
Two Harvard University Alumni Win Salesforce $1M Hackathon Prize - b0b0b0b
http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/21/two-harvard-university-alum-win-salesforce-1m-hackathon-prize-at-dreamforce-for-mobile-service-to-create-reports/
======
melvinmt
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
Not to mention it cost $500 to enter, meaning negative EV, not as bad as the
lotto, but still a losers' gamble.

~~~
jmacd
It did not cost $500 to enter.

It was either $99 or Free (there was a free entry promotion for most of the
time during the run up to the hackathon).

~~~
DanBC
All entrants had to be a registered attendant of Dreamforce 2013. Are people
including that cost too?

[http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/](http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/)

> You are, and each of your team members is, a registered attendee of
> Dreamforce 2013. See the Dreamforce website for event registration
> information.

How much did that cost? DF14 says it's going to be $799

[https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF13/register.jsp?d=70...](https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF13/register.jsp?d=70130000000tFvi&internal=true)

I think, but I don't know, that DF13 was the same price?

Maybe the 5 is just a key-rollover error from the $99?

------
zulfishah
The winning team presented their project at a Meetup well before the Hackathon
was even announced: [http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-
Analytics/e...](http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-
Analytics/events/136920332/)

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%...](http://res.cloudinary.com/hy4kyit2a/image/upload/Final%201M%20Hackathon%202013%20Rules%20%282%29.pdf)

So there you go.

~~~
colabi
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
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
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.

------
bobbles
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
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
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.

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

~~~
rrich
Awful. Makes me think twice about doing company sponsored hackathon contests.
Particularly contests that require a fee to enter.

~~~
AsymetricCom
I think just a little research on the company sponsoring the event would have
been good enough for me to know better.

------
joseman
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.

------
dragulagu
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...

~~~
philthesong
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...

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

------
argumentum
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..

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

------
birken
>> "Healthcare.lov came in second and won $50,000 for its service for people"

Excellent job picking a big market

------
jimraynor
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-
Hac...](http://boards.developerforce.com/t5/Salesforce-1-Million-Hackathon/My-
Five-Finalists-Would-Have-Been/td-p/706515)

------
mrkmcknz
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.

------
enra
Seems like many didn't even get their app reviewed
[http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/forum_topics/264...](http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/forum_topics/2644)

------
xfax
What does Harvard have to do with any of this?

~~~
xauronx
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.

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

------
dnraj72
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)

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

------
Lord_Nolan
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
Just to clarify did this happen at the Salesforce hackathon? What project were
you working on?

------
vlad
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.

------
morenoh149
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.

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

------
MrGando
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.

------
ismaelc
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)

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

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

------
fizx
Woah, those guys are in my office!

~~~
wavefunction
You work at Salesforce? ;)

------
vgoklani
Congratulations to Turian!!! :)

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

------
orph
major congrats to turian and thom!

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

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

------
eggbrain
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
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
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...

