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.