Shaker, an app that has been described as “Facebook meets Second Life”, has emerged from a 29-strong field to win TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2011.
The Israeli start-up won the coveted prize after the participants were whittled down to seven finalists, including Bitcasa, Cake Health, Farmigo, Prism Skylabs, TalkTo and Trello.
Shaker, which is currently in “exclusive private beta”, has already raised $3 million in funding. It will now be backed by Michael Arrington, the recently-departed founder of TechCrunch.
The app works by creating a virtual world where users can interact with people they know on Facebook.
It features a “Facebook bar” in which people can talk, buy drinks and even dance via an avatar.
The app has proved extremely popular with initial users, leading to the Shaker team withdrawing invitations for further participants.
Prism Skylabs, a cloud-based service which allows businesses to bring video feeds online, was runner-up. The start-up is backed by, among others, Google chairman Eric Schmidt.
Vocre, a translation app, was the audience choice winner. The app translates your voice into another language by simply speaking into an iPhone.
Fortune Planet won the award for the best game, while Vocre took out the award for the best mobile app.
COMMENTS
SmartCompany is committed to hosting lively discussions. Help us keep the conversation useful, interesting and welcoming. We aim to publish comments quickly in the interest of promoting robust conversation, but we’re a small team and we deploy filters to protect against legal risk. Occasionally your comment may be held up while it is being reviewed, but we’re working as fast as we can to keep the conversation rolling.
The SmartCompany comment section is members-only content. Please subscribe to leave a comment.
The SmartCompany comment section is members-only content. Please login to leave a comment.