A life-size fire-breathing dragon. A fully robotic calliope band. A full-scale flight simulator built by teenagers. An entire herd of homemade R2-D2s. Electric cars, steampunk fashion, a robot petting zoo, a piano made of bananas, and a cardboard Trojan Horse. Plus a zillion different interactive attractions, classes, and events for kids of all ages. Yes, the Maker Faire is back in town, and only just in time.

It was exactly the tonic I needed after my inability to get excited about the Facebook IPO and my ongoing sense that most of the Valley is focused on building meaningless mobile/social/local/scrapbooking sugar water. This was a place full of people building real, tangible things for the sake of sheer awesomeness. Oh–and while they’re at it, almost as a side effect, hidden behind their Burning-Man-esque decor is a community and technology ready to turn the whole planet on its ear.

The maker movement has hit an interesting flux point; its amateurs and enthusiasts, much like the computer geeks of the 1970s and 1980s, now stand on the verge of watching their hobby erupt into big business that will reshape the way people everywhere live. Do I sound hyperbolic? Don’t just take my word for it; listen to the mighty Economist, which in its British understated fashion recently called digital manufacturing no less than “The third industrial revolution.”

“What happens when you give the tools of the industrial revolution to the creative class, for the cost of a bad coffee addiction?” asked Mark Hatch, CEO of TechShop, a company that offers its members access to workspaces armed with industrial-strength toolsets. Then he reeled off some impressive examples: James McKelvey built the first three prototypes of the Square card reader — in two weeks — at TechShop in Menlo Park. That’s also where Phil Hughes and Bob Lipp built their initial fanless liquid-cooling system for server farms, which went on to soundly defeat IBM in a “chill-off.”

TechShop’s Mark Hatch.

But I’m most interested in the economic effects once the maker movement hits the developing world, where the demand for custom parts, recycled materials, and mechanical repairs is immense and inexhaustible. Or consider another of Hatch’s examples: the Embrace low-cost infant warmer which is reportedly on track to save the lives of 100,000 premature babies over the next five years.

And we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. When maker technology and spaces like TechShop begin to metastasize all over the planet, so that anyone and everyone can plausibly build their own solutions to their problems rather than waiting for some industrial-scale corporation to do so, that’s when a lot of lives will really begin to change. And TechShop is indeed expanding, although, alas, only in the USA for now: there’ll be “more than one open on the East Coast by the end of the year,” according to Hatch.

In the interim, drop by a Maker Faire if you can, to catch a glimpse of this nascent future in its larval stage, while it’s still messy and exuberant and fuelled by amateurish enthusiasm. (Bay Areans: it’s open until 6PM today.) And the next times your eyes glaze over at the sight of yet another SoLoMo app, consider looking into what’s happening in the world of hand-made hardware instead. If nothing else, it’s awfully colorful:

The Ragtime Castaway Band, a fully robotic giant calliope band.

Laying down a beat with a piano made of bananas and a drum kit built from limes.

That dragon again.

A mere 24 hours ago, coders started hacking with hopes and dreams of building the next great app or program. Many participants stayed overnight, fueled on gumption and Red Bull. Others cut out early, apparently satisfied with their creation. But they’re all back now, waiting to present on our massive Disrupt stage. Watch it live!

Click to view slideshow.

It’s been a long, caffeine-fueled ride for the hundreds of hackers who have set up at our big Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon, but the furious process of taking a wild idea and turning it into something real is finally winding down.

Projects were being finalized, UIs were being tweaked, last minute Red Bulls were being downed — it was a quite a sight to see everyone buckling down for those final few minutes before submissions were due.

It’s almost like a weight has been lifted off everyone’s shoulders though, and more than a few people have chosen to let off some of their stress-fueled steam by running around with the arsenal of Nerf guns we’ve left strewn about.

Oh, but it’s not over yet.

Now that everyone’s hacks have been collected, they’ll all start to take the stage here at Pier 94 and present the fruits of their hard work to our panel of judges. The chosen winners will then have the chance to present their projects at the Disrupt main stage in front of all of our wonderful attendees (but only after they get a few days to catch up on their sleep). On top of that, our API sponsors will be handing our prizes of their own, ranging from cold hard cash to a free Windows Phone.

The Hackathon finals are set to begin in just a few moments, so stay tuned for all the action!

Click to view slideshow.

Pictures of the Prophet Mohammad have always been a highly contentious issue — they’re not explicitly prohibited in the Qu’ran but many Sunni Muslims forbid the idea, while others do not seem to mind as much. Among the latter group are those who feel that banning such images is a restriction on freedom of expression. The issue at the center of the Pakistan-blocks-Twitter story today has been reported to be around a viral activist campaign that’s been running for the past few years to point attention to this.

But as with the actual blocking of Twitter itself in Pakistan — there has been no official Pakistani government statement about what is actually behind the current Twitter block at the moment (here is a screenshot of an alleged email ordering the block to ISPs with no specific reason behind it) – it’s hard to pin down exactly what content was actually sent around that caused the block in the first place.

And at least one group is raising the question of whether this blockage could be related to the government testing an image filtering service — something with wider-ranging implications.

A Prophet-drawing campaign started on Facebook in 2010 with a specific page, Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, created in response to the TV show South Park getting some heat for depicting the Prophet. The EDMD page was eventually taken down; but not before resulting in a temporary Facebook block in Pakistan. This year, according to Wikipedia, EDMD was specifically geared at sending pictures around via Twitter, to protest the arrest of Saudi poet/journalist Hamza Kashgari for writing “insulting” tweets about the Prophet. However, there are a number of Facebook pages that come up when one searches for “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” — not clear whether any of these are “official.”

And at least one Pakistani blogger/activist (and, yes, dentist) Awab Alvi has raised the point that there may be no direct blasphemy accusation involved today at all. In a blog post Alvi explains:

Ever since the reports emerged we have asked affected users to help test the site from their ISP connections and within minutes we had hundreds of reports The traceroute shows a very interesting fact, the block is at the DNS level, the url is not resolving right from the get go… My gutt [sic] feeling is that PTA is just testing their URL Filtering system, we had reports of them testing some image servers on facebook last week, and it disappeared by the evening. PTA choose Sunday to avoid any legal backlash exploiting the courts day off….

…The civil society has to its credit a stay order on the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority preventing them from blocking websites obtained on 19th April 2012 which can be used against them.

Once they get through these testing days I am sure it can be later used as and when needed. Though the argument presented by PTA is that it needs this technology to crack down on Terrorism related issue, but one may never know when it can be used for political censorship

Regardless of what is really behind today’s Twitter block, the issue of not being able to easily access the social network clearly touches on a sensitive point in Pakistan around freedom of expression: watch #twitterban to see how people in Pakistan and elsewhere are responding to the story.

We have contacted the Ministry, Facebook and Twitter to try to get more information on this.

Another day, another example of a country making it harder for its people to use the web and some of its most effective channels of communication? There are reports coming in from Pakistan that it has become the latest country to ban the use of Twitter.

According to the blog Dawn, the chairman of Pakistan’s telecommunications authority has today imposed the restriction because of blasphemous content: it reports that Chairman Mohammad Yaseen blocked the site today “because Twitter refused to remove material related to a competition on Facebook to post images of Islam's Prophet Muhammad.” Facebook, apparently, has complied with the request, says the blog. Others are now starting to report the same, and below the break we have a screenshot of how accessing the site looks from one of our readers in Lahore who says he “cannot access the site at all.”

Getting blocked in Pakistan, if true, is particularly ironic because the two, paired up, played a major role in one of the most important news events to be broken in recent history: the raid and demise of Osama bin Laden, which was tweeted by at least two people watching the raids as they happened in the mountains of the country.

This is a developing (and slightly confusing) story: just yesterday, about 12 hours ago, Senator Rehman Malik, of Pakistan’s People Party, tweeted that nothing was getting blocked: “Dear all, I assure u that Twitter and FB will continue in our country and it will not be blocked. Pl do not believe in rumors,” he wrote. We have contacted Twitter and Facebook for their responses to this story.

Update: More details coming in from Pakistan’s Express Tribune: The request to block the site was made by the Ministry of Information and Technology, it says, citing a drawing competition (more on that here). The ministry, apparently, made several requests to Twitter, which responded that it "cannot stop any individual doing anything of this nature on the website.”

Directives to block the site were sent to ISPs in several parts of the country, including PTCL Broadband and Wi-Tribe. It also reports that Twitter is still accessible by mobile using secure browsers like Opera, as well as proxies and VPNs like Vtunnel. [original report continues]

This is not the first time that Twitter has been blocked in the country: a similar ban took place in 2010, Dawn reports. That lasted for two weeks.

The move underscores how susceptible social networks remain to higher powers in government. And Pakistan is not the only country to pull something like this.

Sites like Facebook and Twitter  are still officially forbidden in China (although millions use it anyway using VPNs — virtual private networks), with the bans often having strong political overtones around people expressing contrary opinions. Developing countries with big populations represent some of the biggest potential growth opportunities for scale-oriented social networks — when they can get used.

Even developed countries like the UK have floated ideas about how to restrict the flow of information on social networks — this was something that came up last summer during the London riots and the role that some believed services like BlackBerry Messenger played in gangs getting organized to loot.

Update 2: One of our awesome readers in Lahore, Waqas Ali, sent us this screenshot:

Ali has also played a role in a past campaign in the country to keep Facebook from getting banned. He says that he cannot access Twitter at all right now but that a friend is able to use the Opera Mini browser to access the site.

Update 3: Here is a follow up post some back story on Prophet drawings, along with another theory: the blockage could be to do with Pakistan testing an image filtering service, which sounds even wider-ranging in its possibilities.

[Image: Farooq on Flickr]

It’s midnight.

The city is alive with Saturday night fever, and Pier 94 is just as awake, and perhaps a bit more drunk. Tequila shots (and plenty of beers) are flowing, along with Red Bull, Mountain Dew, and Energy Bites.

In other words, this place is like one giant vat of FourLoko, topped with a sprinkling of coders. For the most part, they seem ready for anything. We’ve heard that the majority of them are ahead of schedule, which is good news considering that the alcohol-induced energy rush will only last so long.

We caught up with Jake, a 15-year old hacker who’s back for the second time to code away, along with Matt Hall, co-founder and CEO of Docracy and former Hackathon winner, and both seemed confident in their hacks. However, Jake has all the energy in the world (despite eating basically nothing), while Matt says he’s typing at a rate of one character per minute. Clearly, youth is an advantage once the clock strikes midnight.

We also brought along some Nerf Vortex blasters (the ones that shoot discs) so that the hackers could take a break and let loose a bit, which basically means that the floor of Pier 94 is currently littered with little green discs.

All in all, the hackers are hitting their stride with about 11 hours left to perfect not only their product, but their presentations. We’ll keep you updated on the action as it’s happening.

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.

It’s been about eight hours since our big Disrupt Hackathon kicked off, and all of our intrepid hackers have been busy letting the code (and the caffeine) fly ever since.

I managed to tear a few of them away from their work (these folks are pretty motivated, so it took a bit of doing) to tell us a little bit about themselves and what they’ve been trying to crank out during the wee hours of the morning.

Devon Peticolas

Devon is a senior at Rutgers University (and the newly-minted president of the school’s undergrad CS club). As you might imagine, he’s no stranger to hackathons either — he can’t quite put his finger on it, but he’s probably in the “double digits” at this point.

He’ll be spending the night working on a mobile web app that allows users to find their friends in a crowd through sort of a hot-and-cold approach — if all goes well, a phone will vibrate when it’s pointing in the direction of a user’s friend, and will vibrate even stronger as the two people get closer to each other.

 

Peter Verrillo

Peter is the CEO of a company called EnHatch, and during the day he works on creating apps to help promote, demo, and sell medical devices for use in surgery.

He and his team specialize in creating those 3D apps for the iPad, but he’s looking to spend his time at the Hackathon bringing that 3D experience to the iPhone. The app he’s working on tonight deals with slightly less gruesome fare — instead, it aims to walk users through the process of putting together Ikea furniture.

“If Ikea had a good app, this would be it,” he told me.

Dasara Kushi

This is Dasara’s second Hackathon (her first was a photo-centric event), and this time around she and her partner Ronn have decided to spend their night building a web app that uses a computer’s built-in webcam to analyze a user’s face and suggest places for them to go in real time.

“If you look sad, it’ll tell you to go to a comedy club,” said told me.

Their project makes pretty extensive use of the faceAPI, but there’s still plenty of work to do — they’re both still looking at pulling in new data from different APIs, to make the service more robust, but thankfully the night is still young.

Jared Zoneraich

Jared is a 14-year old hacker who attends Bergen Academy, and he’s quite excited to stay up and have fun here at his very first Hackathon. His project of choice? Nothing less than an ad delivery service, of course.

“If I weren’t doing this, I’d be doing homework,” he said.

His hacker idols include Mark Zuckerberg as well as seasoned iPhone cracker George “geohot” Hotz, who just so happened to attend Bergen back in the day as well.

Pavan Krishnamurthy

Pavan and his teammates are cranking away on an iOS app that will tell you what sort of music people in different cities are listening to – a noble and clever goal. Cities that tend to listen to faster-paced music on Rdio are labelled ‘hot,’ while more laid-back cities (Chicago in their mockup) are tagged with the “chill” label.

His team’s mockups look pretty darned solid, but we’ll soon see if the finished product lives up to their ambitions. When he’s not hacking, Pavan works at Bloomberg and (like Jared) looks up to Mark Zuckerberg as his own hero hacker.

Jon Gottfried

Jon works for Twilio (during the day) and dons his hacker cape when night falls. He and his buddies are working on a system for A/B testing Amazon products tonight — not the sexiest idea the in the world sure, but that system is only part of his team’s plan.

They hope that their testing system can be used to determine consumer desires, and use that information to whip up a subscription service — Thingscription — that’s focused on delivering those goods to people on a regular basis.

Octavian Costache

The royally-named Octavian (or Vivi, as he’s also known) and his teammates are working on a second-screen app that provides users with additional context as they watch Game of Thrones, which is probably one of the geekier endeavors we’ve spotted today. Need to figure out why that guy just got stabbed? Or some lesser-known facet of some clan’s convoluted family tree? Keep your eyes peeled on this guy.

Incidentally, he is totally in love with the Khalisi (because of the dragons, not the other thing) and his Twitter is Okvivi.

Karina Ruzinov

Karina goes to Rutgers (there’s a pretty large contingent of Rutgers kids, it would seem) and is spending her summer interning for Refinery 29. She studies Computer Science and Math and she says the student parties are real ragers.

She and her team are working on a app that helps people come up with names for their Hackathon projects. It’s not quite ready for primetime yet, but when it is, it aims to inspire people by providing synonyms and rhymes for words that embody their particular project’s spirit.

Victoria Mo

Victoria is a Master’s Student in Computer Science at Columbia University and her tech role model is none other than Google’s Marissa Mayer.

She and her team are working feverishly on an app that helps users find the hottest clubs in town (and not the hottest clubs in Ontario, as it sounded when we first heard the pitch). They aim to accomplish that by posting images and videos of the clubs’ exteriors so people will be able to quickly determine how popular a particular venue is.

What a week. After eight years, Mark Zuckerberg takes Facebook public at a $104 billion valuation. His longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan gets her medical degree from the UC San Francisco. He has his 28th birthday.

And to top it all off, they get married today! Mazel tov.

Apparently, the wedding had been in the works for four to five months, according to a source authorized to speak on behalf of the couple. It wasn’t tied to the IPO, but rather Chan’s graduation from medical school on Monday.

About 100 of their closest friends and family showed up at the backyard of their Palo Alto home, thinking they were going to celebrate Chan’s graduation. When they arrived, they were told it was a wedding. “It was a surprise,” the source tells us.

Zuckerberg gave her a ruby ring he designed himself, which Chan had never seen until today. The food came from their two favorite restaurants, Palo Alto Sol and Fuki Sushi, and they shared it family style. For dessert, they served Burdick chocolate mice (which is what the pair ate on their very first date!)

Chan and Zuckerberg met more than nine years ago while at Harvard. In this cute story from the Harvard Crimson seven years ago, Zuckerberg asked her, “Hey Priscilla, do you want a job at the Facebook?"

"I'd love a job at Facebook," she responded, offering him a Twizzler.

How things have changed. What an amazing ride for the pair and for the company, and hopefully a lot longer to go too.

There’s a strong murmur in the room with random spurts of excitement. Hackers and coders have teamed up and mostly (hopefully) decided on a project. There are only 15 hours left. But night is approaching. That’s when things tend to get loopy thanks to the sudden influx of food and beer.

So far the event has been fantastic. There’s a 3:2 ratio of Macs vs PCs. Epic t-shirts are everywhere. Caffeine is flowing thanks to Red Bull and Outburst Energy Bites.

The event runs until tomorrow morning. Coding a fantastic app is just part of the fun. Starting at 11:00 am tomorrow morning, teams will have one minute to present their project, hopefully winning over the judges for a shot to present at TechCrunch Disrupt. But first the participants need to make it through the night.

Click to view slideshow.

Hackers aren’t necessarily known for their fashion sense. Most of the time, a t-shirt and jeans is as far as it goes. But there are certain circumstances in which it’s clear that hackers pay a little extra attention after rolling out of bed in the morning. The TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is one of those instances, but that doesn’t mean that the go-to jeans and T have been abandoned.

Even better, our hackers are choosing to express themselves through the t-shirts, and I have to say that they’re some of the coolest I’ve seen. Last year in San Francisco, most of our hackers had something on their heads, whether it was a baseball cap, headphones, an Ushanka, or even a shower cap.

This year, it’s all about the classic T, but with a coder’s spin.

Without further ado, these are the most badass t-shirts of the TC Disrupt NYC Hackathon:

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.

Editor’s note: Jeremy Toeman is a founder of Dijit Media, a startup whose vision is to create the ultimate "hyperpersonalised social TV guide" mobile experience. Jeremy has over 11 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, social TV and consumer technology working with companies like Sling Media, Mediabolic, Boxee, Clicker, VUDU, and more. Follow him on Twitter@jtoeman.

Last time I took a look at the most over-hyped topics of the Future of TV, and I thought a great follow-up would be to look at the reverse case. After all, it’s easy to sit there and critique, but what about the positive side, where’s the action happening but not being talked about as much as it could be?  Here are four things going on in the TV industry that definitely don’t get enough respect…

Open Platforms

Did you know that many cable/satellite/telephone providers have created APIs to communicate and/or control their set top boxes over either home networks and/or the Internet? That’s right, the dinosaurs who are sitting on old technology have opened access to their (formerly) closed systems. If that’s not sinking in clearly enough and I’m not saying this to pitch the company or anything, but by way of example, at Dijit we have the ability to interact with set top boxes that exist in approximately 30 million households today. Just think about it – a _insert cable company name here_ cable box is just as mashup-able as Craigslist.

AirPlay for the rest of us

First, let’s knock another topic off right here: the Apple TV isn’t about being a standalone product, it’s about being an awesome accessory to iPads (which is why it’s effectively the top selling ‘Internet streamer’ over the past 3 years). Works much better when you think of it that way, eh? The flagship feature of Apple TV? AirPlay. If you are “in” the iOS ecosystem, you know how well AirPlay works. If you don’t, you are truly missing out – and I don’t mean you need to rush out to buy one, I mean you need to see how this works: user picks up iPhone/iPad, user finds content, user hits Play, user hits AirPlay to AppleTV, user sees content playing on TV, user enjoys cool refreshing beverage while watching Internet content on TV. Win.

Compare that to any TV-based “10 foot user interface” experience, and you’ll understand the difference. But here’s where it gets interesting: there are a good half-dozen or so startups working on this, not to mention consumer electronics companies like Samsung and others who have already deployed solutions. Granted not one of them is as slick as Airplay, but the era of “fumble around terribly designed menus on your TV” is coming to end, and I for one couldn’t be happier about it. I guarantee a couple of years worth of fragmentation ahead, but either way, the future of interfaces is a bright one.

Death of the content genre

The other day I was trying to reclassify some of my music, and I realized terms like Pop, Alternative, and even Rock are poorly suited to today’s immense breadth of music offerings (and WTF is Adult Alternative anyway???). We are in the age of the micro-niche, driven much due to the growth of Indie music dating back to the 90s. I believe the same fragmentation of big, generic genres like Comedy and Drama will occur in fairly short order.

Considering the rise to 500 channels with the infusion of short and long form Internet videos, the cross-over between content formats is pretty much already here. When I look at the results of most TV recommendations engines, and by that I mean Netflix, I see an increasingly disparate view on content. Am I more interested in Witty TV Comedies (which blends King of the Hill, the Dick Van Dyke Show, Black Adder, 30 Rock, Cheers, and Archer) or Dysfunctional-Family TV Dramas (featuring Rescue Me, Weeds, and My-So-Called Life)?  And while I’m at it, why is Portlandia similar to Twin Peaks? Protip: it’s not.

Bottom line here is expect more and more filters, views, and correspondingly value placed on matching people with the micro-niche hipsteresque genres that describes them, uniquely. Second protip: stop trying to recommend shows because I like Arrested Development, it stand alone.

Who’s Going to Disrupt the TV Industry? The TV Industry

The Internet has disrupted a great many things, and we’ve seen startups emerge to tear down many sectors. Craigslist, started by one dude, disrupted newspapers. eBay owns Christie’s. Music was killed by, well, it seems like the Internet and poor business models, as opposed to startups per se. But when it comes to TV, it’s just not as simple as all that. I can name almost two dozen startups who thought they could just run on down to Hollywood, buy up some content, and start a business – all are now dead. I’ve seen almost as many think they could do the same thing by just trying to use some “trick” through the system to accomplish the same. Most are already dead.  Even Google has now twice failed in their attempt to court the content industry.

But we can see the signs that disruption could and should occur. I’d argue, however, that the real interesting thing happening is the intra-industry battles. At last year’s Cable Show, for example, multiple cable companies showed their services running as “apps” inside Smart TV ecosystems. Comcast, as another example, has OnDemand (broadcast video on demand), StreamPix (Internet video on demand), DVR, TVEverywhere, and other ways to deliver you content. What happens if they decide to bring their services outside their existing geographical boundaries? What happens when cable co’s actually leverage devices like Xboxes to deliver fully authenticated content offerings? What happens when NBC decides Hulu is a bad investment, and creates an openly accessible content feed using third party authentication? What happens when local affiliates continue to get squeezed out of the business?

We can and should expect to see cracks in the system. But I don’t think it’s about cord cutting and little startups. This is the Barzinis teaming up with the Tattaglias to take out Vito, and I hate to say it, but Silicon Valley’s no more than a Clemenza, at best. But there is war a-coming, and there will be great opportunities for startups to rise to great heights if they understand how the system works today, and what’s coming down the pipe. Pun intended, don’t forget to tip your waiter.

It’s been just over nine months since Google announced their intentions to acquire hardware manufacturer Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, and now it seems that the final pieces of the deal have fallen into place.

According to a new report from the Associated Press, Chinese officials have finally given the Google-Motorola deal their blessing.

China’s official approval of the deal has been a long time coming — Google managed to score regulatory approvals from the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission back in February (on the same day no less), but China’s anti-monopoly bureau leapt into action just a few days later. That period of intense regulatory scrutiny is a routine part of the purchasing process, as every company that makes more than 400 million yuan ($63 million) in China and 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) globally is subject to the process.

Google and Motorola originally expected to close the deal in “early 2012″, and it turns out they weren’t too far from the market. With this final approval in place, Google has confirmed that they expect purchase to be completed some time next week.

With the long process of purchasing Motorola Mobility finally drawing to a close, Google seems to be shifting their attention to the process of selling hardware on their own. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Google was looking at fleshing out the Devices section of the Google Play Store with unlocked smartphones and tablets — all of them “lead” devices —  from up to five major hardware manufacturers. Now that Google will have their own in-house hardware team, it stands to reason that they might soon offer their own devices alongside those from hardware partners like Samsung and HTC.

The anticipation is palpable.

Hundreds of hackers have congregated outside Manhattan’s Pier 94, planning, strategizing, and praying to baby Jesus that their fates will be similar to those of Group.me and Docracy. We’ve seen plenty of Hackathon winners go on to do incredible things, make millions of dollars, and rise to startup stardom levels, but the journey isn’t a simple one.

Click to view slideshow.

Let me paint a little word picture for you:

The hackers will be in a massive warehouse for the next 24 hours and beyond. They’ll have API sponsors and helpful workshops, sure, but the challenge of creating a product, or even a prototype, all comes down to them. Red Bull will be an unavoidable temptation, especially after a couple hours staring at white code on a black background.

They know they might crash, but they don’t care. They need the energy. Snacks will abound, and snacks are all they have time for anyway. A huge meal is sure to weigh down the belly and slow their pace.

After a few hours, fights are destined to break out. Maybe it’s a disagreement over which API to use, or which color the UI should be, or really anything. They’re under an insane amount of pressure, and even the slightest frustration or hindrance can cause a major break. Teams will turn against each other, and joyously reunite after a few moments of pensive reflection.

When the clock strikes midnight, that’s when things get loopy. The empty cans of Red Bull will be joined by full cans of beer, heads and shoulders will begin to slump, and the fights that have since been resolved will resurface.

Certain members of various teams will begin practicing their presentations, most certainly distracting other teams from their work, but this is, after all, a competition. The coffee pot will be refilled twice as often for the rest of the Hackathon, and bean bags, tables and even cold, hard floors will be converted into napping pads.

And alas, the sun will rise. Obstacles will be overcome. Prototypes will be completed. Presentations will be perfected.

And perhaps, just maybe, the beginning of a beautiful story will be written.

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.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Gabe Rivera, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — play toe jam football in the shadow of the Facebook IPO. Try as we might, we can’t shake the weight of Facebook’s dominance of Techmeme and maybe the fate of the global economy. Greece, move over. @gaberivera joins near the 30 minute mark.

@scobleizer tries a reverse Statue of Liberty play around the forthcoming Samsung phone and the threat to Apple (nonexistent) but our hearts aren’t in it. I fail in a weak attempt to roll up everything under push notification. Face it: our hopes and dreams are now tied to our jobs as feeders of the Facebook Empire.  Please Twitter. Save us.

@stevegillmor, @gaberivera, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Comcast’s plans to do away with its 250 GB data cap and charge users based upon usage marks the end of an era for cable TV providers, and for the online video industry. No longer will users be able to endlessly stream all the content their hearts desire. Not just that, but the fact that usage-based pricing is arriving at the same time that more, higher-quality content is appearing online could have a dampening effect on demand for services like Netflix or Hulu Plus.

Comcast, of course, says that its new, usage-based pricing policy is pro-consumer, and to a certain extent it is. The average broadband subscriber — those who only use up about 8 GB or 10 GB of data a month — shouldn’t necessarily pay the same as those whose usage goes above 300 GB in the same period of time.

But for those of us who are avid streaming video users, usage-based pricing models could change the overall value proposition of watching video on the Internet.

Can streaming video be a TV replacement?

I’m a subscriber to Netflix, Hulu Plus, and MLB.tv. I have a Roku box and an Apple TV, and I frequently purchase season passes to shows like Mad Men, Justified, and Sons of Anarchy. Even though I don’t pay for cable, I take advantage of access to TV Everywhere applications from the likes of Showtime and HBO, from my family’s Xfinity TV account, as well as test accounts that I occasionally get from some of the cable networks to check out their new services.

In other words, I watch streaming video in the same way a lot of other people watch regular TV. But instead of recording shows and watching them from a DVR, I watch them on-demand online.

I’m also a Comcast broadband subscriber, and I’m probably what the company would consider a heavy data user. While I’ve never bumped up against the 250GB cap, I’ve definitely started to come close over the last several months. In April I racked up 160 GB of data usage, and about halfway through May, I’ve already used 90 GB. That might be atypical for the average Comcast broadband subscriber, but I think that type of usage is becoming a lot more common, particularly for highly connected people like me.

More importantly, the amount of data I’m using has rapidly increased over the last year or so. It wasn’t so long ago that I was typically using less than 100 GB a month. And I expect it to continue increasing, to the point where I wouldn’t be surprised if I hit and surpass Comcast’s new 300 GB data limit at some point over the next 12-18 months.

Part of that is due to me just watching more stuff — I’ve been re-watching old episodes from The Wire, for instance, in addition to a regular slate of weekly shows. And with baseball season up and running, I’m streaming a lot more MLB.tv as well. But part of it is also due to more bandwidth being used by higher bit rate streams, as services like Netflix improve the video quality of their products.

Putting things into perspective

But what about data usage for everyone else? The average video on Netflix uses up about 1 GB of data per hour, but most of those streams aren’t in full HD. The highest quality setting for Netflix, which is what most viewers would like to stream to their TVs, uses more than twice as much data per hour.

According to Nielsen, the average TV viewer consumes about five hours of video a day, or about 150 hours of video per month. For those keeping track at home, that means that you’d have to watch even more video online than your typical TV watcher if you ever plan to max out Comcast’s 300 GB allotment.

Of course, that’s where things are now, but video quality continues to improve for all of these services, and that means higher bit rates and more data streamed per movie or TV show. What happens as these services improve, as more content and higher-quality content makes its way online? And what happens as more people tune into those services?

Today, about 30 percent of users have streamed a video to their TVs, either because they own a so-called “smart TV” that came with access to streaming video services, or because they’ve connected a game console or streaming box (and in some cases a PC) to a dumb TV. What happens when that hits 50 percent? Or 75 percent? Hell, what happens when Apple’s mythical iTV gets released and users suddenly have access to a whole new set of streaming applications in 1080p?

That will change the value proposition of online video dramatically. For me, between all the different subscription VOD services and the cost of 8-10 season passes that I buy every year, I’m probably already paying more for streaming services than I would pay for TV if I just purchased a basic cable package.

But then, I wouldn’t have the convenience of on-demand access to most of the content that I want from a number of different services and devices. And I also wouldn’t have the pleasure of watching most of that content without ads. For now, it’s a trade-off I’m willing to make. But in the future, if I have to pay an additional $10 for every 50 GB of video I consume over a 300 GB limit, though? Then I’m not so sure it’s worth it. That’s the world we’re about to enter.

What Comcast’s moves are really about

For me, the debate over Comcast’s treatment of its streaming Xbox Live app isn’t even about net neutrality or whether it treats the traffic of online competitors any differently than it treats its own. What it really comes down to is, do you want to pay for a TV and VOD service that you can stream to your Xbox or an iPad, computer, or connected TV… Or do you want to piece together an alternative solution from a variety of different streaming services?

It’s a judgment between the current value of online video offerings versus what you can get from TV. Due to the relatively cheap nature of most online video services, that made the choice easy for people like me. You could pay $100 for an HD cable package and DVR, or you could pay a couple of different services less than $10 a month each for a lot of similar content on-demand. And you could get those streams on pretty much any device you wanted to access them on.

But things are changing rapidly. With the introduction of Comcast’s Xbox app, as well as new applications coming on devices like Samsung Connected TVs and other devices, the cable company is making its service a lot more attractive to potential customers. At the same time, the implementation of usage-based pricing changes the potential cost of online video services and makes bundled pay TV and broadband services a lot more attractive as a result.

That’s not to say that the recent moves by Comcast are going to kill the online video industry — I think that Netflix, YouTube and others are beginning to create enough value on their own through device access and new original programming to begin offering a real alternative to cable. But it could make people think twice about how they choose to access content and through what services, if it means additional broadband charges down the line.

My set ritual before going to bed each night is as follows — turn out the lights, plug in my iPhone, take off my glasses and attempt vainly to nod off. Step two in that process can be a bit of a crapshoot in the dark, but the folks at Scrap Pile Labs have recently kicked off a new Kickstarter campaign for a product called the CordLite that just may come in handy.

As the name sort of implies, the CordLite is a dock connector cable for iDevices that, well, lights up thanks to a pair of forward-facing LEDs. It’s a very simple concept, but the thoughtful execution is what make this project worth keeping an eye on.

Perhaps the niftiest thing about the CordLite is how you actually fire up those lights — the dock connector’s aluminum body is entirely touch-sensitive, so the lights engage whenever someone goes to plug in the cable. Meanwhile, a pair of indicator lights run along the top of the dock connector so there’s never any confusion as to which side is up.

Pledging $25 locks you in for one of the first CordLites to roll off of the assembly line, so you’d best shell out the dough if you’re interested — after the Kickstarter campaign ends, the price will jump up to $35. Not a bad deal for night owls, especially considering that Apple’s own dock connector cable is nearly $20 without a single frill to go with it.

Though the CordLite is Apple-only for now, Android users shouldn’t feel too left out. The team also has a light-up micro-USB cable in the works, though I suspect we won’t be seeing those out in the wild for a little while yet.