Salesforce is totally committed to a fun, fair and transparent hackathon. To that end, this year a hackathon vendor was brought in to run the event and put in place a process and set of checks. During one of these checks, it was discovered that one team had a score from only one of the three judges Sunday night. It’s unclear how it happened, but it was a large and complex operation to coordinate. As you know, each app submission was reviewed by three judges, and a contestant’s score needs the aggregated scores of all three in order to be comparable to other contestants’ scores. The team was contacted Monday night and was judged by three of the original judges Tuesday at 8 a.m., according to the same rules followed on Sunday. The team’s submission did well and received a score that advanced it to the final round in the Heroku category.

We want to be fair and include this team in the final judging; therefore, we’ve decided to add an additional 5th place prize for Heroku ($15,000 each). This means the total number of finalists competing is 16 instead of 15. We believe that this is the most fair course of action for everyone.

We will run the final judging round at 11 a.m. today in the DevZone, and unveil the top prizes Thursday in the final awards presentation. Good luck to all our competitors!