<i>Mandatory demos. Banning of slide decks.</i><p>Thank you!<p>I had the pleasure of attending AngelHack london in April, and it was amazing. Keep up the great work!
I've been to a number of hackathons, and AngelHack is by far the best run. The team does a great job, the locations+judges+sponsors are good, and they're usually cheap/free developers and designers. Can't wait to see what AppHACK is like.
"Making money from the idea will not be a factor. Winners will be audited before winning to ensure hacks were created during the weekend."<p>This is great! The last angelhack I went to was the exact opposite and it was pretty demoralizing getting a bunch of negative feedback from VC-ish judges even though it was 100% working and 100% built from scratch by myself in 24hrs (which was blatantly obvious most weren't via simple Google search) and it looked good and was using pretty advanced real time web technology[1]. It actually kinda bummed me out on hackathons for a while.<p>[1] Heres the app if you're interested <a href="http://whereyouat.meteor.com" rel="nofollow">http://whereyouat.meteor.com</a>
I went to AngelHack Austin earlier this year and I thought there were a number of things that could be improved upon. The group I went with (all devs) had a terrible time. Sounds like they've realized this too.<p>At the ATX event, there were no demos. Not even a public presentation to the rest of the participants, we were just grilled in a closed-room session by their panel on a bunch of business questions.<p>The only way to get a T-Shirt was to listen to a sales pitch by one of their sponsors.<p>Everyone was absolutely crammed in their space. I really hope they find a new venue for Austin.<p>Maybe this event just went poorly but everyone I went with was really soured on AngelHack after that.
Love the focus on demos and code reviews; many 'hackathons' are becoming anything but. Wish the through-the-night part would change, though, I feel that aspect makes these events less accessible.<p>The bootcamp aspect is an interesting one. Would you accept apps that were built in HTML/JS and PhoneGapped? I've seen that approach used more and more at hackathons, due to speed. Android/iOS is definitely doable (I've built both at hackathons/startup weekends), but for someone completely new to the platform, it'll be slower. So allowing skeleton apps, templates and frameworks could even the playing field a little.
Here is their challenge: bmljZSBkZWNvZGluZyB5b3VuZyBwYWRhd2FuIFVzZSB5b3UgbXVzdCBsZWFybmVyIGZyZWUgdGlja2V0IGNvZGU6IEhBQ0taSUxMQQ==<p>Reward, a coupon code that you can apply for a free ticket to an angelhack hackathon.
I've volunteered at Lean Startup Weekend a number of times, am currently a Hackstar at Techstars first Austin-based program, and have been working in-and-out of Capital Factory with a number of its startups since before it opened.<p>As such, I'm super excited to see how this event differs in practice and have already signed up to volunteer.
This is definitely taking hackathons in the right direction - and as someone who has attended AngelHack before, I like the focus on building something cool vs. focusing on slides/market potential.