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by xauronx 4593 days ago
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.
2 comments
eskimoroll 4593 days ago
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.
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xauronx 4593 days ago
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.
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colabi 4592 days ago
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
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colabi 4592 days ago
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?
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xauronx 4592 days ago
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.
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colabi 4592 days ago
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
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