I think part of the problem here is that there are so many Hackathons around nowadays, it's hard to attract attention to your hackathon, and attendees. This is

I think part of the problem here is that there are so many Hackathons around nowadays, it's hard to attract attention to your hackathon, and attendees. This is even worse for the for-profit ones rather than the more social affairs. As a result they seem to have chosen to focus on prizes and big money as their core marketing angle. This raises the stakes and makes it far more about pursuing the dollars for many participants. I've seen people pitching their startup idea in the one minute presentation for the hackathon, thinking that this is the best way to launch a company (spoiler alert: it's not!). Yes there have been some nice positive stories coming from projects that started at hackathons, but that's the exception. I love hackathons. I have a couple of buddies and we go to every TechCrunch hackathon, and some of the others from time to time. We do it because it's fun. We love the social aspect of it. We don't go expecting to win. We go because we enjoy it. I like the little side prizes $x free services for the best on Y platfom; a free iPad for the best using Z platform. But when it's become about $50,000 grand prizes, and places in unproven incubators/accelerators I think we risk destoying the atmosphere of hackathons. We'll drive away the social participants and it'll just be competitive hackathoners, and when they realize it's not the best way to achieve their startup goals they'll move on... Let's just go back to fun hackathons, like the old TechCrunch ones used to be. Good food, social activities, fun atmosphere, lots of vendors and partners to teach us about their APIs and perhaps a few side prizes that are nice-to-wins but don't have people thinking this will make or break their startup.