Last call: Sign up for the TC Hackathon at VivaTech 2019

This one’s dedicated to all the genius hackers, coders and creators who also happen to be inveterate procrastinators. Right here, right now — this is your final opportunity to participate in the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 in Paris on 17-18 May. The application is free and the process couldn’t be easier, so drop whatever you’re doing and sign up today.

If you snooze, you lose — lose the chance to flex your mighty coding skills and build something creative and amazing from scratch in 24 hours. Don’t be that person. A rich, exciting — and potentially lucrative — experience awaits. Here’s what goes down at the TC Hackathon at VivaTech.

Teams of 4-6 people will select one of the five sponsored hack challenges. Don’t worry if you arrive solo, we’ll help you find a team once you’re onsite. Our sponsors include EDHEC, Eramet, Sanofi–Cegedim–IBM, Galeries Lafayette / Publicis Sapient and Corvid by Wix. Specifics on the challenges are below:

EDHEC Challenge

Making an impact can have different meanings, and we believe that one of them is about improving how we support students’ careers. Have you ever asked yourself “have I chosen the right studies and the right career for me?” According to the French Ministry of Higher Education, 150,000 french students decide to change their degree course. Participating in VivaTech is a great way to solve this issue through innovation. So let’s help them find the path that suits them best for their future career! The winner of this challenge will receive a €5,000 prize.

Eramet Challenge

In the 21st century, metal alloys are everywhere, e.g. computers, electric cars, satellites. You can find up to 20 different alloys in a single computer. The quality requirements of customers are extremely tight nowadays. Eramet, a global mining and metallurgical group, challenges you to find a solution that can provide our customers with 100% transparency on our supply chains, from the extraction of ore from the mine to the final product, with a heavy focus on the quality, environmental, social and ethical aspects. The winner of this challenge will receive a €5,000 prize.

Sanofi-Cegedim-IBM Challenge

Collective intelligence can help to find smart solutions to make healthcare professionals’ (HCPs) practice easier and bring better care to people living with cardio-metabolic challenges like diabetes. Sanofi, Cegedim and IBM will provide anonymized electronic health records for you to design data-driven solutions for HCPs and their patients. How to optimize time and effort? How to better predict and personalize care? How can we avoid health complications and allow better decision making? The best product that addresses this challenge will receive €5,000 in prize money.

Galeries Lafayette Publicis Sapient Predictive Mode Challenge

Discovering emerging brands and proposing an offer aligned with consumer expectations is a permanent challenge. Data can help us identify major upcoming trends and measure the potential of a brand or collection by uncovering fashion trends of tomorrow through text mining algorithms and pattern recognition in images and videos. If you wish to put your creativity and data analysis skills to link fashion and deep learning algorithms, this challenge is made for you! The best product that addresses this challenge will receive a prize worth €5,000.

Corvid by Wix Challenge

There are plenty of community, collaboration and project management tools available for developers to use. But how do we make these essential assets better? In this challenge, the team with the best hack that uses Corvid—an open development platform that lets you build, manage, deploy and scale advanced web applications—will receive a €5,000 prize.

Teams will then spend roughly 24 intense, focused and caffeine-fueled hours designing, building and creating the best working solution possible. Don’t worry, we’ll have food and drink to keep you going (at no charge!) Once the proverbial whistle blows, teams will have a mere 60 seconds to pitch their project in front of the sponsors and TechCrunch judges.

Not only will the sponsors choose a winner and award prizes for their specific challenges, but the TechCrunch judges will also award each team a score ranging from 1-5. The team that scores the highest combined score wins €5,000 in cash as the overall winner of the TC Hackathon. Plus, all teams that receive a TechCrunch score of three or higher will win two free tickets to both TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019 and VivaTech 2020.

If you’re a stickler for details, you’ll find all you need in the TC Hackathon at VivaTech FAQ.

Dear procrastinators, this is it. Your last chance to pit your skills — for free — against the very best of the best at the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 on 17-18 May. Don’t snooze. Don’t lose. Sign up right here, and we’ll see you in Paris!

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D2C underwear brand TomboyX raises $18 million from Craftory

TomboyX, a direct to consumer, gender-neutral underwear brand, has today announced the close of an $18 million Series B funding round led by Craftory. With this deal, Craftory becomes TomboyX’s majority shareholder.

TomboyX develops gender-neutral, size inclusive underwear at a relatively affordable price point.

The company started when cofounder Fran Dunaway struggled to find herself a Robert Graham-style button down shirt. Tomboy X originally started selling fun, dress shirts that fit all body types, and eventually transitioned to underwear and swimwear.

The D2C startup offers sizes from XS to 4XL and the classic TomboyX briefs start at $20/pair.

The company raised $4.3 million in Series A financing last year, which brings total funding to more than $25 million.

Here’s what cofounders Fran Dunaway and Naomi Gonzalez had to say in a prepared statement:

We are very excited to collaborate with the team at The Craftory as we continue in our mission to design inclusive and gender-neutral underwear for our diverse global audience. We are confident that their expertise in branding and consumer goods will complement our own creativity and disruption of traditional products.

As part of the deal, Craftory directors will join the board of directors alongside Pauline Brown, lead investor for TomboyX’s Series A round.

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Delta is testing free Wi-Fi on flights this month

Delta says it plans to eventually offer free Wi-Fi on flights. The first step to achieving that goal, however, involves testing it on a handful of planes, beginning later this month. Starting May 13, the carrier will begin offering free service on 55 domestic flights per day.

The idea here is to test the strain on the system. Currently, the number of passengers who actually use the in-flight service is fairly low. Delta’s current provider Gogo says it’s around 12% of passengers across its various airline partners. Obviously that figure is going to jump pretty significantly if service is offered up for free.

“Testing will be key to getting this highly complex program right—this takes a lot more creativity, investment and planning to bring to life than a simple flip of a switch,” Delta’s director of Onboard Product told The Wall Street Journal.

But while installing and maintaining that service on planes certainly isn’t cheap, exorbitant prices stand out in a world where many businesses offer up access for free. Like luggage-check prices, Wi-Fi has become another indication of airlines looking to squeeze every last penny out of travelers.

In fact, JetBlue is currently the only major U.S. airline that offers free internet access to all passengers, but it relies on corporate sponsorships to offer the service. Delta hasn’t given a firm date on when its own passengers might gain free access on a larger scale.

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Verified Expert Brand Designer: Base

Base coined the term “blanding,” but the international branding agency is anything but boring. With clients ranging from AI startup Rival Theory to e-commerce company Kidbox, Base leverages its broad portfolio of clients and designers from all around the world to help startups develop their individual personas. As they celebrate their 20th anniversary this year, we talked to Base Partner Geoff Cook about how the agency continues to evolve.

On Base’s culture:

“Base strives to have a profound cultural impact. Yes, we do strategy, and yes, we do identity, and all sorts of brand executions, but the end goal is to have a significant cultural impact for our clients. The end goal isn’t the product, it’s the result.”

“As one of our longest-standing mentors at Techstars in New York, Base partner Geoff Cook (with Base as back up) has helped to brand several of our portfolio companies and provided counsel to hundreds more.” Jenny Fielding, NYC, Managing Director, Techstars

On common founder mistakes:

“This may sound provocative, but I think the most common mistake is that there is a belief in the tech world that branding should be approached iteratively like their approach to product development. Having now been through that process of iteration with both startups and the largest tech companies, we’ve found that the results are often compromised. Oftentimes if you iterate or have different groups weighing in throughout the process, it can be detrimental to the end result. It’s a conversation we’re now having with founders to say, “We’ve tried both ways, we’ve seen these results, and we would ask that you go along for the ride and put your trust in us, and we’ll ensure that you will arrive someplace really compelling.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup brand designers and agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.

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Interview with Base Partner Geoff Cook

Yvonne Leow: To kick things off, could you tell me about your backstory? How did you get into branding?

Geoff Cook: I actually came from DKNY, back in its heyday, and met Base’s Belgian partners through the world of fashion. I always joke that I wanted out of fashion and they wanted out of Brussels. So I invested in Base and brought it to New York City in 1999. My background is in marketing and strategy. When I was leading the International Menswear division at DKNY, I started realizing that I always had the most fun working with our internal branding group. So, when I left, I knew I wanted to pivot and go more in that direction. I think what appealed to me was the combination of creativity and the massive impact branding could have on the world. The intersection of those two things really drew me in.

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Check out all the challenges at the TC Hackathon at VivaTech

Money, prizes, glory — it could all be yours, but only if you’re good enough. Do you have the stamina, focus and coding chops it takes to create something awesome out of nothing in less than 24 hours? Then sign up to compete in the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 in Paris on 17-18 May.

The hackathon is open to everyone — across Europe and beyond, so join hundreds of other hackers, UX/UI designers, coders and like-minded techies for a full-on coding free-for-all. And we do mean free — it won’t cost you a thing to participate.

Here’s how the hackathon works. Teams, which can range from 4-6 people, choose one of several sponsored hack contests when they register. If you don’t have a team, that’s OK — you can find one when you arrive onsite. You and your team have just 24 hours to design, code and create a working solution to your chosen challenge. Don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of food and drink to fuel your focus — including plenty of coffee. Once you’re finished, you’ll have just 60 seconds for a rapid-fire project pitch and presentation onstage in front of the sponsors and TechCrunch judges.

Each sponsor will be awarding prizes to the projects that address their challenges the best, including up to €5,000 in cash. On top of all that, TechCrunch judges will be scoring each pitch presentation on a scale of 1 to 5 and will declare one team the overall hackathon winner — with a €5,000 grand prize. Huzzah! Plus, if your team earns a combined TechCrunch score of three or higher, you also score two free tickets each to both TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019 and VivaTech 2020.

Here’s the lowdown on all the sponsored challenges:

EDHEC Challenge

Making an impact can have different meanings, and we believe that one of them is about improving how we support student’s careers. Have you ever asked yourself “have I chosen the right studies and the right career for me?” According to the French Ministry of Higher Education, 150,000 french students decide to change their degree course. Participating in VivaTech is a great way to solve this issue through innovation. So let’s help them find the path that suits them best for their future career! The winner of this challenge will receive a €5,000 prize.

Eramet Challenge

In the 21st century, metal alloys are everywhere, e.g. computers, electric cars, satellites. You can find up to 20 different alloys in a single computer. The quality requirements of customers are extremely tight nowadays. Eramet, a global mining and metallurgical group, challenges you to find a solution that can provide our customers with 100% transparency on our supply chains, from the extraction of ore from the mine to the final product, with a heavy focus on the quality, environmental, social and ethical aspects. The winner of this challenge will receive a €5,000 prize.

Sanofi-Cegedim-IBM Challenge

Collective intelligence can help to find smart solutions to make healthcare professionals’ (HCPs) practice easier and bring better care to people living with cardio-metabolic challenges like diabetes. Sanofi, Cegedim and IBM will provide anonymized electronic health records for you to design data-driven solutions for HCPs and their patients. How to optimize time and effort? How to better predict and personalize care? How can we avoid health complications and allow better decision making? The best product that addresses this challenge will receive €5,000 in prize money.

Galeries Lafayette Publicis Sapient Predictive Mode Challenge

Discovering emerging brands and proposing an offer aligned with consumer expectations is a permanent challenge. Data can help us identify major upcoming trends and measure the potential of a brand or collection by uncovering fashion trends of tomorrow through text mining algorithms and pattern recognition in images and videos. If you wish to put your creativity and data analysis skills to link fashion and deep learning algorithms, this challenge is made for you! The best product that addresses this challenge will receive a prize worth €5,000.

Corvid by Wix Challenge

There are plenty of community, collaboration and project management tools available for developers to use. But how do we make these essential assets better? In this challenge, the team with the best hack that uses Corvid by Wix, an open development platform that lets you build, manage, deploy and scale advanced web applications, will receive a €5,000 prize.

Be sure to check out more info on all the sponsored hackathon challenges and prizes. Here’s the official agenda and, if you have any other questions, take a look at the TC Hackathon FAQ.

The TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 takes place on May 17-18. Money, prizes, glory — plus camaraderie and a whole lot of fun — can be yours. Sign up for your free ticket today and show us your stuff in Paris.

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How I podcast: Start With This/Welcome to Night Vale’s Jeffrey Cranor

The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut from NPR studios to USB Skype rigs.

We’ve asked some of our favorite podcast hosts and producers to highlight their workflows — the equipment and software they use to get the job done. The list so far includes:

Jesse Thorn of Bullseye
Ben Lindbergh of Effectively Wild
My own podcast, RiYL

Launched in 2012, Welcome to Night Vale quickly grew into one of the most popular narrative podcasts in the medium’s history. Centered on the strange goings-on of a desert town, the series has spawned its own mini-empire, including tours, books and and upcoming television adaptation. Co-creators Jeffrey Cranor and Joseph Fink have also launched a series of independent shows under the Night Vale Presents banner, including Alice Isn’t Dead, The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air) and I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats.

Their latest series, Start With This, is designed to motivate writers, featuring discussions on method and tips for getting the creative juices flowing. Each episode gives the listener writing assignments designed to be shared through its membership forum on Patreon. 

This week, on How I Podcast, Cranor shares his home and portable recording rigs. 

In my home, I have a large closet I converted to a recording space. I did this by cleaning out all of the junk we had been storing there over the years and then sticking up some acoustic foam. But I travel a lot for work, and I can’t always bring the closet with me to various Hampton Inns.

A couple years ago I bought a Tascam DR-40 portable recorder — perfect for packing on tours and vacations. The Tascam solved most any issue I would run into podcast-wise while I was away from NY. The only items I ever really needed to record were brief monologues (ads, show intros, credits, etc). So if a Bombas ad came in, I could just throw a blanket over my head to prevent hotel echo, and then record the spot on the Tascam, looking, I’m sure, like the world’s least-spooky ghost.

This winter, my writing partner Joseph Fink and I both ended up in Los Angeles for a few weeks. We also have a brand new podcast called Start With This, wherein we talk to each other for half an hour about creativity and storytelling, and then give writing assignments to listeners.

So, I picked up a couple of Shure-48s (cheaper than 58s, and for talking only, just as good) and a Yamaha MG-06 Stereo Mixer. This was about $200 total, which was the most I’ve ever spent at once on podcasting equipment. The mixer’s light and easy to pack, and the Shure mics are rock solid.

At home I have an MXL 770 on an extendable arm and it’s great, but there’s something so physically liberating about having just a Shure mic on an XLR cable. Recording these SWT episodes on the road using handhelds really loosened up the feel of the conversations. I might actually change my set up when I get back home to NY.

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Check out the latest challenge of the TC Hackathon at VivaTech 2019

Dépêche-toi et ne tarde pas! Roughly translated that means “hurry up and don’t delay!” You can still register to participate in the TC Hackathon at VivaTech to hack for some great prizes. It won’t cost you a thing to join the fun — tickets are free, and they also give you access to all three days of VivaTech 2019. Get yours now while you still can.

The TC Hackathon takes place May 17-18 — on days two and three of VivaTech. Come and join more than 500 hackers, coders, developers, UX/UI designers and other creative geniuses to build, pitch and present something incredible in less than two days. Enjoy the competition, the community, the camaraderie — and win cold, hard cash, prizes and swag in the process.

If you’re not familiar with how this hackathon works, here’s what you need to know. Teams, which can range from 4-6 people, will choose one of several sponsored hack contests (more on those in a minute) when they register. If you don’t have a team, you can find one when you get onsite.

When the hackathon starts, your team has just 24 hours to build a working solution for the challenge you selected. It’ll take all your focus, skills and stamina to get the job done. Then it’s time to present and pitch your product to the TechCrunch judges onstage — in 60 seconds.

The esteemed TechCrunch judges assign each team a score between one and five, and the team with the highest score wins the prize associated with the sponsored hack. Depending on the challenge you select, you could win €5000, incubation, other cash prizes and hardware. All teams that receive a combined score of three or higher also win tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019 and VivaTech 2020.

In addition, TechCrunch will select one team as the overall best hack and award them with a €5000 grand prize. Last year, CommerceDNA earned that honor. Will it be you this time?

If you’re detailed-oriented or just plain curious, check out the TC Hackathon FAQ. Wondering about the sponsored contests we have lined up so far? Here’s the latest info:

Galeries Lafayette Publicis Sapient Predictive Mode Challenge
Discovering emerging brands and proposing an offer aligned with consumer expectations is a permanent challenge. Data can help us identify major upcoming trends and measure the potential of a brand or collection by uncovering fashion trends of tomorrow through text mining algorithms and pattern recognition in images and videos. If you wish to put your creativity and data analysis skills to link fashion and deep learning algorithms, then this challenge is made for you! The best product that addresses this challenge will receive €5000 in prize money.

The TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 takes place in Paris on May 17-18. Don’t miss out on this exhilarating, exhausting and fun event. Register for your free ticket now. Dépêche-toi et ne tarde pas!

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