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

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

First place:<p>&gt;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.<p>Oh that sounds fishy? As a concession, we&#x27;ll just award <i>another million</i> to 2nd place. Oh, who is second place?<p>&gt;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.

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

The issue is they specific said you can&#x27;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 &quot;yeah sure, just not a significant amount&quot;. Most programmers were heads down in their code and didn&#x27;t check the forum. That&#x27;s wrong and they did nothing to explain or correct this.

&gt; The internal audit team&#x27;s review determined that Upshot&#x27;s mobile app was created during the hackathon and met these criteria.<p>Let&#x27;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 &#x2F; 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.<p>The fact that Upshot guys haven&#x27;t spoken is also ridiculous. Or have they?

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.<p><a href="http://salesforce1million.challengepost.com/submissions" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;salesforce1million.challengepost.com&#x2F;submissions</a>

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?<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6836581" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6836581</a>

Why give them the publicity?

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