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We’re inviting hundreds of think-outside-the-boxers — coders, devs, engineers and tech makers — to compete onsite at the TechCrunch Hackathon, which takes place during Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Are you up for the adventure? Participating in the hackathon is free, and all competitors receive Expo Only passes for days one and two, and then an Innovator pass for day three of Disrupt SF. If you’re psyched to strut your stuff and tackle a project that addresses a real-world challenge, apply for the hackathon today.

The hackathon will definitely put your creative skills to the test as you pit your wit and talent against some of the best devs in the world. Here’s how it all works. The competition will take place in a dedicated area at the Moscone Convention Center, and we’re limiting the number of participants to 800 people.

Our host partners will sponsor a variety of hack contests looking for solutions to real-world challenges. Your team will choose a challenge and then have less than two days to build projects with sponsored APIs, data sets and other tools. Don’t have a team? No problem, we’ll find a match for you. It’s an exhilarating, pressure-cooker situation. Thank goodness for free food, beer and plenty of caffeine. You’ll need it.

After you submit your project, you’ll have two minutes to demo your creation to judges (science-fair style) from both the sponsors and TechCrunch. They’ll select 10 finalists to demo the next day on the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt SF.

Each sponsor awards prizes, including cash, to the team that creates a product that best addresses the specific challenge. On top of that, TechCrunch offers a grand prize of $10,000 to the best overall hack. Ka-ching!

Over the coming weeks, we’ll announce this year’s sponsors and the specific challenges and prizes they offer. In the meantime, take a look at the sponsored contests, prizes and winners from the hackathon at Disrupt SF 2018. Want more details? We know you love details. Find out what to expect at the hackathon.

The TechCrunch Hackathon is an opportunity to connect, be inspired, discover and create. And you never know what might come of it. Some projects experience success long after the hackathon ends. One legendary example — GroupMe — was built overnight, didn’t win a thing at the hackathon, but went on to be acquired by Skype for $80 million. True story.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place on October 2-4. Apply for the hackathon, join us in the City by the Bay — the birthplace of startup dreams — and start making your dreams come true. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Interested in sponsoring the hackathon? Fill out this form and a member of our sales team will contact you.

Behind all those on-demand shuttles, ride-hailing vehicles, dockless scooters, bikes and someday even autonomous cars is data. A lot of data.

Numerous startups have popped up and several large, established companies have rolled out products all aimed at capturing and making sense of that data.

One such company is Populus AI, a startup that has launched a data platform for cities to better understand and manage how people are moving from Point A to Point B.  The idea is that real-time data and analytics will help cities become easier to navigate and live in. Populus also offers real-time data from ride-share companies to inform curbside management and pricing. Back in December, Populus partnered with Lime to facilitate data sharing from its car-share service, LimePod.

We’re excited to announce that Populus AI CEO and co-founder Regina Clewlow will join us on stage at TC Sessions: Mobility on July 10 in San Jose.

Before launching Populus, Clewlow was the director of business development and strategy at RideScout, an early mobility-as-a-service aggregator that was acquired by moovel, Daimler and BMW’s mobility services unit.

Clewlow, who has a Ph.D in transportation and energy systems from MIT, has also served as a research scientist and lecturer at Stanford, UC Berkeley and UC Davis universities.

TC Sessions: Mobility is designed to highlight the best and brightest founders, investors and technologists. We introduce our audience to and coming startups, offer demo space to showcase products and create programming aimed at delivering the most value for every ticket holder. Our events are fun, too.

Clewlow will be able to discuss what Populus has learned from the data it collects. The company works with Washington, D.C., and cities in the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles areas.

Early-stage startup founders, don’t miss your chance to demo your company in front of top influencers at TC Sessions: Mobility 2019. It’s a prime opportunity to showcase your tech startup in front of a very large, very targeted audience — the mobility and transportation industry’s movers and shakers. Book a demo table here.

In case you missed it, some of our recently announced speakers include May Mobility co-founder and COO Alisyn Malek, Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov, Nuro co-founder and CEO Dave Ferguson, Scoot SVP of Product Katie DeWitt, co-founder and CEO of Voyage Oliver Cameron, co-founder, president and CEO of Mobileye, Amnon Shashua — who also is a senior vice president at Intel. And there are more.

Early-Bird tickets are now on sale — save $100 on tickets before prices go up.

Students, you can grab your tickets for just $45.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. The EU will reportedly investigate Apple following anti-competition complaint from Spotify

The European Commission plans to investigate Spotify’s claim that Apple uses its control over the App Store to “deliberately disadvantage other app developers,” according to the Financial Times.

Specifically, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek raised concerns about Apple’s 30% cut of in-app spending, as well as its restrictions on communication between app publishers and users, “placing unfair restrictions on marketing and promotions that benefit consumers.”

2. Watch Microsoft’s Build 2019 keynotes right here

CEO Satya Nadella will already be onstage by the time you get this newsletter, but you may still catch the tail end of his “vision keynote.” Then at 11am Pacific, we’ll have technical keynotes by Scott Guthrie and Rajesh Jha. (And, of course, I’ll recap the big announcements in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

3. NBCUniversal’s scannable ShoppableTV takes viewers directly to e-commerce sites

The Shoppable TV feature displays QR codes during specific moments in TV shows, taking viewers directly to e-commerce sites once scanned.

4. Carta was just valued at $1.7 billion by Andreessen Horowitz, in a deal some see as rich

The company — which helps private and public companies, investors and employees manage their equity and ownership — is the latest tech unicorn.

5. Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system

Security researcher John Wethington found a smart city database accessible from a web browser without a password. He passed details of the database to TechCrunch in an effort to get the data secured.

6. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest episode of Equity discusses the two new funds raised by Andreessen Horowitz, while the Original Content team put together a super-sized episode about “Avengers: Endgame” and the big battle episode of “Game of Thrones.”

7. Takeaways from F8 and Facebook’s next phase

A discussion with Josh Constine and Frederic Lardinois about the major announcements that came out of Facebook’s F8 conference. (Extra Crunch membership required).

A new trailer for “Spider-Man: Far From Home” has just been released, and it’s setting up a way for Marvel to finally unite the disparate elements of its franchises.

The trailer contains a pretty huge spoiler for “Avengers: Endgame“, so be prepared, but it also reveals how Disney’s super-heroically successful Marvel franchise will enter the next phase of its development (after 22 films and nearly $21 billion in box office receipts).

The secret, it seems, to the next iteration of Marvel movies and shows will be through the concept of the multiverse that was first floated in the Academy Award-winning “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse“.

In the new film, a super-powered being from another version of Earth (apparently) needs the help of a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man to help stop some evil from destroying the world.

The concept of multiple-versions of Marvel heroes opens the door for appearances of heroes from other franchises that have never been under the Marvel umbrella or incorporated fully into the Marvel universe (heroes from titles like The Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Blade, to name a few).

Some folks have even speculated that it could be a way to draw Anthony and Joe Russo (who had taken the reins on the Avengers movies from Joss Whedon) back to do another arc based on the “Secret Wars” Marvel comics of from 1984 and 1985.

No matter what ends up happening, expect to see the web-swinger become one of the mainstays of the new Marvel Universe and the hero Marvel will seemingly hang more than one franchise on.

When it comes to voting, we’ve come a long way from dropping pebbles into an amphora, but still not nearly far enough, if the lack of confidence in our election systems is any indication. Microsoft is the first major tech company to take on this problem with a new platform it calls ElectionGuard that promises to make elections more secure and transparent — and yes, it’s free and open source.

Set to be made available this summer and piloted during the 2020 elections, ElectionGuard is not a complete voting machine, but rather a platform for handling voting data that can either empower existing systems or have new ones built on top of it. It’s part of the Defending Democracy Program and sister product to the similarly-named NewsGuard and AccountGuard, which appeared last year.

The basic idea is to let voters track their votes securely and privately, while also allowing authorities to tabulate, store, and if necessary audit them. As Microsoft puts it:

ElectionGuard provides a complete implementation of end-to-end verifiable elections. It is designed to
work with systems that use paper ballots, supplementing today’s tabulation process by providing a
means of public verification of the accuracy of reported results.

The platform would sit underneath existing voting systems, and when a voter casts their ballot, the data would be entered in the ordinary fashion in a state’s election systems but also in ElectionGuard. The voter would then be given a tracking code that lets them see that their vote has been, say, recorded locally at the correct polling place, or perhaps that it has been sent on to state authorities for auditing.

Meanwhile the ElectionGuard databases are securely recording all votes and tabulating them, a process that would happen in parallel with existing tabulation processes. In the case of an audit, random ballots could be selected from the database and compared with paper ballots, providing a quick way to see if, for example, a machine error in one district was throwing off results.

Importantly, this is all accomplished without Microsoft, or whoever is actually administrating the ElectionGuard system, knowing how any individual voted. This is done, the company explained, via a cryptographic technique known as homomorphic encryption. Basically it allows a system to perform mathematical operations on encrypted data without decrypting it, making interference or exfiltration of that sensitive data next to impossible.

In this case every vote is trackable only by the individual who made it, but the system is limited to adding up encrypted votes and reporting those sums.

Ultimately ElectionGuard aims to be a full voting solution, but one that can be customized and run on any number of actual devices — just like the rest of Microsoft’s software.

When it’s time to vote, ElectionGuard supports the use of standard tablets and PCs running a variety of operating systems as a ballot marking device, which can be used to create an interface that looks and feels like modern applications people interact with every day on their phones and tablets.

Here’s hoping ease of deployment and a modern code base will end for good the reign of aged and insecure voting machines that can be hacked with a USB key. Microsoft is also working with election tech suppliers to bring ElectionGuard into existing product lines or build new ones.

The company worked together with Galois to develop ElectionGuard, a company that has been working on election security for years and recently received a $10 million grant from DARPA to pursue secure voting hardware.

It will no doubt take some tinkering, but it’s good to see a major tech company making a credible and comprehensive bid to fix an elections process that is technologically compromised on multiple fronts. Tech can’t fix politics, but it can sure build a better way to vote.

One major — and somewhat unexpected — theme at Microsoft’s Build developer conference this week is autonomous robots. After acquiring AI startup Bonsai, which specialized in reinforcement learning for autonomous systems, the company today announced the limited preview of a new Azure-based platform that is partially built on this acquisition and that will help developers train the models necessary to power these autonomous physical systems.

“Machines have been progressing on a path from being completely manual to having a fixed automated function to becoming intelligent where they can actually deal with real-world situations themselves,” said Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft vice president for Business AI. “We want to help accelerate that journey, without requiring our customers to have an army of AI experts.”

This new platform combines Microsoft’s tools for machine teaching and machine learning with simulation tools like Microsoft’s own AirSim or third-party simulators for training the models in a realistic but safe environment, and a number of the company’s IoT services and its open-source Robot Operating System.

In preparing for today’s launch, Microsoft worked with customers like Toyota Material Handling to develop an intelligent and autonomous forklift, for example, as well as Sarcos, which builds a robot for remote visual inspections that are either unreachable or too dangerous for humans. Typically, Sarcos’ robot is remotely controlled by an operator. After working with Microsoft, the company built a system that allows the robot to autonomous traverse obstacles, climb stairs and climb up metallic walls. What’s important here, though, is that there is still a human operator in the loop, but since the robot can sense its surroundings and move autonomous, operators can focus on what they are seeing instead of having to deal with the mechanics of steering the robot.

“We are looking to offload the tasks that can be automated — how does the robot climb a stair? How does it move around obstacle? — so the operator can focus on the more important parts of the job,” Kristi Martindale, the executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Sarcos. “The human is still there to say, ‘No you actually want to go to that obstacle over there because maybe that obstacle is a person who is hurt.'”

Bonsai CEO Mark Hammond echoed this: “In any sort of operation where you have a mechanical system that interacts with the physical world, you can probably make it smarter and more autonomous. But keeping people in the loop is still very desirable, and the goal is really to increase the capabilities of what those humans can do.”

While robots are a flashy use case, though, Microsoft is also looking at more pedestrian use cases like cooling and heating systems that autonomously react to temperature changes.

If you write in Microsoft Word Online, you’ll soon have an AI-powered editor at your side. As the company announced today, Word will soon get a new feature called “Ideas” that will offer writers all kinds of help with their documents.

If writing is a struggle for you, the most important feature of Ideas is surely its ability to help you write more concise and readable text. You can think of this as a grammar checker on steroids, as it goes beyond fixing obvious mistakes and focuses on making your writing better. It uses machine learning, for example, to suggest a rewrite when you mangled a complex phrase. Ideas will also help you write more inclusive texts.

The cloud-based tool will also give you information about the estimated reading times and decode acronyms for you, based on data it has about your company in the Microsoft Graph.

Ideas can also automatically extract key points from a document. That’s probably more interesting to a reader than a writer, though, so I expect that’s something users will use when somebody sends them a 67-page news summary.

Microsoft also notes that Ideas will bring something called the “Word Designer” to the word processor, which will help you style different parts of a document, including tables.

These new features will come to Office Insiders in June and will become generally available to all users in the fall.

Microsoft today announced the private preview launch of Visual Studio Online, an online code editor the company is positioning as a companion to Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

The service is based on the Visual Studio Code, Microsoft’s popular free and open-source desktop code editor. This means Visual Studio Online will also support all the extensions that are currently available for Visual Studio Code, as well as popular features like Visual Studio Code workspaces. Support for IntelliCode, Microsoft’s tool for AI-assisted development that became generally available today, is also built-in.

The emphasis here is on Visual Studio Online being a ‘companion.’ It’s not meant to become a developer’s default environment but instead as a way to make a quick edit, review a pull request or join a Live Share session.

And if you think the name Visual Studio Online sounds familiar, that’s because Microsoft is actually recycling this name. Not that long ago, Visual Studio Online was Microsoft’s hub for all things DevOps, before DevOps was a buzzword. Last year, the company renamed it to Azure DevOps, leaving the name open for other uses. Frankly, given the name, a lot of people probably always assumed that Visual Studio Online was a web-based version of the integrated development environment, only to be then disappointed that it wasn’t.

It’s worth noting that if you don’t want to wait for Microsoft to open the private preview to more users, there are also startups like Coder, which can provide you with a remote Visual Studio Code environment.

Microsoft’s quantum computer may not have a working qubit yet, but the company has been hard at work on building the tools to program future quantum computers. Over the course of the last few years, the company announced both Q#, a programming language for writing quantum code and a compiler for this language, as well as a quantum simulator. Today, Microsoft announced that it will open source these efforts in the coming months.

This move, the company says, is meant to make “quantum computing and algorithm development easier and more transparent for developers.” In addition, it will also make it easier for academic institutions to use these tools and developers, of course, will be able to contribute their own code and ideas.

Unsurprisingly, the code will live on Microsoft’s GitHub page. Previously, the team had already open-sourced a number of tools and examples, as well as a library of quantum chemistry samples, but this is the first time the team is open-sourcing core parts of the platform.

“Our approach to solving intractable industry problems requires new types of scalable software tools, and the Quantum Development Kit offers that and supports us in every step our development process,” said Andrew Fursman, co-founder and CEO of 1QBit, in today’s announcement. “We’re excited to contribute two important code samples to accelerate advanced materials and quantum chemistry research, including one focusing on Variational-Quantum-Eigensolver (VQE) and another which demonstrates density matrix embedding theory (DMET) running on our platform, QEMIST.”

It’s not the first company to do so, though. IBM, for example, offers Qiskit, an open-source framework for building quantum computing programs, including the Aer simulator.  Rigetti Computing, too, has open sourced many of its tool.

Only about a month ago, Microsoft also announced that the Development Kit has been downloaded over 100,000 times. At the time, it also brought support for Q# programming to Jupyter notebooks.

While all these software efforts are laudable, though, Microsoft’s quantum hardware efforts have yet to pay off. The company is taking a novel approach to quantum computing, which may yet give it a lead over its competitors in the long run. In the short term, though, some of its competitors are already making real, physical — but limited — quantum computers available to developers.

IntelliCode, Microsoft’s tool for AI-assisted coding, is now generally available. It supports C# and XAML in Visual Studio and Java, JavaScript, TypeScript and Python in Visual Studio Code. By default, it is now also included in Visual Studio 2019, starting with the second preview of version 16.1, which the company also announced that.

IntelliCode is essentially the next generation of IntelliSense, Microsoft’s extremely popular code completion tool. What makes IntelliCode different is that the company trained it by feeding it the code of thousands of open-source projects from GitHub that have at least 100 stars. Using this data, the tool can then make smarter code-completion suggestion. It also takes the current code and context into account as it makes its recommendations.

By default, IntelliSense would provide the developer with an alphabetical list, which is useful but too often, the code you need would be a few items down in the list.

It’s worth noting that startups like Kite offer similar smart code-completion tools that work across development environments, though Kite currently only supports Python code.

The promise of tools like Kite and IntelliCode is to make a developer’s life easier, increase productivity and reduce the likelihood of bugs. As these tools get smarter, they’ll likely be able to look ahead even further and maybe even suggest to auto-complete larger part of a program’s code based on the context of what you’re trying to achieve and it’s knowledge of how others have solved similar problems. Until then, though, they are already a pretty good way to avoid a few trips to StackOverflow.