from Hacker News

Two Harvard University Alumni Win Salesforce $1M Hackathon Prize

by b0b0b0b on 11/22/13, 12:37 AM with 100 comments

  • by melvinmt on 11/22/13, 2:01 AM

    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."

  • by zulfishah on 11/22/13, 3:27 AM

    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...

    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%...

    So there you go.

  • by bobbles on 11/22/13, 4:39 AM

    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

  • by hughes on 11/22/13, 1:54 AM

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

  • by joseman on 11/22/13, 9:30 PM

    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.

  • by dragulagu on 11/22/13, 2:49 AM

    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...

  • by apapli on 11/22/13, 1:43 AM

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

  • by argumentum on 11/23/13, 8:51 AM

    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..

  • by greglindahl on 11/22/13, 2:24 AM

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

  • by birken on 11/22/13, 1:29 AM

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

    Excellent job picking a big market

  • by jimraynor on 11/22/13, 4:15 PM

    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...

  • by mrkmcknz on 11/22/13, 3:48 AM

    Somewhat related technology to the winning team: 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.

  • by enra on 11/22/13, 3:02 AM

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

  • by xfax on 11/22/13, 1:35 PM

    What does Harvard have to do with any of this?

  • by fletchowns on 11/22/13, 1:55 AM

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

  • by dnraj72 on 11/25/13, 4:39 AM

    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

  • by lcedp on 11/22/13, 1:34 AM

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

  • by Lord_Nolan on 11/22/13, 9:45 PM

    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.)

  • by vlad on 11/22/13, 6:07 AM

    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.

  • by morenoh149 on 11/22/13, 5:21 AM

    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.

  • by cliveb on 11/23/13, 12:56 PM

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

  • by MrGando on 11/23/13, 2:23 AM

    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.

  • by ismaelc on 11/22/13, 10:26 PM

    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

  • by xauronx on 11/22/13, 4:47 PM

    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.

  • by ReligiousWacko on 11/22/13, 6:13 PM

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

  • by diycomb on 11/23/13, 8:51 AM

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

  • by fizx on 11/22/13, 2:00 AM

    Woah, those guys are in my office!

  • by vgoklani on 11/22/13, 3:51 AM

    Congratulations to Turian!!! :)

  • by prtkgpt on 11/22/13, 2:31 AM

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

  • by orph on 11/22/13, 2:16 AM

    major congrats to turian and thom!

  • by abdultukdi on 11/22/13, 9:42 PM

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

  • by eggbrain on 11/22/13, 1:51 AM

    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.