The one hackathon I've been to, the emphasis was way too heavily on not only making something "useful" but something that could be turned into a business. It wa

The one hackathon I've been to, the emphasis was way too heavily on not only making something "useful" but something that could be turned into a business. It wasn't advertised this way, and my group went in just wanting to have a bit of fun, making something quirky in a hurry. We ended up scrambling for ideas, then when we finally found an idea or two that we kind of liked, we were talked out of it by the industry-rep mentors that were supposed to be helping us. One even took our idea, and twisted it into a really weird financial solution for a totally different problem to what we were thinking about. After spending about 5 hrs trying to make it work, and struggling with the basics of the concept, we just gave up and walked away. Best part of the whole thing was the free RasPi 3 that I got because one of my group went to one of the talks.