Fresh off the hackathon dungeon, Laplock is a nifty little app developed at our TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon in London. Martin Saint-Macary and Ivan Maeder worked tirelessly for the past 24 hours to build an easy-to-use software lock for your Mac. Here’s how it works.
At heart, Laplock is a menubar app for your Mac. You install it, enter your phone number and/or Yo account, and that’s it. After that, whenever you close your laptop lid and leave it somewhere, if someone unplugs the power cord, an alarm will blast through your speakers and you will get a notification on your phone.
Notifications can be a simple text message or a Yo. If reception is bad, the app will call you instead. Behind the scene, the two hackers used the Nexmo API to manage the notifications.
While Saint-Macary was already part of the runner-up team at the Disrupt Hackathon in Berlin, it was Maeder’s first hackathon. They two met at the venue yesterday, and started working on this project right away.
“I think it’s great because you spend 2 days doing something full time,” Maeder said. “You wouldn’t do that normally.”
I asked whether he managed to get some sleep. He just put two chairs together and slept as much as he could for a couple of hours. “This hackathon really feels like 10 days,” he said.
Yet, when I see the end result, it was worth it — I’m definitely going to install the app after the event. You can download it on Laplock‘s website right now, and the app was just submitted to the App Store as well.
Good job guys, and enjoy your nap.