Disrupt NYC Day 1: Your Startup Battlefield Companies

Our very first day of Disrupt NYC is over and the conference started off with a bang. We had memorable chats, dove into fashion for a bit, hung out with the Startup Alley companies and witnessed 15 startups launch their products in our first day of the Startup Battlefield.

Even though we will have brand-new companies launching tomorrow while fighting for the ultimate prize of $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup, we wanted to take a moment to highlight all that we saw today. There were some brilliant companies, so be sure to check all of them out below. The Internet was buzzing with positive words about each. This is going to be a tough battle. Which company was your favorite?

Session 1: Disrupting Learning and Decision Making

SpokenLayer
Read the web with your ears. SpokenLayer delivers the written web as audio. Instantly. Read by authors, real people and really smart robots. In your pocket, on your time.

Answer Factory
Cyfeon invented Answer Factory to improve how businesses made decisions and understand their data. Answer Factory immediately operationalizes any data source, regardless of its format, size or location, resulting in improved answer quality.

Ark
Ark is a search engine for people. With Ark, you can search for new people, old classmates, new business contacts, and even search your friends across multiple social networks.

Koemei
Koemei is a self-service cloud-platform and API for automated transcription and captioning of video content at large scale.

Incident (gTar)
Incident is a consumer electronics company aiming to make creating and interacting with music as enjoyable and casual as listening to it.

Session 2: Disrupting Processes

UberConference
UberConference is a simple, free and visual conferencing tool.

BroadPeak Partners
BroadPeak Partners brings you K3, an interface harness that standardizes interfaces without the complexity of EAI/ESB.

CallApp
CallApp was founded in 2011 by a group of passionate industry experts, well funded VCs and angels. CallApp makes each call more fun and productive. Powered by a Universal Crowdsourced Contact-Genome, CallApp provides the Ultimate Calling Experience via its Social Phone CRM & Interaction Platform.

Open Garden
Open Garden lets you share your mobile Internet among all your devices.

KurbKarma
KurbKarma delivers a social network for parking that connects people with killer parking to people seeking parking. This mobile app facilitates a peer-to-peer exchange and rewards both parties – parking karma at your fingertips.

Session 3: Disrupting Media

Punch!
Punch's interactive publishing platform radically reduces the cost, time and risk of creating apps for tablets by removing the need to code. It also enables Punch's original entertainment iPad app, the "Punch! Culture Shelf".

StyleSaint
Designer goods for under $100. An online eTailer where the community sets the trends.

Stevie
Stevie turns online video and social graphs into a broadcast-like TV experience, creating entertainment that is personal and social across platforms.

TagBrand
TagBrand is the service for people who love brands.

Babelverse (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner)
Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and, with little notice, ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter.