I've had a hard rule for a while: Don't go to Hackathons where the prizes are over $1000. This is why: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/19/victoria-walker

I've had a hard rule for a while: Don't go to Hackathons where the prizes are over $1000. This is why: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/19/victoria-walker-rode-dog_n_1897464.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/19/victoria-walker-rod... I was at that Hackathon. The prize was pretty cool; certainly the largest I had seen at a Hackathon. I'd done other AT&T hackathons ("won" some, "lost" most) so I figured it wouldn't turn into a giant marketing/PR stunt - Silly me! Not only was AT&T's local head of marketing there but they had a professional artist there to help the kids with their slide show and a reporter was brought in for the presentation/judging phase. Their presentation was well choreographed and polished (professional artwork, animations, well written copy). For everyone else the judging went a bit different. I wrote an app using Twillio rather than the AT&T texting API and the marketing head was fairly overt in her distain for not touting their API. A few more instances of that happened with a couple other entries. Honeslty it was the least professionally run event I've seen out of that camp. Since then I've limited my parcipitation to events that have Amazon gift cards and EC2/Sponsor API credit as prizes. The kids that won were very nice, well behaived, etc. I hope they actually got the prize money for being part of AT&T's stunt.