Salesforce.com Announces Two $1 Million Winning Teams for Hackathon | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce.com Announces Two $1 Million Winning Teams for Hackathon

finance.yahoo.com

34 pointsjhchen28 comments

Ha. Still sticking to their guns: "...while the Upshot mobile app used pre-existing code, this did not violate the hackathon rules. Use of pre-existing code was allowable as long as the code did not comprise the majority of the app and did not violate any third party's rights." I think it does more damage than good

"The internal audit team's review determined that Upshot's mobile app was created during the hackathon and met these criteria."

They just took an existing application made during a nine year tenure at Salesforce, threw it into a generic responsive / mobile app framework during the "hackathon" and made a cool mil..

It helps if Salesforce is already an investor in your product, of course.

And this doesn't address why most apps that were submitted weren't even ran. It's not like 149 apps are all that hard to at least take a look at.

Because if they rescinded the Upshot prize, they would have wound up having to pay more for the Upshot app they wanted to acquire. They aren't going to throw that deal away, ever.

First place:

>Upshot was created by Thom Kim, who left Salesforce after nine years in Janauary, and Joseph Turian, with whom Kim had been friends since they attended Harvard University together.

Oh that sounds fishy? As a concession, we'll just award another million to 2nd place. Oh, who is second place?

>Fisher and Oliveros are employees working at Taptera, a San Francisco-based startup that received $2 million in August of 2011 from Salesforce and other investors in a Series A round of financing.

shrug

This doesn't strike me as inherently scandalous.

Scandalous, no. The part that bothers me is that an event, presumably designed to introduce new developers to their platform, seems impossible to win unless you're either a) directly associated with the company or b) make a living developing for the company's platform already.

Are you sure that was the design of this hackathon? I was more under the impression it was to incentive their entire developer base, not simply to encourage new adoption.

This may be the largest back pedal in the history of backpedaling.

On a bike that doesn't go backwards when you backpedal..

I personally haven't ever seen a bike that goes backwards when you backpedal. @dangrossman, thanks for the info -- TIL.

A fixed gear bike will do that, and they're not terribly uncommon. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsmYe6Hxg0c

If you visit SF, there are hipsters on fixies all over downtown.

Microsoft/XBox1 backpedal probably beats this one. SalesForce isn't giving up much here. What's another million to a company they've already invested in?

I don't know what this reference is about.

It's referencing Microsoft back tracking on the XBox One being 'always connected' and calling homebase once every 24 hours. The removed that functionality after a huge backlash o the 'Net

http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/tech/gaming-gadgets/xbox-drm/

DRM. Xbox One was supposed to require an almost constant internet connection to play games. They changed their minds after seeing the internet's response.

Xbox One? Microsoft took a huge gamble in their decision to all but eliminate discs from their consoles. They had planned that consumers would not be able to resell their discs once purchased with the promise that your friends would be able to play the games in your games library without owning the game themselves (ie. they download the game from your games library) so long as you weren't playing the game at the same time as them. People didn't like this because 1.) They couldn't resell their games and 2.) It required that you connect your Xbox to the internet once every 24 hours. For some reason a lot of people felt like this would affect them (I don't know why.. I can't remember the last time my internet was disconnected for 24 hours.) As a result of all the negative feedback, Microsoft scrapped their whole DRM system in favour of a more classic approach while Sony basked in the positive attention despite bringing nothing new to the table.

The issue is they specific said you can't start or use existing code before the date (still there in the rules PDF). I know that many very talented teams followed that rule even though theycould have used some of their older repos and did something even more impressive than Upshot. Then they respond to a forum question, weeks after the hackathon started, saying "yeah sure, just not a significant amount". Most programmers were heads down in their code and didn't check the forum. That's wrong and they did nothing to explain or correct this.

> The internal audit team's review determined that Upshot's mobile app was created during the hackathon and met these criteria.

Let's be honest. Upshot is pretty solid before the hackathon. It was functioning to some great degree. How many days did the event last? Three days? A mobile app for this hackathon is small. What innovations / cool business logic did they develop in the mobile app? I probably will see none. Pretty UI... maybe that was the winning shot. I am sure.

The fact that Upshot guys haven't spoken is also ridiculous. Or have they?

I also competed. We had from when the hackathon was announced (October 25th) to November 17th to build our submissions.

> The fact that Upshot guys haven't spoken is also ridiculous. Or have they?

Unlike most of us here, perhaps they've learned not to feed the trolls ;)

To me, the most interesting part of this is buried. Whereas previously only the five finalists were showcased, now many (all?) of the losing entries are now published.

http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/submissions

They reached out to all the teams for their permission to publish their submissions. Not all of the teams have agreed to do so yet.

More than anything, I’m bothered that the submitter has submitted multiple articles[1] on the same subject. Is HN karma really this important to people?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6836581

Well, this apparently bothers you, so it must be, right? :)

There are many more reasons to post an article than just winning internet points...

Why give them the publicity?

That healthcare app is actually pretty cool, how did that not win 1st place?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com