Picking the winner of the battlefield startup competition should be free of any influence of non-editorial people and judges.
I'd argue it's rather hypocritical of Michael to talk about 'influence' when his venture capital fund had invested in the previous three Disrupt SF winners -- for which he was a judge -- prior to their victories.
Fair point, but I care a lot more about an objective assessment of the current state of the conference than pegging someone as a hypocrite. People who try too hard to avoid hypocrisy never do anything interesting.
Many of these conferences are a waste of time for startups attending them and Europe is especially guilty of this with many media companies jumping on the bandwagon. Instead of startups being at the center, they simply have become cheap 'content' that are allowed to pose next to corporate sponsors priding themselves of 'loving innovation'.
Interesting application of what I call the 'Top Gear Effect.'
Top Gear UK is produced for BBC. They aren't beholden to sponsors and therefore their reviews come across as being less biased than sponsored shows (so long as the product is not British). Because they have the largest viewership on the planet, companies continue to give them cars regardless of the outcome of the review.
If Top Gear US tried doing some of the reviews that UK does, they would lose sponsorships or even access to entire product lines. This has lead to a dramatic restructuring of the show that ONLY does reviews when they can be positive.
I attended the hackathon and was a little disappointed that all the prizes went basically to teams who rubbed up the sponsors in the right way. Obviously the sponsors were there to promote themselves but rewards should have been given to innovation and not just how many api's from the sponsors you can mash into an app.
At the Disrupt SF 2012 hackathon, one submission managed to create a Hello World-esque app...using literally every sponsor's API. The emcee commented that he was "hedging his API bets."
I'm afraid that this is how the $1 million Salesforce hackathon will end up going to be. Given how 25% of the judging criteria is the "Use of Salesforce Platform".
I'm not aware of the event but if it is a Salesforce hackathon (i.e. they are running it) doesn't it make sense you get points for innovative use of their platform? If they are just a sponsor I can understand frustration.
This is exactly how the Disrupt SF Hackathon went IMO. Sponsors doled out hefty prizes for including the use of their respective APIs in a hack. With the addition of teams receiving passes to attend the event by participating, it led to a 5 hour showcase that was mostly comprised of variations on a familiar theme. Lots of, "Shopping app with instagram like filters" and other mishmashes of APIs with no critical thought applied. Really a bummer.
It was nice having an easy target to win a sponsor prize, though. I know I got a whole extra app written with the eLance winnings from that event. :) Wasn't even trying or expecting for anything to happen on the winning overall front since I was the only coder on my team.
I've been to a lot of these (I'm loosely associated with TC these days but help them out) and while I think Arrington's criticisms are sort of silly after everything that went down before, I do agree that there's been a lack of focus on editorial content since the whole thing was doubled down on about 18 months ago. Too many promotional interviews, not enough exploration of culture and concepts. It's become a convenient platform for moneyed entrepreneurs to launch, rather than a serious investigation of the people and companies involved. There's still good stuff, and we get great guests, but I do agree it needs to be pulled back and made more beholden to editorial — they can sell that. Right now it's kind of a meat grinder of valley trends and personalities.
<< Michael, you see, in Europe there are far better ideas and better executors than those you saw at Disrupt. The problem is that some European countries fail to understand software and Internet of Things as a potential for not yet existing value-added products. This is so clear with European VCs that won?t fund ideas they don't understand.
So, what happens to the "far better ideas" not easily understood from people whose wallets still live in the dotcom bubble?
We have to work at night, and only those nights we have some spare energy left from our day jobs, which we cannot leave, because we don't have funding to pay for dinners or rents.
Silicon Valley doesn't have better ideas, it has better investors and resources.
How do you plan to "disrupt" that? >>
There is a distinction between the Startup Battlefield (companies that are launching) and the Hackathon (apps and hacks made in a constrained time period). His criticism seems to be leveled at the Battlefield judging.
I'd argue it's rather hypocritical of Michael to talk about 'influence' when his venture capital fund had invested in the previous three Disrupt SF winners -- for which he was a judge -- prior to their victories.