[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."

[jorde]

People also complaining that their apps didn't get any hits during the evaluation period [1]. If this is true, which it seems like to be, it is pretty shameful business from Salesforce given that people clearly used a decent part of their week in order to participate. I feel bad for Heroku employees who promoted this.

Edit: According to one of the judges [2], they only saw and evaluated the 5 Salesforce selected apps. Also the app gallery only shows the five winners [3]. No matter how the finalists were chosen, this is not how you run a hackathon.

[1]: http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/forum_topics/264... [2]: https://twitter.com/alexwilliams/status/403723331007832064 [3]: http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/submissions

[jmduke]

that people clearly used a decent part of their week in order to participate

And $499.

[Jd]

Hacker pass was $99 list price and often given out for free.

[philthesong]

People gotta group up and sue them

[vyrotek]

I'm not really surprised. Salesforce held contest a few years ago for some of their Apps and based it completely on Facebook Likes of YouTube video presentations.

Some teams were definitely felt favored. Some were let in well past the entry due-date (giving them more time to submit better presentations). Other products were bogus and nothing more than photoshop mocks. And some companies cheated and purchased thousands of likes over night (they were caught and disqualified).

It was a serious mess. The funniest part was seeing how the companies all had thousands of likes while the actual views of the videos were barely in the hundreds.

[drakaal]

I'd like this one. I sell Facebook likes. If you were offering a $1M prize I'd "sell" you a lot of Facebook likes. It would be like if all of England liked me. Which they probably do even if they don't want to admit to it.

I also sell Youtube views, so I could make sure it would be less funny than what you describe.

Popularity contests should be done in person. Harder to cheat if you have to get people to the venue.

[goldenkey]

Not to mention it cost $500 to enter, meaning negative EV, not as bad as the lotto, but still a losers' gamble.

[yeukhon]

This part I just don't get it. Why? Salesforce is not a small startup. It can definitely afford a 100k hackathon.

[ReligiousWacko]

Not startup but still losing tons of money.

[yeukhon]

i don't know the actual number. They might have a negative net income for a little while due to expense but according to this news, growth is going up. Plus, if you look at Facebook's Tools Engineering position it mentions Salesforce.com so I think the company has a pretty good outlook. Plus, coming, 100k for food and facility is not that much to them when they are giving up 1M.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-coms-revenue-growth...

[trentmb]

The Web-Startup Tool Mindest.

[schmerdy]

I don't know what you paid $500 for. The hackathon was free. Zero. $0. Early on they charged $99 for a developer pass, but they reimbursed me and my team members.

[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/

> 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...

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?

[goldenkey]

I was wrong. Still though, that $99 fee is _per_ person. You'd probably have 2 or 3 people on your team. That's $300 in that case. And if I'm correct, I remember them saying that a 1-person team would have very low chances of winning. Not to mention that the competition is not a 1-day event, it is just a 1-day showing, the winning team put a month of work in addition to what they already had completed as a base. I am not one to take such large gambles when the tables are clearly not in my favor. The whole thing reeks of pre-arranged cronyism.

[dlotus]

Very few people registered at even the $99 hacker pass level, which is why they ended up making it free. Nobody who wasn't already going to DF paid the full conference price to participate in the hackathon. Quit with the hysteria.

[philthesong]

even if it was free...... how about time?

[andyakb]

An entry fee does not make something negative EV. $1,090,000 was added to the prizepool. If it was literally 100% guaranteed that the winner was pre-selected, then it would be -EV if >180 teams entered and all had the same chance of winning a prize. If the event was not rigged, then it is clearly +EV for even medicore participants.

[karawoodard]

At least you got to compete. All the girls wanting to compete at Launch Hack got rejected. All hacks are rigged. All the ones worth winning anyway.

[bcjordan]

Serious question—are "hackathons" starting to be known as "hacks"? Have heard it a couple of times now.

[karawoodard]

I think so. Several hackathons are just call somethingHack. Like LaunchHack.

Unrelated to your comment. Nice to know I got voted down for pointing out sexism. I thought I was on YC not Reddit.

[huu]

Do you have a link for this? I can't find any information on it.

[chaqke]

given the copious amount of US laws regarding giveaways, it's probably illegal too.

did it for fun because of a coupon code, but I feel sorry for anyone who paid the full price of admission. if they were going to rig it anyway, why sell hackathon-only tickets? that's pretty malicious.

[awol_77]

I know the developers of the healthcare app personally. They competed properly and within the rules, day and night, in preparation for the demo. They have the professionalism and the "wow" factor that you mentioned. Just because you may think it's too polished to be done in a few days by a few people, does not make it so.

[tedivm]

There's proof of these allegations- they apparently demo'd the app at a Salesforce meetup several weeks before the competition started.

See- http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/e...

So maybe, since you have this personal relationship with them, you can get the developers to come here and explain how that happened?

[mynameisvlad]

Upshot is not the Healthcare app. They're separate.

[coppenheimer]

This is ridiculous. Really sounds like a bunch of sniveling losers. I participated in the hack, lost don't regret it at all. Well, a little bit because i hate staying up late. next time will plan ahead.And I'm a former salesforce employee and personally know a bunch of the dev relations team. No leg up there. I thought our submission was pretty good, didn't win, oh well. It's almost as if these commenters believed they were promised the million and have been ripped off. I don't think that is the right way to think about this, if your app is so great keep it going make your own million.

[xauronx]

I'm not sure how it sounds like sniveling losers... It's like entering a painting competition, spending hours creating a piece of art and the people running the contest saying "Just put it in that closet, we already have our top 5", without even glancing at it". Developer time isn't free, and although I didn't think we would win, at least having someone take a look at what I gave up a weeks worth of nights for would have sufficed.

Also, if the winners were eligible, that would help. I would have never entered a "Best Salesforce startup of 2013" competition with a week's worth of work.

https://twitter.com/alexwilliams/status/403723331007832064

[coppenheimer]

The winners not being eligible is a fairly big deal actually. The negative publicity from this makes it a full on disaster I'd guess.

The accusations that nobody looked at the submissions and the winners were predetermined sound unsubstantiated.. nobody (who's commenting) knows that. Analytics on your videos? Please. I'd love to see the team that has zero video views, they are telling us it was submitted it and didn't watch it once? Our whole team watched ours multiple times, impossible to tell if the judges did any out of the dozens of views. The idea that the apps weren't used and logged into sounds right - with the amount of time they had to judge (a few hours) they would mostly use the video, description, and probably verify the code was uploaded, and winnow it down to five top ones. We fully expected to win or finish without them logging in to our app which required a custom android build. And no matter what, that leaves the majority of contestants loosing.. it's not a conspiracy people, it's math. Not everybody wins...and it could even be some of the best teams lost, thats endemic to every sort of competition.

But we hear from every complainer, "the only possible way I could loose is cheating, I'm so entitled to this, I DESERVE TO WIN THE HACKATHON, WHERE IS MY TROPHY???? I ALWAYS get a trophy!!!". Sore losers? Check.

And, in closing, I'd like to say what nobody on the internet fourims have ever said: I was wrong. Seems like this is a full on shit show, even though I'm quite glad my team participated (and lost). So go on internet - be hysterical about this travesty of justice, you deserve it.

[xauronx]

"But we hear from every complainer, "the only possible way I could loose is cheating, I'm so entitled to this, I DESERVE TO WIN THE HACKATHON, WHERE IS MY TROPHY???? I ALWAYS get a trophy!!!". Sore losers? Check."

I don't think I ever said that (hint: I know I never said that, or felt that). In fact, I mention that I didn't think our team would win. I don't know why you're getting so angsty about this, like you personally know the judges, saw the process and think Salesforce is a mom and pop shop with the best intentions.

There are a couple teams that I've seen, and I would have been HAPPY to lose to them. Just simply being out classed is awesome, you get to see just how much better you can get.

[colabi]

that guy doesn't get what people are feeling. People are feeling that this was a closed box. A possibly even pre determined outcome. And out of their efforts they didn't even get to show or talk about what they did - the least you can expect . So we have to shop for a new sponsor to finish it out. I think most people wouldn't even care so much about the prizes. have oracle or Microsoft end the even right with everyone's submissions. Let everyone show what they created

[colabi]

I spoke to many devs. As we are not former salesforce people, we are smart enough to know to subtract the single view or views we made when we watched it. We're also smart enough to put analytical into the apps and be able to read server logs. And that is how we know what happened during review

[priley]

I had a great time too. But it unfortunately does look they started Upshot (their startup) way before the hackathon was even announced.. pretty messed up: http://www.meetup.com/Salesforce-com-Integration-Analytics/e...

[xauronx]

About a week before Dreamforce, Salesforce had a call with their "premiere partners", and were very unsure about their own rules. They ended up saying "You can submit an existing app or product, but you'll only be judged on your contributions for the hackathon", which was a huge red flag of BS. In light of all of the news, I almost feel like they knew the winner at that point and were trying to cover their tracks a little bit.

[eskimoroll]

Wow, that's messed up. My team and I could have tacked on Salesforce to our existing product (like several of the top teams), but we read over the rules several times and made the conscious decision to build everything from scratch so that our entry would count.

[xauronx]

Yeah, we knew this was going to happen after hearing that. We should have just aborted, but decided to be hopeful that it would be tastefully handled. I guess that was too much to hope for.

[colabi]

Their strategy at this point if the high ups are stubborn will be to wait out the weekend for activity to die off. People get on with their lives. The thing to do now is to reach out to companies who could sponsor ending this thing right. prize or no prize. i think we organize to find a Microsoft or oracle who could host an evening

[colabi]

I'm starting a fact timeline that we can contribute to. Google spreadsheet probably. maybe it's all the episodes of ms marple my wife watches. Can you say how and when you came across this info? Was it firsthand?

[xauronx]

It was firsthand. I'm not entirely sure how many people were invited to the call. They talked about the hackathon (mostly marketing stuff). In the QA afterward they were asked some details about teams (if everyone had to be there, etc), but the question of preventing people from bringing premade apps came up. And the answer given was almost exactly (per my memory) "You may use an existing application, however, you will only be judged on your contributions for the hackathon". It's weird that no one really dug deeper for more clarification, and I'm ashamed for not doing so myself.

[colabi]

Wow. Thank you. Who issued the call from their side? I can't imagine they passed that information to the judges. But even before then it should have been made public and applied to the entries. That would have made the winning app a text field with Google voice that shows an arbitrary link

[colabi]

it's fine to not win. i've won and and i've lost. i just won at Facebook last week. but i expect that what they ask to review, they review. i can't find anyone who said they detected any launches during the review period. i would have expected to find ONE person. don't run a hackathon with strict rules and a long development period and ask for source if you actually are NOT going to run the app. just be honest and ask for a wireframe or a f*ing powerpoint.

[philthesong]

these guys are definitely tools. it is not really about winning. its about being fair or not. it is a scam if teams had to pay to contend

[jcrei]

So was this just one of those hackathons made to keep internal employees happy? I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of people inside Salesforce who have big dreams and ambition, and would be thinking about starting their own companies. So does Salesforce put on a show just for these people to feel good about themselves? And of course to get the prize money. But why open it to the public then?

[colabi]

NEW BREAKING NEWS> THIS THING WAS FULLY RIGGED. HEALTHCARE.LOVE CAME FROM SALESFORCE PORTFOLIO COMPANY.

Violates: Neither you nor any of your team members are an employee of salesforce.com or its related companies as of September 1, 2013 or during the Hackathon; nor an immediate family member (parent, sibling, spouse, child) of or household member to an employee.

[Jd]

Bluetooth guy won a couple of previous hackathons and was accused of favoritism even then.

[colabi]

Do you know which finalist the check in deadline was extended for ?