SF, New York, Austin, Chicago, Toronto, and Melbourne: VB’s Botathon is coming to your town!

The innovations coming out of the bot and messaging space are starting to explode.

How about a bot that turns your text into video? Or celebrity bots that can convincingly assume the personality of said famous person? Or a chatbot as your next best friend? (Hello Samantha). Or even something totally practical like a bot that monitors cash flow in your bank account — and lets you know if you’re in danger.

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If you’re looking to get some great exposure for your bot chops, and compete against other crack developers, you’ll want to apply to be part of VentureBeat’s International Botathon taking place next month. It’s all part of MobileBeat 2016 and we’re looking to promote innovation and creativity in bots that are transforming the mobile ecosystem.

Get everything you need to apply here. Applications close July 7.

Where

The Botathon is taking place in six different cities simultaneously worldwide:

• San Francisco
• New York
• Austin
• Chicago
• Toronto
• Melbourne

When

July 9-10, 2016

The Botathon will take place in all cities on the weekend leading up to MobileBeat 2016, VentureBeat’s flagship event. Competitors will present to a team of judges and one finalist from each city will be chosen to advance to the next stage.

Final Judging

July 11-12, 2015

Once finalists advance, public voting will take place both online and onsite at MobileBeat in San Francisco. Finalists are invited to present live in front of the MobileBeat audience — but any unable to make the trip out to San Francisco will be able to participate with the MobileBeat audience through a telepresence robot.

Awesome exposure

So what do you get out of it? As a finalist, you’ll be in front of people at MobileBeat representing some of the most influential brands: Google, Facebook, Kik, Pinterest, Slack, Twitter, Sensay, Amazon, Pandora, Spotify, Uber, TripAdvisor, Uber, Expedia, Lyft, NBCUniversal, Samsung, Sony, and more. Each finalist gets a booth at MobileBeat, with plenty of opportunity to demo your awesomeness.

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You’ll also get exposure in online voting in front of VentureBeat’s 8 million monthly readers.

And finally, you’ll be interviewed for a featured post on VentureBeat.

Once in a decade this kind of massive transformation comes along. This time it’s bots. Here’s your chance to be part of it.

Get everything you need to apply here. Applications close July 7.

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Thanks to our co-organizers on the ground in all cities — we wouldn’t be able to host this ground-breaking event without their help.

San Francisco: BeMyApp is a digital transformation and developer relations agency. They ideate, plan, and execute events and online campaigns for technology companies and brands helping them connect with the best developers and startups. They produce conferences, hackathons, pop-up incubators, workshops, DevLabs, white-label and remote accelerators globally. BeMyApp has a community of 100,000 developers, startups, mentors, and partners.

New York: Navid Hadzaad is the CEO & Co­Founder of Angel.ai (formerly GoButler) a technology company that supports businesses in automating conversational commerce using natural language processing. Most recently, he was featured on the 2016 Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Consumer Tech category.

Austin: Howdy is a bot coworker for Slack teams and has also created Botkit, an open-source toolkit for creating bots for Slack, Twilio, Facebook Messenger and more. Message.io is a cross-platform deployment utility for bot developers.

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Chicago: Lightbank is a $200 million early stage VC fund founded by serial entrepreneurs Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell. The firm is headquartered in Chicago but invests throughout the U.S. WeWork provides small businesses, startups, freelancers, large enterprises, and everyone in between with the workspace, community, and services they need to make a life, not just a living.

Toronto: Massively.ai allows anyone to create and instantly deploy chat bot solutions anywhere messages can be sent and received. Launched in 2014, Massively manages your most important relationships by powering chat bots people actually want to talk to.

Melbourne: Peter Marko has struggled with diets and daily what-should-I-eat questioning. He just started working on an AI era of meal planning and mindful eating by combining chatbots and fitness trackers with intelligent grocery planning and takeaway food options.

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