The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 Is Layer | Hacker News Reader

The Winner Of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2013 Is Layer

techcrunch.com

28 pointsninthfrank0719 comments

Arrington is a judge and CrunchFund is a seed investor of the winning company.

Stay classy, TechCrunch.

Doesn't CrunchFund do tons of small investments and I'm guessing they invest in every company at Disrupt? It would almost be silly for them not to... I would think.

That's fine, then TC shouldn't put any CrunchFund people on the judging panel.

They do not invest in every company at Disrupt. Source: I presented on stage in NY 2010.

Arrington recused himself from voting with every startup he invested in (as did other investors on the stage).

Interestingly, I think that for one of the finalists (forget which one), all of the judges but one were investors.

Forget who invested and who voted, Layer is seriously addressing a huge problem. I looked at their presentation and realized how bad something like this is needed.

I was looking for something like this recently and now I can't wait to get an invite. I feel they deserved winning.

I do not have a vested interest in this company, just a fan.

This is fine, no? Who better to judge than investors? As long as it's not for firms he has a stake in, there's no conflict of interest. This is especially true when competitors want to attract investors.

I'm hoping you either didn't quite grasp it or you're joking. Arrington is CrunchFund's founder. He was on the judging panel AND an investor in the company which won. This is a conflict of interest on the level of NBA referee who gambles on basketball games.

Even if Arrington didn't vote on Layer directly, it's still ridiculous. He could still easily influence the outcome. Some suggested in the TC comments that he grilled COTA enough to raise doubts in other voters' minds.

Any investor wants exposure for their portfolio companies: either to grow the user base or attract more investment.

I guess I'm not shocked that TC did it this way–just shocked that everyone else sees no issue with it.

I misunderstood the magnitude. So let's say it's a rigged contest. Do you think people will choose not to apply as a result? Or just accept that it's more for PR than for funding?

I cannot believe anything other than COTA deserved to win. It is clearly the most impressive piece of technology I have seen in this Disrupt. What if a whole city can be covered by such device? Non-disruptive power on your mobile devices man.

And Dryft? I tried it and it was terrible (to be fair, a lot of people was trying it, so the machine learning algorithm might messed up, I tried for like 2 mins and it was not easy).

I'm not sure how TechCrunch do it, but if you have Ghostery installed in your browser, the entire article content disappears as soon as the page loads, leaving you with an empty article.

It's ads and trackers all the way down?

Adblock isn't doing it, definitely Ghostery, so looks like either they detect Ghostery and hide the article if you have it (the rest of the page shows up, just not the article content/text)... or Ghostery thinks their text is a tracker and is blocking it.

The latest update includes "Click to Play." Just click the Play button to let the script run once.

It doesn't occur to TC that a page with several videos that play upon page load is super annoying? I wanted to watch one of those videos but it was easier to just close the whole thing.

None of the videos played on load for me.

OK, maybe it's just me. But I tried it on a second browser - same thing.

Thanks!

I just tried opening the story's link in Chrome/OSX and also Chrome/OSX incognito (in case extensions were interfering) and the page loaded but none of the videos played until I manually clicked Play.

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