplifiers.

TechCrunch: I seem to get really emotional during the Battlefield. People are launching products they’ve been working on for years sometimes, and it’s a huge moment in their lives. How was the experience of launching on stage?

Mint.com: We came out with a fairly immature product at TC40. So we realized that we had a ways to go. We were very focused on trying to demonstrate the value of the product and into pulling everything into one place. We wanted Mint to do all the work for you, which was our focus at TechCrunch.

But at the time we could only aggregate checking, savings and credit. Over the next two years we worked on rounding out the financial picture, pulling in investments, loan functionality, and adding budgeting features. This type of full view built up quite a lot of data.

We knew where consumers were shopping, and during the financial collapse in 2009, we became a huge resource to the media. Our data was anonymized and aggregated, and we could help the media tell a story with real data. It got our name out, and we continued to see really healthy growth during the economic downturn.

Then we brought out mobile apps. It’s started to really drive us a lot of new users at a very affective acquisition cost. In fact, 60 percent of our new users come from app stores. By then, interest from Intuit and others started to come our way.

As you already know, Intuit acquired us in September 2009 for $170 million, and we’ve continued to grow post-acquisition.

TechCrunch: Do you think your TC40 win may have strengthened the argument for you guys, whether it be with investments of with the acquisition?

Mint.com: Our win absolutely lent credibility. But then there’s the after effect. The amplifier that TechCrunch provides means that a lot of influential people end up following your service and getting buzz going. That, paired with attention from the media gave nothing but legitimacy to what we’re doing.

The idea of aggregated finances has been done before, but it didn’t get traction. We did it substantially differently. Having that kind of platform to be born into the world got our name out there, gave us a lot of users fairly quickly, and made it easy to demonstrate growth.

TechCrunch: So if you had to name a few things that led to your success, what would they be?

Mint.com: I think TC40 made us.

It was the launch at TechCrunch and the work we did to parlay that into making us a reputable service. Another thing that helped was the economic crisis. Being financially conscious was actually cool all of the sudden, and we could help people be cool and not be trapped in the desktop or a legacy personal finance tool. We modernized it and made it mobile.

TechCrunch: There are hundreds of entrepreneurs headed to New York right now, if they aren’t already here. As a winner, and a super successful member of the Disrupt alumni clan, what advice would you give to them as they launch their products on stage?

Mint.com: I think the demo has to impress, which rests on the strength of the product. the demo just makes it believable.

But the thing that really resonates — and you have to realize that the panels are made up of guys who are used to investing and seeing lots of ideas come by — is the value proposition of how your product is going to change lives.

If you have that hook, something that makes people believe in your company, then you have a chance.

The next thing that you’re sure to be challenged with is how you’ll do it better than other people. Be prepared to speak about it in those terms. “Here’s how we’re different and that’s why we’re going to win.”

If you can show the product and communicate a clear value proposition and how you’re going to win relative to competitors you’ll have a successful onstage launch.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

It’s midnight.

The city is alive with Saturday night fever, and Pier 94 is just as awake, and perhaps a bit more drunk. Tequila shots (and plenty of beers) are flowing, along with Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and Energy Bites.

In other words, this place is like one giant vat of FourLoko, topped with a sprinkling of coders. For the most part, they seem ready for anything. We’ve heard that the majority of them are ahead of schedule, which is good news considering that the alcohol-induced energy rush will only last so long.

We caught up with Jake, a 15-year old hacker who’s back for the second time to code away, along with Matt Hall, co-founder and CEO of Docracy and former Hackathon winner, and both seemed confident in their hacks. However, Jake has all the energy in the world (despite eating basically nothing), while Matt says he’s typing at a rate of one character per minute. Clearly, youth is an advantage once the clock strikes midnight.

We also brought along some Nerf Vortex blasters (the ones that shoot discs) so that the hackers could take a break and let loose a bit, which basically means that the floor of Pier 94 is currently littered with little green discs.

All in all, the hackers are hitting their stride with about 11 hours left to perfect not only their product, but their presentations. We’ll keep you updated on the action as it’s happening.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

Hackers aren’t necessarily known for their fashion sense. Most of the time, a t-shirt and jeans is as far as it goes. But there are certain circumstances in which it’s clear that hackers pay a little extra attention after rolling out of bed in the morning. The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is one of those instances, but that doesn’t mean that the go-to jeans and T have been abandoned.

Even better, our hackers are choosing to express themselves through the t-shirts, and I have to say that they’re some of the coolest I’ve seen. Last year in San Francisco, most of our hackers had something on their heads, whether it was a baseball cap, headphones, an Ushanka, or even a shower cap.

This year, it’s all about the classic T, but with a coder’s spin.

Without further ado, these are the most badass t-shirts of the TC Disrupt NYC Hackathon:

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

The anticipation is palpable.

Hundreds of hackers have congregated outside Manhattan’s Pier 94, planning, strategizing, and praying to baby Jesus that their fates will be similar to those of Group.me and Docracy. We’ve seen plenty of Hackathon winners go on to do incredible things, make millions of dollars, and rise to startup stardom levels, but the journey isn’t a simple one.

Let me paint a little word picture for you:

The hackers will be in a massive warehouse for the next 24 hours and beyond. They’ll have API sponsors and helpful workshops, sure, but the challenge of creating a product, or even a prototype, all comes down to them. Red Bull will be an unavoidable temptation, especially after a couple hours staring at white code on a black background.

They know they might crash, but they don’t care. They need the energy. Snacks will abound, and snacks are all they have time for anyway. A huge meal is sure to weigh down the belly and slow their pace.

After a few hours, fights are destined to break out. Maybe it’s a disagreement over which API to use, or which color the UI should be, or really anything. They’re under an insane amount of pressure, and even the slightest frustration or hindrance can cause a major break. Teams will turn against each other, and joyously reunite after a few moments of pensive reflection.

When the clock strikes midnight, that’s when things get loopy. The empty cans of Red Bull will be joined by full cans of beer, heads and shoulders will begin to slump, and the fights that have since been resolved will resurface.

Certain members of various teams will begin practicing their presentations, most certainly distracting other teams from their work, but this is, after all, a competition. The coffee pot will be refilled twice as often for the rest of the Hackathon, and bean bags, tables and even cold, hard floors will be converted into napping pads.

And alas, the sun will rise. Obstacles will be overcome. Prototypes will be completed. Presentations will be perfected.

And perhaps, just maybe, the beginning of a beautiful story will be written.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

Is The Avengers worth your money? Do the disc-blasting Nerf guns leave a welt? How do you pull a Pebble and rein in $3 million on Kickstarter?

In this week’s TC/Gadgets webcast, we answer all this and more. John and Matt argue over the value in one of this summer’s tent pole movies, The Avengers. John finds it boring, while Matt thinks “it’s fun for everyone.” And while I can’t say I’ll be buying a ticket to The Avengers any time soon, I can say with great certainty that I’ll be at one of the opening day showings of Prometheus.

Who doesn’t love space, right?

The gang also discusses Nerf’s disc-blasting guns, and how they may or may not be used at this weekend’s Disrupt Hackathon. Last year we saw a raucous group of hackers start an all-out war with bungee darts. None of the TC editorial staff was injured (nor were the hackers), but this year we’ll at least have some Nerf Vortex and Vulcan guns slung over our shoulders. You know… Just in case.

In the words of the recent Game Of Thrones trailers, “War is coming.”

Finally, but likely most importantly, Matt, Chris, John and I offer up some tips as to what we cover on Kickstarter. Matt is done with iPad cases, and though I echo the sentiment, I’ll probably be more willing to make exceptions than he. John prefers the “little tweaks” to things we already use and enjoy, like the automatic bike light that knows when you’re moving.

I encourage a strong video, as marketing is a huge driver of any business. But the geeky stuff has its place too — Chris thoroughly enjoyed the electron microscope project that significantly reduced the cost of looking at really, really tiny things.

The tale of Docracy’s year-long journey is a fun one. When Matt Hall and his partner John Watkinson first went into the Hackathon last year, the only goal was to get a prototype working for an idea they had, a GitHub for legal documents. Sure, a win would’ve been nice, but the main goal was to push out a prototype they could pitch to investors (instead of just an idea) with a firm deadline hanging over their shoulders.

But alas, Docracy took home the top prize despite the fact that they were the first of more than 100 presentations that day. And after last year’s Disrupt NYC (tickets to this year’s Disrupt here), the story only gets better.

The original plan was to push out a fully functional Docracy within a week or so of the Hackathon, but after a chat with a more legal-savvy friend the pair realized that a little extra scrutiny to any liabilities was in order. That week turned into a full seven months, with a hard launch in December of 2011. In November, just a month before, the company received a $650,000 seed round led by First Round Capital. Vaizra Investments, Rick Webb and Quotidian Ventures also participated.

Matt and John were able to quit their jobs and focus on Docracy full time. And today the service already has over 10,000 users.

There’s something to be said about the power of a successful Hackathon presentation. It’s not only true with Docracy, but Group.me (which was recently acquired by Skype) won the TechCrunch Hackathon as well and has since gone on to fall under the almighty Microsoft umbrella.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

How timely. After launching a year ago at Disrupt NYC 2011, Tracks is today releasing one of its biggest updates to date. The service is much like Color, but without the creepy factor as any and all members of a specific photo-sharing group must be invited. I like to think of it as the place where Color and Google+ Circles intersect, but I far prefer Tracks than either of the former.

Thus far Tracks has offered iOS, web- and real-world versions of your tracks (the collection of photos shared with a specific social network, which can be both geo-temporal or last forever). Today, however, the service gets much more beefy, with the ability to shoot and send real-time video and the addition of new filters, Instagram-style. There are now ten filter options on the app, and they’ll all work on both photos and videos.

But that’s not all. The update brings with it the ability to add friends to various tracks from Facebook and Twitter, as well as a new custom camera with multi-shot capability and locks for exposure and focus. Animations have also been added.

Tracks has seen great success since its debut at Disrupt last year, launching an iPhone app officially in October and raising a $1 million round in December. The company also enticed Photobucket’s founder Alex Welch to join the board.

Speaking of Mr. Welch, here’s what he had to say about today’s Tracks update:

Since joining Tracks as both an investor and board member last year, I have worked very closely on product and strategy with Vic and team. I continue to be impressed at the overall vision, as well as the dedication and execution of this team. As simple as it may sound, the challenge of having a single mainstream service that can span both experiences and interests with different groups of friends and family, has not been solved at a large scale. The Tracks approach is the right one.

The idea of a private social network is one of the few new social ideas that I can jump on board with, and it’ll be interesting to see how the company builds out this offering with behemoths like Facebook and Twitter still growing at a solid pace.

Today’s Facebook IPO is a momentous, historical occasion. It’s set to be the biggest tech IPO ever, and the third largest IPO in U.S. history, second only to Visa and General Motors. The company that was once just a glimmer in the eye of a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg raised over $16 billion yesterday as shares were gobbled up by hungry investors, and that $38 share price point is expected to increase as the stock starts trading around 11am today.

Do you know how much money that is?

That’s more than nine Google IPOs, the cost of buying Napster 132 times in 2008, and enough to buy Mark Zuckerberg plenty of executive hoodies — 266,266 to be exact.

And how did I calculate this madness, you ask? I didn’t. A new website just popped up titled “Facebook made more money than”, and it looks a helluva lot like a Facebook page (fittingly). The site is sourcing facts from the web to provide a little added perspective on just how much $16 billion is worth.

Check it out here.

Here’s one more for the road, just to nail down the nearly unimaginable sum in your mind:

The $16 billion netted by Facebook before the stocks begin trading is more than the value of 66 sets of Winklevoss twins.

~The Best Of TechCrunch’s Facebook IPO Coverage~

Video & Photos: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Rings In The NASDAQ Bell

No IPO Pop Here: Facebook Trades Slightly Higher At Around $40

Facebook’s Key Executives And Shareholders: What Is Everyone Worth?

Zuckerberg Receives Hoodie, Says “Our Mission Isn’t To Be A Public Company” In Pre-IPO Remarks

How Facebook Hacked The NASDAQ Button

Zynga Shares Go On Wild Ride During Facebook IPO — Big Fall, Then Recovery

Facebook Says Haters Gonna Hate, Likers Gonna Like

The Hackathon is one of the best parts of Disrupt. Granted, it’s not quite as emotional as watching the Battlefield rounds play out, but there’s something sort of inspiring about the idea that you may be building the start of a company during a 24-hour beer/pizza/Red Bull-fest.

Success stories like Group.me and Docracy were born at our Hackathon, but they’d be the first to tell you that none of it is possible without our awesome API sponsors. These include foursquare, The Echo Nest, metaLayer, Twilio, bitly, Tumblr, Spotify, Mobli and more. But one has gone above and beyond when it comes to teasing out the event, with the promise to offer “one thousand dolla dolla bills” to the hacker who makes the best use of their API.

Knodes, who is offering up a context API which maps users’ social graphs, has made a movie-type trailer ahead of the Hackathon and posted it to YouTube. It promises that same cash reward we just talked about, packaged nicely in a briefcase, along with a $250 JetBlue gift card.

The tagline reads: “You. On a plane. With a briefcase full of money. Make it happen.”

Other sponsors are handing out cash too (among other things), including $5,000 from both AT&T and CityGrid, and a whopping $10,000 from Mobli. Ticket sales are already closed for hackers, but you’re more than welcome to attend the Hackathon presentations on Sunday. If interested, sign up with this EventBrite link.

Last night, Time Inc. threw a pretty badass party in Manhattan to celebrate “Ten NYC Startups To Watch.” Among the ten were Fancy Hands, a site that offers up a personal assistant for every and any need you might have, and Stamped, a social network that lets you put your stamp of approval on the things you like.

We pulled aside founders of both companies to find out a little more about them, their business models, and why they think they deserve a spot on Time Inc.’s list.

In the case of Fancy Hands, founder Ted Roden justified his slot on the list with staying power. He’s been working on the site, that up until a recent $1 million funding round was entirely bootstrapped, for three years, with the site alive and growing for the past two years.

In his opinion, Time Inc. chose Fancy Hands because it’s not necessarily all about how much hype you get at launch, but your ability to scale and grow over time.

For Stamped the story is a bit different. After asking co-founder and CEO Robby Stein why he was named one of Time Inc.’s 10 best startups, his answer was all about disruption.

“We think that we’re trying to do something that will hopefully disrupt the way people think about discovering new information, and really transform the model from one that’s more crowd-sourced and anonymous to one that’s extremely personal,” said Stein.