The speaker schedule for TechCrunch’s Disrupt NYC conference has been set for a while now, but three brand new presenters were just added to the lineup: The winners announced earlier today at the finale of this past weekend’s 24 hour Disrupt 2012 Hackathon, Thingscription, PoachBase, and PractiKhan.

Since the winning apps were so seriously awesome — and we have a very, very small sadistic bent (most of these people had not slept for at least 24 hours at this point, so a video interview with bright lights was especially fun) — we pulled aside all three winning teams for interviews with TechCrunch TV backstage.

Embedded above you can see our chat with the people who built the Hackathon’s first place winner, ThingScription, a platform to let people get subscriptions for deliveries of potentially any consumer good.

And in the videos below, you’ll first find our interviews with three of the five-person team that built the second-place Hackathon winner PoachBase, a web app for finding the most poach-able potential hires in the tech industry. Below that is the developer behind the third-place winner PractiKhan, an app that lets teachers create online lessons and tests utilizing content from Khan Academy.

Stanford has been a hotbed of startup activity for what seems like forever, and one reason for that is its Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) program. The group, which has been instrumental in promoting startup activity at the university for the last 15 years, will be awarding $150,000 in prizes to participants from four different funding competitions this Tuesday.

BASES is the largest student-run entrepreneurial group in the world, with 100 active members. The program, which aims to educate and inspire students to create interesting new startups. The main way it does this is through the programs it runs.

Examples include its E-Bootcamp, which brought in 100 students from around the world for a weekend at Stanford. There’s also its Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) Seminars, which has sponsors meetings that bring in entrepreneurs like Jack Dorsey and Daniel Ek or investors like Mark Suster.

On Tuesday, May 22 it will put on the BASES Finale, which brings together four different funding competitions for one full-day event. From 10:00 am to 7:00 pm at the Arrillaga Alumni Center, groups will present as part of the E-Challenge, Social E-Challenge, Product Showcase, and Forge program.

A total of $150,000 will be up for grabs, with $50,000 in prizes being offered for the E-Challenge, Social E-Challenge, and Product Showcase. (Forge participants will automatically be entered into the Product Showcase.) The BASES Finale is being sponsored by the likes of Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Perkins Cole, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morgenthaler, and the like, which will also provide judges for the contests.

BASES is expecting a good mix of students, entrepreneurs, and investors to show up for the event, which will also have a keynote by Alfred Lin, of Sequoia Capital (formerly Chairman and COO/CFO of Zappos). Last year, the BASES Finale drew between 400 and 500 attendees, according to Kevin Xu, Chief Branding Officer (CBO) at BASES.

For more details on the event and to see an agenda, you can click here. And if you’d like to register and attend, go to 150kfinale.eventbrite.com.

[Image via Flickr/Jill Clardy]

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Derek Andersen, who is the founder of StartupGrindand Vaporware Labs, and is a former entertainment development manager at Electronic Arts.

Paypal created a cost effective way to safely accept payments 10 years ago, but the web has changed dramatically and accepting payments has not. Enter Stripe, a company that in my opinion is going to get very influential over the next few years. At a recent Startup Grind event I interviewed 24-year old Irish co-founder Patrick Collison who has raised $18MM from Sequoia Capital and others. Patrick is leading a company poised to completely disrupt the online payment industry starting with your website.

Background

Patrick has the most valuable of Valley technology skillsets. He’s a technical prodigy having won numerous prestigious awards including Ireland’s 41st Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in 2005, a national science competition which boasts hundreds of submissions each year from the country’s brightest young scientists. But he also has the personality and presence to be a leader and CEO. His two brothers are equally impressive. John is one of Stripe’s co-founders not to mention a Harvard dropout and one of the first engineers at Auctomatic. His youngest brother, Tommy, is a teenage blogger and writer that probably has more Twitter followers than most of us.

Y Combinator and Paul Graham

Patrick holds the distinction of literally being the face of Y Combinator. He’s the skinny red headed guy you see on the front of their website. While attending MIT at age 18, he and his brother decided to build a better version of eBay. After applying to YC they merged with Kulveer and Harjeet Taggar to build Auctomatic. They moved to an apartment in San Francisco, raised angel funding, and went to work. After launching and getting initial user traction, the company was acquired by Live Current Media and the founders moved to Vancouver to build the product. From start to finish the company’s pre-acquisition life span was just 10-months. Stripe was also eventually funded by YC.

Patrick said that YC’s founder network is one of its most valuable assets. “Having all these other people building startups and having them want to help us because we were a fellow YC company, that was super valuable for us.” He added that perhaps the greatest advantage to YC is that,  “Paul and the (other) partners are just really smart. There is no question that they are very top tier.” Because of the sheer quantity of deals and companies that they interact with combined with those smarts, they’re able to offer both specific and strategic feedback that is second to none.

What makes Paul special? According to Patrick, Paul Graham is able to make surprising ideas and connections that other investors and advisors simply aren’t able to make. What isn’t Paul Graham so good at? Patrick says, “He’s not good at feigning interest.”

Solving Hard Problems

 “The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe’s idea. For over a decade, every hacker who’d ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world’s infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.
Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking “should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?” and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.”

- Paul Graham, SchlepBlindness.

John and Patrick first started working on Stripe in early 2010.  The inspiration came when Patrick, who was working on a few side projects, kept complaining about how difficult it was to accept payments on the web.  The two quickly developed a simple solution and within 2-weeks they had processed their first transaction.  Over the next 6-months they showed it to friends, watched people interact with it, and iterated as fast as they could.

In the beginning they weren’t sure how big the market was or whether they could accomplish their goal of addressing issues like fraud and non-US payments in a user-friendly way.  They originally partnered with a payments company, but quickly realized that the only way to control the entire experience was to control all aspects of the process. That’s when they brought everything in house.

By the fall of 2010, Stripe had become their full-time jobs.  They thought about bootstrapping it, as they had to that point, but soon realized that as a payment startup they would need the kind of institutional credibility that only a top-notch investor could provide.

“Even Turkeys Can Fly In A High Wind”

Stripe’s most requested feature is to expand beyond the United States, which is something he assured me they’re working on. The team also recently moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco to accommodate their rapid expansion.

To date the company’s growth has been completely organic. Before they publicly launched last fall they had more than 1,000 developers on a waiting list and have grown almost exclusively by positive word of mouth. For those wondering why they haven’t heard of Stripe, it’s because true to Steve Blank’s Customer Development process, they have planned to turn on the marketing as soon as they were sure the product was right. Quoting from a Kleiner Perkins founder Eugene Kleiner saying, “Even turkeys can fly in a high wind.” Watch the full interview here.

In this episode we talk about Disrupt, the new EVO 4G LTE, and the rumors of the four-inch iPhone. We also talk about the “thumb touches anywhere on the screen” iPhone chestnut, how good the battery life is on some Android phones, the late night Nerf wars at the hackathon, and my horrible sausage fingers.

Tune in today and look for another episode next week from the show floor.

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 it’s 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.

Craig Palli is vice president of Client Services & Business Development at Fiksu (@fiksu), which helps brands boost iOS and Android mobile app ranking and secure large volumes of loyal users. You can find him on Twitter @cpalli.

Thriving with Google Play
Apple’s planned phase-out of the UDID has introduced considerable angst in the app marketing community. The UDID provides a standard, widely supported method for attributing performance of advertising campaigns. Unfortunately, there’s no single solution to replace the UDID and it appears the iOS market is fragmenting, with multiple technologies vying for developer attention. This is making it difficult for app developers to allocate their resources.

With all this uncertainty, some marketers are looking more closely at Google Play to fuel their continued growth in mobile. Unfortunately, many marketers are sidestepping Android development based on several published reports indicating that Apple’s iOS monetizes significantly better. Savvy marketers know that high-level statistics often mask a much more complex reality. While we’d never suggest that the iOS market be ignored, once you do the math you may find that Android represents a much more compelling (and profitable) opportunity than you thought.

Here’s why and how you can thrive with Google Play.

Bigger yet cheaper…
For sheer size, the Android platform has no equal. According to Nielsen, Android has more than 48 percent of the smartphone market, versus 32 percent for iOS. Google indicates there are 850,000 Android device activations per day and total Google Play app downloads have reached more than 15 billion. App search firm Xyologic reports that in March 2012 there were 617 million app downloads on Android versus 393 million app downloads on iPhone in the U.S.

Android also provides more advertising inventory, and at a lower cost. A recent analysis Fiksu did of available impressions concluded Android is able to deliver 12 percent more ad inventory than iOS. Further, the estimated cost of those impressions was 40 percent lower.

Android Advantages
Android also has a number of practical advantages over iOS that make it a great environment for market testing and quick rollout. Since there is no app approval process, you can quickly iterate your design and determine what features or offers work best. Updating an app can take weeks with iOS due to Apple’s submission and approval process.

In some ways, Google Play is also a more accessible market. Competition in the iOS sphere is extremely intense. Marketing any app is challenging, but the explosion of new apps and changes in Apple policy have made breaking a new app into the iOS market a much tougher hill to climb. Xyologic reports they “have seen the momentum of iOS for app publishers slow down considerably in the last 5 months. Several key performance indicators we track are down, especially the amount of new apps which make it to the Top 100. We view this as evidence of the new challenges the Apple environment puts on app marketers.”

Unlike iOS, where rank is critical and often expensive to attain, Google Play has a strong search engine that makes it easier for interested users to find your app. Our experience is that 80% of the organic users in Google Play come from searches.

Finally, Android also solves the problem of marketing attribution, since it provides referrer information that anonymously identifies the source of a download. This is a single industry-wide solution that provides reliable data, yet balances the need for user privacy.  You know exactly where your ad dollars go. You know exactly what is and isn’t working. And there’s none of the data ambiguity or user experience issues seen with some iOS tracking solutions.

What About Monetization?
Of course, the big concern about Android is monetization. There’s clearly a gap: an oft-quoted post last December by Peter Farago of Flurry indicates Google Play monetization is roughly 24 percent of that of iOS.  It’s important to note that the gap is closing. Flurry notes that the biggest factor behind the gap is payment mechanisms, and expects this situation to improve with the integration of Google Wallet and Google Checkout. Evidence of improvement has already surfaced: app research firm Distimo indicates it saw an 80 percent improvement in average daily revenues for the top 200 US apps between December 2011 and March 2012. Furthermore, in a post titled Treat Android as a first-class citizen… it’ll pay off!  TinyCo noted that Average Revenue Per Paying User (ARPPU) for Google Play and iTunes is about the same as iOS, and found that Amazon performance surpassed that of iOS by a significant margin.

Beating the Averages
One problem with the monetization statistics on Google Play is that they cover the “average” experience. We’ve seen that if you target users effectively and you employ the right development strategy, Android apps convert and generate loyal users at roughly the same rate as iOS apps. More significantly, they do so at a lower acquisition cost.

In Q1, Fiksu conducted a study of six clients running the same apps on both iOS and Android to determine differences in acquisition cost and loyal usage conversion rates. (Loyal users are those who return repeatedly to an app and are most likely to monetize.) The cost of acquiring an install was 24 percent lower for Android than iOS. Given the monetization issues noted above we expected a higher conversion from installs to loyal users for iOS. Instead, what we saw was that once a user was acquired, the loyalty rate was exactly the same for both platforms. The only difference was that the cost of acquiring those users on Android was 24 percent lower.

There are, however some exceptions where iOS does beat out Android. For example tablet based shopping apps are an area where iOS excels. Other than the Kindle Fire, there is no Android-based tablet that can challenge the iPad. Further, payment processing is stronger on iOS. Fiksu data shows that for such apps loyalty is far stronger on iOS. However, these issues are being addressed in the market and those shopping apps that move to Android now will have a significant early mover advantage since Play’s algorithm rewards total downloads and usage.

How to Thrive with Google Play
It’s clear that there are many apps that are struggling in the Google Play environment, yet some are doing extremely well. Here are factors that we’ve found have made for a successful Android implementation:

Good design has its rewards: A key to rising above the averages is simply to design for Android. Many developers port iOS apps to Android as an afterthought, resulting in a sub-optimal or even buggy user experience. ESPN for example, shared during a recent webinar that their ported apps originally did not perform to expectations. When they took the approach of developing specifically for each environment, they found that performance was on par with iOS.  Another example is game developer TinyCo. who specifically ascribes its aforementioned success with Android to taking “the Android pledge” to treat Android as a first class citizen. The result was that TinyCo doubled its market opportunity.

Prioritize device and OS support: With the large number of form factors in Android, developers can find themselves stretched trying to determine what devices to support. Fortunately, a subset of roughly 20 devices makes up about 80 percent of the volume for Android, so the problem is more manageable than one might suspect. Similarly, more than 90 percent of Android devices are addressed by supporting OS version 2.2 and later.

Look forward: In hockey, there’s a saying “skate where the puck is going” (not where it is now.) The monetization issue that has received so much press is being addressed as more consumers adopt Google payment mechanisms. As noted above, there are already indications that this situation is improving rapidly. In addition, Google’s rank algorithm benefits longevity yielding an early mover advantage for apps debuting on Play sooner.

Leverage lower customer acquisition costs: The enormous scrum of developers scrapping over the iOS marketplace has resulted in higher acquisition costs.  Android presents an opportunity to develop market share and test new strategies at a lower cost.

Best Practices
The following best practices will maximize the return on an Android implementation. Here are some practical tips for success:

• Maximize search potential in your app title: identify your most successful keywords and make sure to include them in your app title.  In fact, this is so critical to success (potentially 80 to 100 places in your search ranking), that you should seriously consider removing your app name from your title and focus your description on the best keywords. Include the app name in the body of the app description – users will still be able to find it by name. Unlike iOS, the body description is searched under Google Play.
• Use, but don’t overuse, keywords: try to use the best keywords at five times the body of your app description. This can affect search ranking from 10 to 20 places.  Anything over five times has no additional benefit, so don’t overdo it.
• Test your search parameters: the above recommendations are guidelines based on accumulated experience, but search results can vary based on many factors.
• Steady efforts work best: Google Play’s ranking algorithm is tilted towards long term user acquisition – apps that acquire and retain satisfied users are rewarded with higher ranks.  Advertising campaigns should be run over a longer term and sustained over two to three months, as opposed to the short bursts of activity often seen in the iOS market.
• Use closed loop attribution and target long term users:  since retained users have an important impact in ranking, use closed loop marketing to ensure you are identifying and utilizing ad sources that bring loyal users.
• Don’t be afraid to experiment and test market your strategy with Android. You can apply these learnings to your iOS versions and reduce your costs and risks.

Conclusion
The ecosystem continues to provide an unprecedented growth opportunity for mobile app brands. While there are several options that iOS-centric developers may explore to maintain their growth in the wake of UDID deprecation, perhaps the biggest opportunity has nothing to do with iOS at all. Android offers a bigger overall market, increased amounts of marketing insight, lower user acquisition costs and, in many cases, users who are at least as engaged as their iOS counterparts. Perhaps it’s time that we all thrived with Google Play.

Editor’s Note: Alexander Haislip is a marketing executive with cloud-based server automation startup ScaleXtreme and the author of Essentials of Venture Capital. Follow him on Twitter @ahaislip.

Congratulations to Facebook for going public. Congratulations to the employees that are now millionaires. Congratulations to the founders who are now billionaires. Congratulations to the bankers, lawyers and investors who have added to their already considerable wealth. You’ve grasped the brass ring we’re all reaching for.

Yet the company that’s been created isn’t what I want from Silicon Valley.

Let’s lay aside for a minute the foibles of the founders: Mark Zuckerberg’s hacking Harvard’s servers and the email accounts of journalists, his decision to “fuck” the Winklevii “in the ear” and Eduardo Saverin’s ridiculous tax dodge. Let’s forget about the Facebook Beacon “mistake” or the comment censorship thing. Let’s forget about the privacy implications. Just take anything that makes you queasy about the company and put it in a box for one minute to consider Facebook objectively.

Facebook sells advertising—it may be the most effective advertising platform since Google, or not—but that’s not the best use of the brightest minds of our generation. Advertising doesn’t improve our balance of trade. It doesn’t lift people out of poverty. It doesn’t employ the modestly skilled. It doesn’t extend life expectancies or take away pain. It doesn’t improve our standard of living.

Silicon Valley is at its best when it uses its unique combination of talent and capital to advance society, to create even better tools for creation, to unlock the potential of people not just here, but across the globe.

Where Facebook Falls Short

There’s an old gambling saying that if you don’t know who is the sucker at the table, it’s you. The same might be said of online businesses these days: if you don’t know what’s been sold, it’s you. Facebook sells your content, your connections, your time, your attention, your personal information to advertisers. The company is only a conduit for what you do. Its value, set by the market on Thursday, is a reflection of the worth of what you’ve contributed and created.

Yes, each time you sign in to Facebook, you’re going to work for Mark Zuckerberg. Each time you update your status, post a video, check in or just sit and watch everybody else do it, you line his pockets.

And I wouldn’t mind that a bit. In fact, I would applaud it, were the product of these hours more profitable.

The fact is that much of the time spent on Facebook is wasted. The company says in its S-1 that users spent an average of 175 million hours per day on Facebook in February 2012. That’s a lot. Compare that to say, the 100 million hours Clay Shirky and a researcher at IBM calculate it took to create all of Wikipedia.

What’s Wikipedia worth? I think it’s priceless, but back in 2008, Business Insider estimated that if it were to become a commercial enterprise, Wikipedia would be worth $7 billion. Say it’s just half that—adjust for the Henry Blodget factor—and you’d see that the value of contributions to Facebook, were they as valuable as the time spent contributing to Wikipedia, ought to be worth $6.125 billion per day.

But it’s not. Contributing to Wikipedia increases the availability of the world’s knowledge. “Liking” Starbucks contributes only to the knowledge advertisers can use to better target you.

It’s much better to watch television. Television, like Facebook, gets paid by advertisers for your time.When advertisers pay TV channels, the money flows to many different pockets. There’s the TV stars, of course, but there’s also the crew: the craft-services, the set designers, the costumers, the line producers, the sound engineers, electricians, gaffers, writers and key grips. All the people who make the TV show get a slice of that advertising dollar and these are good jobs, many unionized, that don’t require a fancy Stanford computer science degree. And each person employed making TV shows pays taxes and pumps their salaries back into the economy.

And the product of their work can be exported. When the U.S. sells movies and TV shows abroad it improves our balance of trade and helps make the products we import, such as iPads and oil, less expensive.

When advertisers pay Facebook, the money goes into the pockets of Facebook shareholders, employees and computer makers. Most of Facebook’s stock is held by a single person and only a small, select group of highly skilled programmers can secure a spot on the payroll. The wealth created by Facebook gets concentrated into the hands of a few—some of whom have refused to pay taxes on their gains—instead of being recycled into the greater economy. And the computer makers that supply Facebook rely on components imported from other countries, sending capital abroad and weakening our balance of trade.

Facebook’s rise is great for Zuck, but unless you’re among a privileged few, it isn’t good for you.

There’s one other important difference between television and Facebook. Great television approaches art. I’ll remember the drama of The Sopranos and the laughs from 30 Rock long after I’m done looking at those pictures of your niece’s baby.

We Can Do Better

The Facebook fans are quick to defend the company’s value. It empowers connection! It brings people closer to each other! You can’t put a price on that! It helped organize the Arab Spring, for goodness sake.

Facebook enhances loose connections and keeps you in contact with the people you wouldn’t invest the time to call or write an email to. Seeing pictures of a friend’s ultrasound may be priceless, but the value comes from you, your connection to the friend and the miracle of life, not the service that delivers the image. Facebook did help people organize in advance of the Arab Spring, but so did Twitter, email, SMS and many other vectors. And there certainly were revolutions before Facebook and will likely be revolutions long after Facebook powers down its last server.

Facebook isn’t bad. It is just a low-value use of time that doesn’t contribute much to the economy beyond enriching the rich. What more valuable things could be done with the time, energy, effort, creativity and capital invested in its making and daily usage?

There are startups doing amazing things here in Silicon Valley still. Sure there are the electric cars, robot butlers, space rockets and a bunch of hyper-ambitious projects. But you can have a positive contribution to the economy and the world without curing cancer or feeding starving people in Africa (there is a venture firm in San Francisco working on sustainable agriculture if you do want to make a difference in the subcontinent). I’m often impressed by people working to prevent outbreaks of nasty viruses with rapid vaccination development or others creating systems to radically improve the energy efficiency of large buildings. These companies’ goals are obtainable, their achievement would be beneficial and the products would be the world’s envy.

With Facebook public, perhaps the past half-decade of social networking, casual games, virtual worlds, MMORPGs, app stores, avatars and “pokes” will give way to a renaissance of startup companies that make real products of tangible value that employ regular people. Such a return to Silicon Valley’s roots could reinvigorate the American economy and once again put this unique place at the heart of human progress.

Nevertheless, we just got an eyeful of 92 projects that our wonderful hackers have been slaving away on through the night, but there are only three teams that will be able to show off their work at on the main Disrupt stage this Wednesday. In addition to that, our API sponsors — about.me, CityGrid, Microsoft BizSpark, Mobli and OpenTok — have offered up prizes of their own to the groups that made best use of their services, so there will be plenty of winners here today.

Our panel of judges have carefully sifted through these 92 submissions, but who exactly decided the fates of these hackers? The panel of judges include Tarikh Korula of Mahaya, Christina Cacioppo of Union Square Ventures, Kip Voytek of MDC Partners, David Tisch of TechStars, Dinesh Moorjani of Hatch Labs, Nora Abousteit of Kollabora, and Dave Jagoda of Andreessen Horowitz.

So, without further ado, meet our newest Hackathon winners!

Thingscription

A service that tracks user impressions to figure out what products to offer as a recurring subscription to customers.

PoachBase

A recruiting service that uses Crunchbase data to check out the talent at startups that may soon fold.

Practikhan

A platform that lets teachers create their own online quizzes to share with their students.

A temporary solution to the drama that unfolded this morning when Twitter was blocked in Pakistan — some believe over representations of the Prophet Mohammed and Twitter’s refusal to block these images; and some believe while it was testing an image filtering service. Whatever it was, the site is now back up –after an order from Prime Minister.

Pakistan’s Express Tribune is reporting that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani made the decision after the site was down for the day on a mandate from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority. But it is still not clear why the authorities shut down access in the first place.

As we reported earlier today, some reports — still unconfirmed directly by any Pakistani authorities (we have reached out on this) — said that the government was concerned about images of the Prophet that were being tweeted as part of an activist campaign in support of the freedom of expression among Muslims and in Muslim countries.

A move to quash sites that facilitate Muslim activism is not unprecedented, so it is very plausible here. However, others have raised an issue about whether it might be something else: they allege that authorities were testing an image-blocking service. In other words: potentially equally restrictive, but different from the specific Prophet drawing campaign.

The whole event sparked off a huge amount of negative response both within Pakistan and further afield. In the country itself, more technically savvy / better equipped users were able to continue accessing the site: it still worked on the Opera Mini browser via the mobile internet, according to several reports. But otherwise, access across the country was denied.

Since we still don’t know why accesses was denied in the first place, it’s hard to say whether the public outcry had a role to play here. Nevertheless, it’s a very encouraging sign when you see people coming together so quickly around an issue.

We’ll continue trying to figure out what exactly happened and for those in Pakistan returning to the Twitterverse, welcome back!

[Image: TakeBackPakistan, Flickr]

The kit consists of a set of tiny furniture with built-in wires and switches. You can wire up your dollhouse however you like, adding lamps and switches. $49 gets you one regular room and $95 gets you a “duplex.”

They’ve hit $13,000 of a $26,000 target and it it helps little girls think more clearly about science and electronics, I’m totally backing it. The project ends on June 16 so there’s still plenty of time to slowly replace the Barbie Dream House with a decidedly more DIY dollhouse.

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