Two developers who met at Harvard University 15 years ago
are the winners of the Salesforce.com $1 million hackathon for its
service to create mobile reports for sales people using the
Salesforce.com platform. The app, called Upshot, was developed by
Thom Kim and Joseph Turian. The service parses data in plain
English, connects via API and then presents results for the
smartphone or tablet user. Users can also use Google’s voice
capability to do queries. [Editor’s note: This post left
out the fact that at least one person on the winning team had
previously been a long-time Salesforce employee even though that
was disclosed onstage, and even though the author self-disclosed as
a hackathon judge.
This was a serious omission, and we’ve updated the post. Salesforce also provided the five finalists for the
judges, and didn’t disclose that the app had been live for many months — normally hackathons don’t allow that.

Salesforce explains its side of the story in this blog post]  The other winners were:

• Healthcare.love came in second and won $50,000 for its
  service for helping people choose a health plan
• The $25,000 third prize went to Hirebase, a service
  that allows to highlight resumes with different colors
  and annotations
• The fourth place $10,000 prize
  went to Salesfetch, a service for
  finding information across different services to get a
  full picture of the lead
• And the $5,000 fifth
  prize was awarded to 2lemetry for its service that detects
  the identity and background of people as they approach a
  trade booth The service uses Raspberry Pi and a low power
  bluetooth device to make the detections.

Kim
and Turian did a demo that showed an app that allows for reports to
be created with drill downs on specific information
points. Queries can be done on the fly by inputting
into the mobile device or by Google Voice. The hackathon began Monday with the
start of the Dreamforce event. Dozens of teams participated. The
teams were judged on their innovation, the customer experience, its
business value and use of the Salesforce platform. As a disclaimer,
I was one of the hackathon judges.