The Coca-Cola Company offers $10K Prize to Re-Imagine the Soda Fountain | Hacker News Reader

The Coca-Cola Company offers $10K Prize to Re-Imagine the Soda Fountain

hackerdojo.com

29 pointsbluehat61 comments

The Coca Cola Company pulled in nearly fifty billion dollars of revenue last year. They can afford to hire some industrial designers.

These kind of corporate hackathons are just scams designed to allow the company to take advantage of hundreds or thousands of hours of skilled labor in exchange for pocket lint. It's ultimately detrimental for everyone trying to make an actual living in the field.

Don't work on spec.

EDIT: You will also have to pay for using the 3D printer! Marvelous.

And yet nobody objects when Facebook runs a hackathon like this? Or is the food industry magically held to different standards than the tech industry?

What hackathon? You can run your own business in FB APIs, not just hand them over to FB.

And if you have a better soda fountain and don't want to sell it you can sell your product directly to bars and restaurants to compete with Coca-Cola, or sell it to Pepsi?

Except it

    * Gives participants resume boosters
    * Gives people direction on what to build in their spare time
    * Gives a common goal for those that feel like it
    * Offers college students some money (because it's probably not a well-employed 
       industrial designer that's going to win, because they aren't the ones
       participating)
    * Gets new ideas on the table, because cross-discipline innovation is where some
       of the most novel innovation can be found
    * Gets community feedback in the form of tangible products
    * Can be used to scout new talent

1. How so? I participated and won this hackathon is a resume booster? How does that compare with actual paid work from a client?

2. Getting a client and working on a paid project gives me plenty of direction as to what to build in my spare time.

3. What?

4. You're only getting money if they think your idea is best. One person/group wins, not everyone. You could have been doing something with guaranteed pay, not spec work.

5. Sure, you get new ideas on the table, but that doesn't mean they're good ideas. Not to mention you're giving away free ideas.

6. You're not really getting feedback from the community. You're getting it from the corporate sponsor.

7. No. They'll simply award the winner(s) $10k for IP and off they go. A win for the company.

1. How does dropped out of college to start startup compare to completing college degree? From the mouths of corporate hiring managers, suprisingly well. Until we get someone who does these kinds of decisions to comment on this, both statements are moot. 2. *paid time. 3. 2+ guys get together and do something. Everyone feels the fuzzy feeling of doing something with other people covering their backs. It's the tech equivalent of jamming. 4. Yes. Money is the measuring standard in this thing. I'm a big fan of money, but it's a means, not the end. 5. Doesn't mean they're bad ideas either. Also, if out of fear of bad ideas, we stopped pursuing ideas all together, we would stand still exactly where we are. 6. Nor is solving crossword puzzles. It can still be fun and relaxing/agitating. 7. If your company doesn't take down the names of those people who completely reengineered one of your key products in 2 days, I'm very sorry for your company. 8. Hackathons are fun. I want to sit with a couple of friends and play with ideas. If you're doing it for the money or the resume building...you got different priorities.

I actually have called people because they won Yahoo! Hack Days and put it on their resume...

1. Because it shows you succeeded in a driven project; and, as bluehat said, bluehat's hired people based on that.

2. Participating in hackathons is an easy, passive way to participate. It also doesn't leave the opportunity to fail as easily. If you mess up or get bored of the hackathon, you just stop. You're not screwing over a client-base. If this is your first project like this, you can even use it as a litmus test of whether you want to keep doing this type of thing, or not.

3. A common goal. There's an idea that maybe you hadn't thought about before; and now you, and your friends, can focus on this goal. Also, you, your friends, and several other people who found an interest, can all work on developing a new thing. It'll probably be more innovators than a normal team that would be designing the new machine.

4. True, but it's still nice incentive. TopCoder contests have prizes for the best contestants, too; and some of those are especially sponsored in much the same way.

5. You never know a good idea until you see it executed; and... so? Some people are freely willing to do that.

6. You, the company, are getting feedback from the community by some of the people in the community making a version of the product that handles some of their problems with the current models

7. Maybe, maybe not. I'm not Coca Cola. They /could/ use it for scouting, even if they don't.

* Buys more than $10,000 worth of press.

The first half of those points is the same fuzzy horseshit rolled out to defend unpaid internships.

That new ideas, informed feedback, and talent are valuable assets is obvious, so why should you hand them over for (virtually) free? That only devalues the value of the skills, training, and experience required to arrive at those insights.

You know, if I was at Pepsi-Cola right now I'd be assembling a team of interns (or multiple teams) to join the competition and participate. Not for the purpose of winning, but watching all the other entries and taking notes.

Is there some cross-team protection or NDA taking place for all the contestants?

No NDAs.

Saw a digital one in San Diego recently. It had a touch screen and allowed you to make your own flavors of lots of brands of soda.

Vanilla coke, orange coke, vanilla sprite, peach Fanta, etc.

The sodas it produced were predictably terrible.

I think you're referring to a CocaCola Freestyle, which was made with technology from Dean Kamen [1].

I'm actually like the Freestyle as you can get a Diet Coke with just a little bit of cherry in it (which is delicious).

1 - http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/oct2009/id20091...

My cofounder made most of the button badges for the UI at his last job (as well as doing some of the product testing). He kept telling me he was working on awesome at coke, but he couldn't tell me what it was until they publicly announced it..

That would probably be a Coke Freestyle machine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola_Freestyle

Come make a better one then :p

Word I hear in the foodservice industry is that Pepsi is dying for a Freestyle-like device. Coke cornered the important pieces of the technology and shut everyone else out.

Think of a way to get Pepsi, Dr Pepper, and 7-11 back in the game and you'll do a lot better than $10K.

When was the last time you heard Goldman Sachs rent out a room, provide pizza, and give 10k to whoever can improve on their strategies the best? Oh, but they're providing test data for free!

Kraft is actually renting out a ballroom in SF for anyone who wants to improve their cheese recipe. You get 10k if you can make a better mac and cheese than Kraft! You'll get a gold star on your resume while we make an extra 13 cents per packet sold (on a scale of billions a year).

It probably cost Coca-Cola 10k to bring the consultant who thought of this idea. If they truly wished to repay people for bringing immense value to their business they would offer them upwards of a $1M USD, not less than your average car.

Coke nearly invented the modern day soft drink industry, and milk that cow to the tune of billions a year. Yet apparently if you beat them at their own game you only get 10k. And your IP taken. And probably a gag agreement.

Seems a little unfair, doesn't it?

...you want $1M for a weekend of work?

That's kind of the crux of the problem, isn't it?

If I am able to improve the vending machine (one of the most ubiquitous appliances in the US, at least) in a weekend don't I deserve something of that magnitude?

On the other hand, if I can improve on the vending machine, what makes you think I'm going to spend my weekend doing it for 10k?

Well, I guess if you have some million dollar idea and the market/human resources to produce it, you probably should do that this weekend instead.

Keep up your brilliance every weekend and you could retire to some tropical island of your choice by the end of this month. If your brilliance also correlates to previous time, I don't know how you have time to write back and forth with me over HN, you should probably be busy with your billion dollars or so right now.

The reality is, great ideas take time to produce. If you want to dedicate years of your life to producing a great idea, go ahead. I wish you good luck. If you'd like to have a few beers that weekend, meet some cool people, play with some cool technology, and possibly walk away with five new Macbook Airs or whatever HN folks would like to spend it on, come party.

I think you're missing the point, I'm not attacking HackerDojo or hackathons, those can be quite fun. For the right reasons. But if someone succeeds in this task, that invention is worth millions. Coke is offering 10k. That's exploitation disguised as a "party".

It just feels awfully similar to that guy you kind of know inviting you over for beers, and then preceding to try and convince you to build his app idea for a couple hundred bucks and no equity. Even if I wanted to help him, why would I do it for so little?

It just seems like coke is piling on the "Get those nerds to build X idea and let us profit off it" train, and the lowball offer isn't helping.

But if you really do succeed in the big ground-changing way, you can decline the prize money and keep your IP. We specifically worked that into the contract with them for this reason.

I understand why people are afraid of big companies, and I have certainly seen the wreckage of these things done wrong, I just don't understand how any of those fears are founded in reality in the case of this event.

It's interesting to see Coca-Cola embracing this- I attended a hackathon they organised with Spotify last year and had a great time. It's particularly pleasing to see that the terms of the prize are very upfront here- they will pay you $10k for your prototype and IP. You are free to walk away.

Yeah. We (Hacker Dojo) worked with them extensively on these terms, and we're really pleased how flexible and understanding they have been. It has been very impressive to see such a large company listen.

10k is kind of a small prize for something like this.

Show me a weekend hackathon with half as big a prize pot.

Are those hackathons sponsored by one of the largest corporations in the world, one that is asking you to revolutionize a product for pennies on the dollar?

It is essentially a corporate takeover of the hackathon without understanding of it at all. Most sponsored hackathons are, "Hey write for our API, here is food and $2K and some t-shirts."

Coca-cola is just hitching on the whole notion of the hackathon, hoping someone is willing to work for cheap on something that can probably bring them a billion if it all works out.

Edit: I should probably note that its their event and they have the right to set the prizes, but man, $10K is low for something that can earn Coca-cola a lot of money.

I'm obviously kinda biased as I'm running this on the Hacker Dojo's side, but how else would you run a hardware hackathon? Or are hackathons only for software? Are you in a position to make a company out of your alternative soda fountain, or is the offer to buy an idea really a kindness?

They have offered classes, support from their engineering teams, equipment to break, and a lot of other things I've never seen anybody else do before.

>$10k for a weekend's worth of work seems rather excessive.

Sure, that'd be fine - if they paid everyone $1k, I'm sure tons would jump for the opportunity.

Remember, the real equation is: 1 weekend of work = (small probability of) $10k. A whole lot less of a deal.

You have to multiply that by your chance of winning (and account for the risk). I even have to bring my own material for CNC!

Last year StartNorfolk (A startup weekend in Norfolk VA) had cash prizes of 15, 10 and 5 thousand dollas for the first through third place winners.

I wonder why there aren't more cheap R&D contests like those. It seems like a fun way to get outside ideas and can result in some really nice inventions.

I would guess that the legal teams at major companies are traditionally gun shy about this kind of thing. Let's say Coke buys some IP resulting from this thing for $10k and then it goes on to revolutionize their business model and they make millions and millions from it .

I'm going to guess that whoever got stuck with the $10k is going to come back with lawyers and say they were taken advantage of, that their interests in the IP negotiation weren't properly represented, that a team of tinkers was no match to negotiate with a professional team of IP lawyers, etc... That's not to say that those are valid arguments, but they are arguments plenty of people make after the fact.

It's been my experience that huge companies have a vested interest in the appearance of dealing fairly and matter-of-factly with small third party vendors, especially in terms of IP law. Even if taking advantage of someone in such a manner doesn't become a legal issue, it's a huge PR liability.

Maybe because product development engineers know what their time and skills are worth, and it's a lot more than $10K?

Don't get me wrong, little contests like this can be great experience for smaller businesses that need development skill and for designers that need the portfolio pages.

But this is Coca-Cola. Then again, considering how much money got sunk into the Freestyle (and they're not out of the woods yet, that machine has problems), maybe a $10K contest is a way to keep the PD pipeline going and keep the accountants happy.

I think it's a matter of knowing how to connect to a community of folks who make things. That's probably why they partnered with Hacker Dojo.

I find this incredibly interesting, but I am a bit intimidated by my lack of hardware hacking experience. What would you recommend as a good way to get into these sorts of hackathons?

If you're local, sign up and attend the info sessions on carbonation etc. Generally though, this is about understanding the technology then repackaging it for a new place and purpose, so with some business sense you should be able to hobble along fine.

That's cheap - 10K won't even pay a 10th of the pitching costs for the kind of agencies they usually deal with

I'd design it like a Cobra to stress the fact that Soda is toxic... To each their own, but I like my hackathons to be about bettering the world.

Sweet delicious wonderful poison mmmm... I love Coke and other pops. I try to limit my intake though. I drink a lot of Yerba Mate tea too, and that supposedly has links to cancer (what doesn't these days). So I'm not going to worry too much about the health risks of pop.

10k is a pathetic prize though. Come on, I bet Coke spends more than that on dining out for their corporate leaders.

It's a huge prize by hackathon standards... how much would you think is reasonable for a team of 2-3 for a weekend of work?

"Everything is poison, there is poison in everything. Only the dose makes a thing not a poison."

Overconsumption may be the problem, i treat soda like a candy and drink one glass once/twice a week.

Moderation is good. Wouldn't recommend drinking candy though.

It's designed to induce overconsumption (sugar+salt).

And yet somehow I resist...

I'm outside of US, if any team going to the event, wants a extra hand, I would love to collaborate. I already have a good idea about the external design.

skype: carl.theteuton

I'm outside as well, but I'll share some aswell. There's been some beer keg development using elastic bags and paper cartons to create throaway kegs which eliminate the overhead of sending the kegs back for refilling. Esentially the liquid isn't squirted forth using a pump, but the elasticity of the container. This could be useful because it would get rid of that pesky pump. It'd also save space. When it comes to cooling the beverage, I'd go with either thermoelectric elements (convert electrical potention into thermal potential - Peltier element), or Thermoacoustic elements, which use precisely generated sonic waves to cool liquids. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoacoustic_heat_engine) Plus? You'll get the cool where you want the cool, and you'll save the whole compressor, evaporator, pump system that regular fridges are. Another thing that's cool, but entirely off topic is acoustic levitation, but it'd neither add to smallness nor convenience of the tap. You have a 3d printer at the hackerspace, so use it, but remember that if coca cola uses the design, they'll want to injection mold it. If a part can't be injection molded or stamped from sheet metal, think of some other way to do it. After all, consider that one of the engineers judging it might as well be the engineer who has to make it mass producable. You might also, before the competition, go to a local fast food joint and snoop around their machine, ask what problems crop up most with it, etc. The machines coke will provide you will most likely be factory condition, and you won't be able to tell where there's wear, where liquid dries and where dust settles. Right now I'm imagining a unibody, 25x15x20 quader which takes collapsible pouches of drink concentrate along with CO² pressure cartridges and a water line/water tank (could you use the CO² pressure to further compress the water whilst simultaneously cooling it using a thermoacoustic element, thus leading to carbonation? I'm thinking of a CO² jet compressor kind of setup) that is easy to fill, easy to clean and hard to break. Use capacive touch on the panel by the way, you gotta have a microcontroller in there anyways, so those couple of pins won't hurt too much. You can use a ir diode couple in the base to detect a glass.

who wants to drink from the FIRE HOSE?

Would not support a company that peddles carbonated sugary junk. It's to blame for the obesity. Period.

I am incapable of understanding some happening. (Coke is bad for you. Coke sells well) I shall therefore apply conspirationalization to it, thereby finding an explanation for it. (Ergo, Coke is controlling the public using mass media to sell massive quatities of unhealthy products). Instead of looking for other reasons why a coke drinker might drink coke (I think it's delicious, and I don't gain weight from it due to a slow metabolism, just as an example), you're assuming mind control. I'm unsure whether you hypothesis would hold up to occam's razor because I don't think that's the nearest explanation.

Note: This is directed towards everyone who assumes coke brainwashed us into soda consumption, so I started generalizing a little

How absurd, would you blame Ford for deaths that result from street racing?

Overindulgence, like unsafe vehicle operation, is on the user.

If Ford had a $2.5billion[1] advertising program encouraging people to take part in street racing then yes, I might well hold them partly responsible for street racing deaths.

Especially if the budget for public health education is tiny.

[1] 2007, according to this source (http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/10/what-top-brands-spen...)

They've certainly spent plenty of money sponsoring racing games, racing events, and various other racing related things. The connection between cars and going dangerously fast is not something the automotive industry had nothing to do with.

If you can't control yourself after seeing "These CGI polar bears and this multi-ethnic group of skater kids both like our soda", then that is entirely on you. (Well, on you, or perhaps on your parents who clearly failed to raise you properly.) For anything short of "More doctors smoke camels", I really cannot place blame on companies for advertising. I see no evidence of such deliberate deception in modern soda advertisement.

Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?

I mean selling stuff that isn't changing the world is fine. As long as it's not for the worse.

Coca cola is worse than say pot. It rots your teeth and your insides. There is no value in it. Yet they sell it and people buy it. It's dangerous.

The parent comment is quoting Steve Jobs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sculley#1983.E2.80.9393_:_...

Yes I am very much aware of it. Scully turned out to be poison :)

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