Hi,<p>I'm the founder of AngelHack, we organize large hackathons around the world and I can tell you this article doesn't hold true for us (though I can't speak for other events). We operate independently of companies and choose winners based on hour things-- Completeness, Impactfulness, Technical difficulty, and viability. We had some issues in our early days with pre-done code, so now all winning teams are subject to code reviews after winning (and in the case where the review shows previous work has been done, we contact the second place winner and invite them to our finals event instead. We do this discretely as to not shame the initial winner who sometimes may not have understood the rules). I'd say this happens 5% of the time, so this is very much the exception and not the rule.<p>I started AngelHack so that people could have a shot of getting exposure for their ideas and support in taking them to the next level. We welcome everyone to our events, startups who want a good environment to team build and work on new things to indie-devs looking for an outlet from their typically work week. Normally, great coders win and great ideas come out of it. Our mission from there to provide support and mentorship, so top teams have a fighting chance at turning their hack into a startup. Many companies raise funding after they win our events and we're proud of that. They literally start at our events and now they are in YC, TechStars, AngelPad, and you name it. That's cool. With 35 cities happening concurrently, sometimes the quality of what judges pick can vary, where even I myself have had WTF moments on who won, but the majority of our judges pick solid winners and if I see something was really awesome, I'll still invite that team into our finals, regardless of what the judges choose.<p>My take on corporate hackathons -- most award winners based on who has spent the most time digging into the API and asking good questions to the company -- these would be teams who helped them improve their product and teams that they'd like to believe will finish their product so they can showcase it on their app-store// dev-site. Again, I can't speak for everyone, but that's the trend I see.<p>And for Startup Weekend, they don't throw hackathons. They do a business plan event, where they don't really care what comes in or comes out. It's about uniting the community and doing customer development on ideas. They judge based on who they feel has improved and who makes the the crowd happy. It's not really a competition.<p>All this said, I'm curious what people think hackathons should be judged on. Imagine you were giving away $10,000 -- how would you decide? Would you do it on what's cool, based solely on the tech, based on what could make revenue, based on the teams passion for what they are doing? Solve that, and AngelHack would gladly integrate it in with our events worldwide. Again, currently we judge based on Completeness, Impactfulness, Technical difficulty, and viability.