This week, TechCrunch was consumed by Disrupt NY 2014. It was an amazing week, and made even better by the appearance of three hardware companies in our Disrupt Battlefield finals.
Mink, an inkjet printer hack that prints out makeup, wowed the audience. ISI Technology reinvented the water heater with the HeatWorks Model 1, and Mimi focused on making hearing enhancement devices accessible to everyone.
It’s been a long, tough road, but it’s finally time to crown the winner of the Disrupt Battlefield. This year’s batch was truly awesome. Twenty-seven startups took the stage to present. The six finalists were Boomerang Commerce, ISI Technology, Mimi, Mink, ShowKit, and Vurb. It was an amazing batch with multiple hardware startups, innovative business models and good engineering. But only one could take home the Disrupt Cup.
All these startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which were John Borthwick (Betaworks), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chris Dixon (Andreessen Horowitz), Marissa Mayer (Yahoo), Brian Pokorny (SV Angel), and Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures).
And now, here it is, meet the TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2014 Battlefield winner Vurb.
Vurb is a web and mobile contextual search engine. When you type a query in Vurb, you get everything you need without having to leave the search engine. The company is rolling out search for Places, Movies, and Media. It will soon launch search for add People, Startups, and others. For example, if you search for a film, you get a trailer, showtimes, reviews, a link to watch the movie on Netflix, the IMDb score and more.