Two Harvard University Alumni Win Salesforce $1M Hackathon Prize

> with the ability to use voice for making queries. oh come on..

I hope this hackathon happens again next year. They were very generous with their grand prize, and anything you built you were able to keep.

The one thing I'd ask them to change is for the prizes to be a little better distributed this year. I'd hate to be those second place winners who perhaps _just barely_ lost to the first place winners but had a $950,000 dropoff.

Perhaps first place $500,000, second place $250,000, third place $100,000 etc.

Some interesting comments about the hackathon below this poorly written article.

One of the comments, kinda what I already expected: "Spoiler: One of those guys used to work for Salesforce! (not kidding, they announced it during the demo). The French guys were followed around during the entire hackathon by a salesforce camera crew (I was sitting right next to them, some of the salesforce people even came over to help them submit to be sure they got it in before the last 5 min was up, kinda knew they were in from day 1). One of the finalist teams didn't make the check-in time, so they extended the check-in by a few hours (saw that one coming too). And last but not least, the healthcare app. Although I liked the app, it was way too polished given the team size, and the time allotted (I mean wow, very professional if it were true), but the fact that they were using lots of logos (with trademark) of some big insurance companies in their demo and video (specifically in the rules, unless of course all those big companies gave written consent in the 3 weeks), kinda figured they were getting a leg up. The bluetooth app, that one I thought had value, and was innovative (albeit not realistic in facial recognition). I would have voted for that one if I could.

You could tell it was just a dog and pony show on the 2nd day. Some people were helped, some werent. Then, when you submitted, all you got was a "sorry, your not chosen" -dear john- canned email... Nothing telling you where you could have improved, nothing saying what your score was, no information at all. Just a simple 'sorry'....

Turned out to be a huge waste of time, energy, and money. Wont be coming back, that's for sure."