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Two Harvard University Alumni Win Salesforce $1M Hackathon Prize

106 points by b0b0b0b 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
birken 13y ago
>> "Healthcare.lov came in second and won $50,000 for its service for people" Excellent job picking a big market
lcedp 13y ago
> with the ability to use voice for making queries. oh come on..
apapli 13y ago
Gee who did the editing on this article? There are sentences that don't finish!
eggbrain 13y ago
I hope this hackathon happens again next year. They were very generous with their grand prize, and anything you built you were able to keep. The one thing I'd ask them to change is for the prizes to be a little better distributed this year. I'd hate to be those second place winners who perhaps _just barely_ lost to the first place winners but had a $950,000 dropoff. Perhaps first place $500,000, second place $250,000, third place $100,000 etc.
- dimva 13y ago
  Their prize structure reflects rewards in winner-take-all scenarios, such as the tech industry. How much money is the second-best CRM system making compared to Salesforce?
  - atwebb 13y ago
    A whole lot? I mean, I don't have exact figures but knowing a few I hardly doubt the next competitor has 95% less profit than SalesForce. Tech isn't winner take all in most cases, it's a few take all, like say 4-5...
  - colabi 13y ago
    the prize structure was simply so that one company could eventually say "1 million dollar hackathon". no other reason. it's more reasonable to even it. every other company does that in the tech hackathons.
  - schmerdy 13y ago
    Almost as much. Only difference is that SAP is actually making a decent profit, while Salesforce is loosing money... http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/04/26/2013-crm-market-share-update-40-of-crm-systems-sold-are-saas-based/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/04/26/2013-cr...
  - ReligiousWacko 13y ago
    Is salesforce making money? Hint: you won't get right answer listening to Benioff pumping and dumping on CNBC.
hughes 13y ago
Wait, the same Thom Kim, Harvard graduate, who's an architect at salesforce.com?
- yelnatz 13y ago
  Same one!
- jcdavis 13y ago
  He left the company earlier this year.
- rrich 13y ago
  Awful. Makes me think twice about doing company sponsored hackathon contests. Particularly contests that require a fee to enter.
  - AsymetricCom 13y ago
    I think just a little research on the company sponsoring the event would have been good enough for me to know better.
- priley 13y ago
  Yeah! The same Thom Kim who demo'd UPSHOT at Salesforce before the hackathon was even announced. :http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/events/136920332/ http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/e...
fletchowns 13y ago
Some interesting comments about the hackathon below this poorly written article.
fizx 13y ago
Woah, those guys are in my office!
- wavefunction 13y ago
  You work at Salesforce? ;)
melvinmt 13y ago
One of the comments, kinda what I already expected: "Spoiler: One of those guys used to work for Salesforce! (not kidding, they announced it during the demo). The French guys were followed around during the entire hackathon by a salesforce camera crew (I was sitting right next to them, some of the salesforce people even came over to help them submit to be sure they got it in before the last 5 min was up, kinda knew they were in from day 1). One of the finalist teams didn't make the check-in time, so they extended the check-in by a few hours (saw that one coming too). And last but not least, the healthcare app. Although I liked the app, it was way too polished given the team size, and the time allotted (I mean wow, very professional if it were true), but the fact that they were using lots of logos (with trademark) of some big insurance companies in their demo and video (specifically in the rules, unless of course all those big companies gave written consent in the 3 weeks), kinda figured they were getting a leg up. The bluetooth app, that one I thought had value, and was innovative (albeit not realistic in facial recognition). I would have voted for that one if I could. You could tell it was just a dog and pony show on the 2nd day. Some people were helped, some werent. Then, when you submitted, all you got was a "sorry, your not chosen" -dear john- canned email... Nothing telling you where you could have improved, nothing saying what your score was, no information at all. Just a simple 'sorry'.... Turned out to be a huge waste of time, energy, and money. Wont be coming back, that's for sure."
- goldenkey 13y ago
  Not to mention it cost $500 to enter, meaning negative EV, not as bad as the lotto, but still a losers' gamble.
  - yeukhon 13y ago
    This part I just don't get it. Why? Salesforce is not a small startup. It can definitely afford a 100k hackathon.
    - trentmb 13y ago
      The Web-Startup Tool Mindest.
orph 13y ago
major congrats to turian and thom!
greglindahl 13y ago
Glad to see HN is keeping the exact title, including the grammatical error.
prtkgpt 13y ago
Also check customerpath.io, it was created at df13 hackathon.
dragulagu 13y ago
The more i read the comments in the article, the more I'm getting the impression that it was a set up deal in which salesforce wanted to buy off the source/architecture of the project from the ex-employee...
- ch4ch4 13y ago
  ... then, they acquire the project and the ex-employee is back at Salesforce again. Perfectly plausible deniability, and the money stays in the company!
- philthesong 13y ago
  Marc Benioff probably thought that it would be a win win situation if he shamelessly plug in one of his investments on top of naive hackers. So does he even care? What a show...
enra 13y ago
Seems like many didn't even get their app reviewed http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/forum_topics/2644 http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/forum_topics/264...
chromecast 13y ago
There is not an iota of honesty in SV. Sooner the world realizes it is better. Don't feed this fat cats that include google, salesforce and other billion $ startups.
zulfishah 13y ago
The winning team presented their project at a Meetup well before the Hackathon was even announced: http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/events/136920332/ http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/e... Which is totally against the official rules for the Hacktahon, which stated "The application you or your team submits must: have been developed solely as part of this Hackathon" http://res.cloudinary.com/hy4kyit2a/image/upload/Final%201M%20Hackathon%202013%20Rules%20%282%29.pdf http://res.cloudinary.com/hy4kyit2a/image/upload/Final%201M%... So there you go.
- colabi 13y ago
  i killed myself to get my entry in. it was another version of healthcare.love. i wish i knew what they were doing so we could team up. i checked my analytics this morning. i was the only one who viewed the official video. i was the only one who launched the app. i'd love to collect the stats from everyone to see how many apps even got played.
  - zulfishah 13y ago
    It's quite a farce. One can excuse not launching the app (it would require some setup for each individual app), but not looking even briefly at the video is inexcusable. But I'm guessing they already picked the 5 finalists for PR-value well before the entries were submitted, so they didn't want to spend their party-time at Dreamforce doing something so boring as looking at hackathon entries.
    - colabi 13y ago
      i would excuse it if they didn't make such a big deal that you had to show source and that you should start a month early. when you do that, you OWE people a run. the way they did it, you didn't even get a little screen time to shine for your sweat. this thing needs to get rejudged in the open.
mrkmcknz 13y ago
Somewhat related technology to the winning team: http://delver.io/ http://delver.io/ They launched in stealth on HN around 12months ago and reached the front page. Since then they've been operating under the radar working on the technology.
vgoklani 13y ago
Congratulations to Turian!!! :)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
bobbles 13y ago
So the winning team: 1) Had a member previously employed by the selection team. 2) Had built their project prior to the hackathon. 3) Was actively helped by the Salesforce team during the hackathon. 4) Was ensured a place by other teams not even having their submissions seen by the judges. What a fair and balanced outcome! I fully expect everyone to take this event seriously in the future. /s
- U2EF1 13y ago
  The only real surprise is that Salesforce wasn't better able to obscure it. Still, they weren't giving out a million dollars for a days work.
  - colabi 13y ago
    i wish it was a days work. they opened the competition oct 25th. so people were developing since then. and they might not have even gotten run.
- sswaner 13y ago
  In addition, Turian is a showman. His finalist presentation was more flamboyant than Benioff's keynote. I felt bad for the guys who presented after Upshot (they had skipped class at UCLA and Purdue to build a cool job candidate app). Watching the show, I felt that it likely that the judges would be swayed by Turian's command of the stage.
morenoh149 13y ago
Dezzmo.com participated in the hackathon. Mostly for the $200 heroku credits, networking, fun and because we were able to get free tickets. That being said we never intended to submit the application due to violation of the rules. If we knew what the result would've been, hell, we should've submitted. Clearly not every submission was even opened according to #dfnolaunch on twitter.
vlad 13y ago
Something nobody is reporting is that the Hackathon actually started October 25, not Monday, so teams were allowed many weeks to get started in advance.
conjugate 13y ago
upshot has been in development since December 2012. great product though.
xfax 13y ago
What does Harvard have to do with any of this?
- xauronx 13y ago
  It seemed kind of stressed in all of press surrounding this. My guess: To give the impression these are college kids doing a neat project.
jimraynor 13y ago
My Five Finalists Would Have Been Salesforce did a really smart job of hiding all other entries apart from the winning ones. I have done a few hackathons on Challenge Post earlier and this is the only one where they are not showing all submissions but only the winning submission in the gallery. While that is food for thought, I feel terrible for myself and some of the other awesome apps that folks built for this hackathon. So, here are the top 5 apps that would have made the finals if I were judging this solely based on the videos I found on YouTube (and I've been doing software development for over 25 years). Just to be unbiased, this does not even include my own submission * Smart * Chatter Complete * zip.ly * Incoming * Matt Lacey's app (Can't remember the name) If I were to pick the top two, it would be Matt Lacey's app and Chatter Complete. I can't believe how those folks missed out. Discussion at - http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Salesforce-1-Million-Hackathon/My-Five-Finalists-Would-Have-Been/td-p/706515 http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Salesforce-1-Million-Hac...
xauronx 13y ago
I kind of don't want them to have my code anymore. Since they didn't even consider it for the competition, I feel like they don't have fair use to have it on their servers.
ReligiousWacko 13y ago
Anyone familiar with Salesforce's accounting scams should not be surprised by this.
joseman 13y ago
I was hacking at for 4 days. Here were my observations about the whole event. I echo op's concerns. Day 1: Monday Came in early 10am-ish. 2nd floor, Moscone West, Hackathon area set up. There was a table. This is where we checked out team in. Room capacity <50% filled. Nightclub lighting. Imagine walking into a nightclub and turning on your computer to work. That's what this setup was like for 3 days! Someone briefly turned on the lights on Wednesday. I am thinking this had to do with Marc and Jim Cramer stopping by. There was a camera crew with really expensive gear filming some people on day one. Not sure what this was all about. Day 1 Overnight Food truck around midnight. Dead. You'd think more people would stick around overnight to work on their hacks. I'd say there were at most 20 people. 2 dudes were noticeably snoring towards the sponsor tables in the bags. First red flag. Keynote day. Hacking continues. Hackers are free to watch the keynote on their laptops despite having "keynote" designation on their badges. Security ridiculously tight everywhere. I started to get a weird vibe about the whole event. I've been to a few other hackathons (angelhack, disrupt, launch, startup weekend, paypal etc). This one seemed less organized and hacker friendly. They had food (think pizza, soda, and ice cream), but as far as wiring (wifi - shoddy, powerstrips - stationary to long desks, lighting - think nightclub-like, flashing blue, green, purple circles, and mainly event production staff present). Re: Hack submissions. Instructions were to submit hacks to Challenge Post by 6pm Wednesday. Submissions must include link for a video and meet the rules and requirements. No information was communicated about judging, how finalists would be selected etc. Waste of my time, money and overall bad vibe from Salesforce.
abdultukdi 13y ago
If you dig deep enough, you'll find that the hackathon was sponsored by Fox News and they kept it Fair and Balanced.
- colabi 13y ago
  no. I know it wasn't sponsored by them. Not enough alert banners on the screen
Lord_Nolan 13y ago
I agree that cash prizes should be eliminated from Hackathons. I'm not sure about Team Selection, whether to have random, pre-determined, or 'quick pitch' style. Sometimes Hackathons can be a great experience for the participants. Sometimes, however, the evaluation criteria can ruin. We had one of the only functioning projects, but were docked points for using Twilio instead of AT&T's shitty API. (One of the Sensei's even told us to use Twilio.)
- jarodreyes 13y ago
  Just to clarify did this happen at the Salesforce hackathon? What project were you working on?
ismaelc 13y ago
This should not come as a surprise anymore. Developers need to be more responsible in picking their hackathons - https://medium.com/hackers-and-hacking/593688fa7c09 https://medium.com/hackers-and-hacking/593688fa7c09
MrGando 13y ago
The Angel Hack in Chile was the same thing earlier on this year, I dunno if there was a lot of money on the table, but still the winners had the app done from long long ago. I would love to force devs to use git and implement a true hackathon system (Open Source) to run hackathons and avoid cheating.
diycomb 13y ago
Honesty races to the bottom, 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE
argumentum 13y ago
I've been in a few hackathons .. winning prizes in some (usually schwag or gadgets), and also ran a couple myself. They don't work nearly as well with more valuable prizes. In my view, a hackathon is best as a starting point ... for teams, projects and ideas. They are much better chances to "network", particularly for hackers/makers, than so called "networking events", which are usually a waste of time. Hackathons also work great for startups to introduce developers to their technology & culture, and perhaps recruit them. The worst hackathons are when the intended outcome is that the winning team(s) go on to start a company with the proceeds of the win and/or are accepted into some newish accelerator/incubator. In the case of Salesforce and it's extreme prize, the controversy could have been predicted .. there was no way they could police a fair competition (and that was unlikely their goal anyway). Their goal was similar to that of a nightclub that doesn't have the desired demographics, so they gave free cover ($99 "hacker" tickets), drinks and raffle tickets to the desired group (programmers in this case). While the majority of the conference attendees were wandering around, mingling and generally enjoying themselves, every once in a while, they might chance by the "hackathon room" and look upon the poor creatures as they would monkeys in a zoo. Quite the spectacle, it must have been..
cliveb 13y ago
We've seen devs swap in prebaked apps for a $2000 first prize. For a $1M prize, what did we expect...
dnraj72 13y ago
We were a participant and I am not worried about winning the 1M hackathon. Our focus was to build a great product and we did from Mon-Wed and submitted before 2pm which was told earlier and got changed to 6pm and we did not sleep for 36 hours. I would prefer if we can have all list posted in a reddit and let us crowdsource this winner not for the prize but for selecting the five best by crowdsourcing the hackathon - Our entry is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I3yhhP2HGk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I3yhhP2HGk
dnraj72 13y ago
We were a participant and I am not worried about winning the 1M hackathon. Our focus was to build a great product and we did from Mon-Wed and submitted before 2pm which was told earlier and got changed to 6pm and we did not sleep for 36 hours. I would prefer if we can have all list posted in a reddit and let us crowdsource this winner not for the prize but for selecting the five best by crowdsourcing the hackathon - Our entry is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I3yhhP2HGk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I3yhhP2HGk

106 points by b0b0b0b 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

birken 13y ago

>> "Healthcare.lov came in second and won $50,000 for its service for people" Excellent job picking a big market

lcedp 13y ago

> with the ability to use voice for making queries. oh come on..

apapli 13y ago

Gee who did the editing on this article? There are sentences that don't finish!

eggbrain 13y ago

I hope this hackathon happens again next year. They were very generous with their grand prize, and anything you built you were able to keep. The one thing I'd ask them to change is for the prizes to be a little better distributed this year. I'd hate to be those second place winners who perhaps _just barely_ lost to the first place winners but had a $950,000 dropoff. Perhaps first place $500,000, second place $250,000, third place $100,000 etc.

dimva 13y ago
Their prize structure reflects rewards in winner-take-all scenarios, such as the tech industry. How much money is the second-best CRM system making compared to Salesforce?
- atwebb 13y ago
  A whole lot? I mean, I don't have exact figures but knowing a few I hardly doubt the next competitor has 95% less profit than SalesForce. Tech isn't winner take all in most cases, it's a few take all, like say 4-5...
- colabi 13y ago
  the prize structure was simply so that one company could eventually say "1 million dollar hackathon". no other reason. it's more reasonable to even it. every other company does that in the tech hackathons.
- schmerdy 13y ago
  Almost as much. Only difference is that SAP is actually making a decent profit, while Salesforce is loosing money... http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/04/26/2013-crm-market-share-update-40-of-crm-systems-sold-are-saas-based/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/04/26/2013-cr...
- ReligiousWacko 13y ago
  Is salesforce making money? Hint: you won't get right answer listening to Benioff pumping and dumping on CNBC.

hughes 13y ago

Wait, the same Thom Kim, Harvard graduate, who's an architect at salesforce.com?

yelnatz 13y ago
Same one!
jcdavis 13y ago
He left the company earlier this year.
rrich 13y ago
Awful. Makes me think twice about doing company sponsored hackathon contests. Particularly contests that require a fee to enter.
- AsymetricCom 13y ago
  I think just a little research on the company sponsoring the event would have been good enough for me to know better.
priley 13y ago
Yeah! The same Thom Kim who demo'd UPSHOT at Salesforce before the hackathon was even announced. :http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/events/136920332/ http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/e...

fletchowns 13y ago

Some interesting comments about the hackathon below this poorly written article.

fizx 13y ago

Woah, those guys are in my office!

wavefunction 13y ago
You work at Salesforce? ;)

melvinmt 13y ago

One of the comments, kinda what I already expected: "Spoiler: One of those guys used to work for Salesforce! (not kidding, they announced it during the demo). The French guys were followed around during the entire hackathon by a salesforce camera crew (I was sitting right next to them, some of the salesforce people even came over to help them submit to be sure they got it in before the last 5 min was up, kinda knew they were in from day 1). One of the finalist teams didn't make the check-in time, so they extended the check-in by a few hours (saw that one coming too). And last but not least, the healthcare app. Although I liked the app, it was way too polished given the team size, and the time allotted (I mean wow, very professional if it were true), but the fact that they were using lots of logos (with trademark) of some big insurance companies in their demo and video (specifically in the rules, unless of course all those big companies gave written consent in the 3 weeks), kinda figured they were getting a leg up. The bluetooth app, that one I thought had value, and was innovative (albeit not realistic in facial recognition). I would have voted for that one if I could. You could tell it was just a dog and pony show on the 2nd day. Some people were helped, some werent. Then, when you submitted, all you got was a "sorry, your not chosen" -dear john- canned email... Nothing telling you where you could have improved, nothing saying what your score was, no information at all. Just a simple 'sorry'.... Turned out to be a huge waste of time, energy, and money. Wont be coming back, that's for sure."

goldenkey 13y ago
Not to mention it cost $500 to enter, meaning negative EV, not as bad as the lotto, but still a losers' gamble.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  This part I just don't get it. Why? Salesforce is not a small startup. It can definitely afford a 100k hackathon.
  - trentmb 13y ago
    The Web-Startup Tool Mindest.

orph 13y ago

major congrats to turian and thom!

greglindahl 13y ago

Glad to see HN is keeping the exact title, including the grammatical error.

prtkgpt 13y ago

Also check customerpath.io, it was created at df13 hackathon.

dragulagu 13y ago

The more i read the comments in the article, the more I'm getting the impression that it was a set up deal in which salesforce wanted to buy off the source/architecture of the project from the ex-employee...

ch4ch4 13y ago
... then, they acquire the project and the ex-employee is back at Salesforce again. Perfectly plausible deniability, and the money stays in the company!
philthesong 13y ago
Marc Benioff probably thought that it would be a win win situation if he shamelessly plug in one of his investments on top of naive hackers. So does he even care? What a show...

enra 13y ago

Seems like many didn't even get their app reviewed http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/forum_topics/2644 http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/forum_topics/264...

chromecast 13y ago

There is not an iota of honesty in SV. Sooner the world realizes it is better. Don't feed this fat cats that include google, salesforce and other billion $ startups.

zulfishah 13y ago

The winning team presented their project at a Meetup well before the Hackathon was even announced: http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/events/136920332/ http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/e... Which is totally against the official rules for the Hacktahon, which stated "The application you or your team submits must: have been developed solely as part of this Hackathon" http://res.cloudinary.com/hy4kyit2a/image/upload/Final%201M%20Hackathon%202013%20Rules%20%282%29.pdf http://res.cloudinary.com/hy4kyit2a/image/upload/Final%201M%... So there you go.

colabi 13y ago
i killed myself to get my entry in. it was another version of healthcare.love. i wish i knew what they were doing so we could team up. i checked my analytics this morning. i was the only one who viewed the official video. i was the only one who launched the app. i'd love to collect the stats from everyone to see how many apps even got played.
- zulfishah 13y ago
  It's quite a farce. One can excuse not launching the app (it would require some setup for each individual app), but not looking even briefly at the video is inexcusable. But I'm guessing they already picked the 5 finalists for PR-value well before the entries were submitted, so they didn't want to spend their party-time at Dreamforce doing something so boring as looking at hackathon entries.
  - colabi 13y ago
    i would excuse it if they didn't make such a big deal that you had to show source and that you should start a month early. when you do that, you OWE people a run. the way they did it, you didn't even get a little screen time to shine for your sweat. this thing needs to get rejudged in the open.

mrkmcknz 13y ago

Somewhat related technology to the winning team: http://delver.io/ http://delver.io/ They launched in stealth on HN around 12months ago and reached the front page. Since then they've been operating under the radar working on the technology.

vgoklani 13y ago

Congratulations to Turian!!! :)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

bobbles 13y ago

So the winning team: 1) Had a member previously employed by the selection team. 2) Had built their project prior to the hackathon. 3) Was actively helped by the Salesforce team during the hackathon. 4) Was ensured a place by other teams not even having their submissions seen by the judges. What a fair and balanced outcome! I fully expect everyone to take this event seriously in the future. /s

U2EF1 13y ago
The only real surprise is that Salesforce wasn't better able to obscure it. Still, they weren't giving out a million dollars for a days work.
- colabi 13y ago
  i wish it was a days work. they opened the competition oct 25th. so people were developing since then. and they might not have even gotten run.
sswaner 13y ago
In addition, Turian is a showman. His finalist presentation was more flamboyant than Benioff's keynote. I felt bad for the guys who presented after Upshot (they had skipped class at UCLA and Purdue to build a cool job candidate app). Watching the show, I felt that it likely that the judges would be swayed by Turian's command of the stage.

morenoh149 13y ago

Dezzmo.com participated in the hackathon. Mostly for the $200 heroku credits, networking, fun and because we were able to get free tickets. That being said we never intended to submit the application due to violation of the rules. If we knew what the result would've been, hell, we should've submitted. Clearly not every submission was even opened according to #dfnolaunch on twitter.

vlad 13y ago

Something nobody is reporting is that the Hackathon actually started October 25, not Monday, so teams were allowed many weeks to get started in advance.

conjugate 13y ago

upshot has been in development since December 2012. great product though.

xfax 13y ago

What does Harvard have to do with any of this?

xauronx 13y ago
It seemed kind of stressed in all of press surrounding this. My guess: To give the impression these are college kids doing a neat project.

jimraynor 13y ago

My Five Finalists Would Have Been Salesforce did a really smart job of hiding all other entries apart from the winning ones. I have done a few hackathons on Challenge Post earlier and this is the only one where they are not showing all submissions but only the winning submission in the gallery. While that is food for thought, I feel terrible for myself and some of the other awesome apps that folks built for this hackathon. So, here are the top 5 apps that would have made the finals if I were judging this solely based on the videos I found on YouTube (and I've been doing software development for over 25 years). Just to be unbiased, this does not even include my own submission * Smart * Chatter Complete * zip.ly * Incoming * Matt Lacey's app (Can't remember the name) If I were to pick the top two, it would be Matt Lacey's app and Chatter Complete. I can't believe how those folks missed out. Discussion at - http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Salesforce-1-Million-Hackathon/My-Five-Finalists-Would-Have-Been/td-p/706515 http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Salesforce-1-Million-Hac...

xauronx 13y ago

I kind of don't want them to have my code anymore. Since they didn't even consider it for the competition, I feel like they don't have fair use to have it on their servers.

ReligiousWacko 13y ago

Anyone familiar with Salesforce's accounting scams should not be surprised by this.

joseman 13y ago

I was hacking at for 4 days. Here were my observations about the whole event. I echo op's concerns. Day 1: Monday Came in early 10am-ish. 2nd floor, Moscone West, Hackathon area set up. There was a table. This is where we checked out team in. Room capacity <50% filled. Nightclub lighting. Imagine walking into a nightclub and turning on your computer to work. That's what this setup was like for 3 days! Someone briefly turned on the lights on Wednesday. I am thinking this had to do with Marc and Jim Cramer stopping by. There was a camera crew with really expensive gear filming some people on day one. Not sure what this was all about. Day 1 Overnight Food truck around midnight. Dead. You'd think more people would stick around overnight to work on their hacks. I'd say there were at most 20 people. 2 dudes were noticeably snoring towards the sponsor tables in the bags. First red flag. Keynote day. Hacking continues. Hackers are free to watch the keynote on their laptops despite having "keynote" designation on their badges. Security ridiculously tight everywhere. I started to get a weird vibe about the whole event. I've been to a few other hackathons (angelhack, disrupt, launch, startup weekend, paypal etc). This one seemed less organized and hacker friendly. They had food (think pizza, soda, and ice cream), but as far as wiring (wifi - shoddy, powerstrips - stationary to long desks, lighting - think nightclub-like, flashing blue, green, purple circles, and mainly event production staff present). Re: Hack submissions. Instructions were to submit hacks to Challenge Post by 6pm Wednesday. Submissions must include link for a video and meet the rules and requirements. No information was communicated about judging, how finalists would be selected etc. Waste of my time, money and overall bad vibe from Salesforce.

abdultukdi 13y ago

If you dig deep enough, you'll find that the hackathon was sponsored by Fox News and they kept it Fair and Balanced.

colabi 13y ago
no. I know it wasn't sponsored by them. Not enough alert banners on the screen

Lord_Nolan 13y ago

I agree that cash prizes should be eliminated from Hackathons. I'm not sure about Team Selection, whether to have random, pre-determined, or 'quick pitch' style. Sometimes Hackathons can be a great experience for the participants. Sometimes, however, the evaluation criteria can ruin. We had one of the only functioning projects, but were docked points for using Twilio instead of AT&T's shitty API. (One of the Sensei's even told us to use Twilio.)

jarodreyes 13y ago
Just to clarify did this happen at the Salesforce hackathon? What project were you working on?

ismaelc 13y ago

This should not come as a surprise anymore. Developers need to be more responsible in picking their hackathons - https://medium.com/hackers-and-hacking/593688fa7c09 https://medium.com/hackers-and-hacking/593688fa7c09

MrGando 13y ago

The Angel Hack in Chile was the same thing earlier on this year, I dunno if there was a lot of money on the table, but still the winners had the app done from long long ago. I would love to force devs to use git and implement a true hackathon system (Open Source) to run hackathons and avoid cheating.

diycomb 13y ago

Honesty races to the bottom, 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE

argumentum 13y ago

I've been in a few hackathons .. winning prizes in some (usually schwag or gadgets), and also ran a couple myself. They don't work nearly as well with more valuable prizes. In my view, a hackathon is best as a starting point ... for teams, projects and ideas. They are much better chances to "network", particularly for hackers/makers, than so called "networking events", which are usually a waste of time. Hackathons also work great for startups to introduce developers to their technology & culture, and perhaps recruit them. The worst hackathons are when the intended outcome is that the winning team(s) go on to start a company with the proceeds of the win and/or are accepted into some newish accelerator/incubator. In the case of Salesforce and it's extreme prize, the controversy could have been predicted .. there was no way they could police a fair competition (and that was unlikely their goal anyway). Their goal was similar to that of a nightclub that doesn't have the desired demographics, so they gave free cover ($99 "hacker" tickets), drinks and raffle tickets to the desired group (programmers in this case). While the majority of the conference attendees were wandering around, mingling and generally enjoying themselves, every once in a while, they might chance by the "hackathon room" and look upon the poor creatures as they would monkeys in a zoo. Quite the spectacle, it must have been..

cliveb 13y ago

We've seen devs swap in prebaked apps for a $2000 first prize. For a $1M prize, what did we expect...

dnraj72 13y ago

We were a participant and I am not worried about winning the 1M hackathon. Our focus was to build a great product and we did from Mon-Wed and submitted before 2pm which was told earlier and got changed to 6pm and we did not sleep for 36 hours. I would prefer if we can have all list posted in a reddit and let us crowdsource this winner not for the prize but for selecting the five best by crowdsourcing the hackathon - Our entry is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I3yhhP2HGk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I3yhhP2HGk

dnraj72 13y ago