The Salesforce $1 Million Hackathon is back and it was better than ever.  We just completed a fantastic weekend of hacking on the top floor of a cool event space in downtown San Francisco.  We welcomed around 1,000 developers on 230+ teams, and we coded and hung out with new friends for 48 hours.  We had a spectacular Blue Angels flyover and warm and sunny weather.

There were three categories of judging: Force.com, Heroku, and Force.com + Heroku.  We used a science-fair approach to judging, so everyone could see each others’ apps.  Judges worked carefully on their panels and used all their expertise to bear in assigning scores.   A big thanks to our volunteer judges (none of whom were salesforce.com employees).

It took a long time to get through all of our scoring, and our audience was extremely patient as we worked through every team with our judging panels.

At the end, we had a great set of winners and semi-finalists!  The judges picked winners in places 6 – 10 for each category, as well as finalists in unranked spots 1 – 5 who advance to the final judging at Dreamforce on Tuesday.

Join us in congratulating our winners and semi-finalists!

We committed to running a fantastic, transparent hackathon.  One thing came up that is worth mentioning here in the spirit of transparency.  When we presented the final ranking in the Heroku category, we named one team twice: in 6th place, and in the top 5.  We regret the error.  When we put the slides together, we had a transcription error.  Dream Sketcher was 6th place, and we let them know right after.  The semi-finalist team was called Reach Out.  We notified them immediately, and found them by 9:15pm.  So, congrats to both of these great apps, and look for Reach Out in finals in the Heroku category.

It was pretty inspiring to see developers from all over the world come to this event, and build cool apps.  There was a ton of innovation here, and it just goes to show what you can do in 48 hours with some great developers and a great platform.

Additionally, every developer in the hackathon has a free pass to the Dev Zone at Dreamforce all week.  We can’t wait for the big final judging ceremony in the DevZone, at Moscone West, Tuesday 11:00am – 1:00pm!  And, we’ll reveal the top 2 in each category, plus the grand prize winner Thursday afternoon in a session after the final Dreamforce Q&A.

Thanks for a great experience, and we’ll see you at Dreamforce!