After its public relations coup turned into a significant embarrassment, Salesforce.com has investigated itself, and changed the results of its recent contest for software developers.
The conclusion: Salesforce did nothing too bad, but the contest now has two winners.
During its recent annual conference, Salesforce held a hackathon with a $1 million prize for the team of outside developers that could build the best product using the company’s new system for making applications work across different Web and mobile screens.
Soon after, word spread that the winning company, called Upshot, included a former Salesforce employee, who appeared to have written much of his winning entry ahead of time.
Following criticism of both Salesforce and the outside judges of the contest, Salesforce promised an investigation.
The company has concluded that Upshot’s team had left Salesforce well before the deadline stipulated in the rules. Salesforce also examined the source code Upshot wrote during the contest, and concluded that the start-up did do a significant amount of novel work at that time.
Counter to what some participants had charged, the company said, all entries were reviewed. There was an initial group of judges, made up of Salesforce employees, who weeded out most of the 154 submissions. A second group of six judges, five of whom were not Salesforce employees, had awarded the final prize.
“They were not as familiar with our technology platform,” said Burke Norton, the chief legal officer of Salesforce, who conducted the review. “We didn’t give them good information about the use of pre-existing code.”
As a result, Salesforce concluded, another company might have won the $1 million prize. Since it can’t rewind the clock, it seems, Upshot gets to keep its $1 million, and another company, Healthcare.Love, will also get $1 million.
In a wrinkle that won’t help Salesforce’s public relations problem, members of the Healthcare.Love team are employed by a company in which Salesforce holds a small equity stake. Salesforce also determined that this is not material, since it had no ability to actually control that company.
In addition, Salesforce has posted all of the submissions online, and says it will try to get the contestants to work further with Salesforce.
Salesforce says it will continue to offer hackathons, and other outreach to independent developers. No word on what the next prize will be, or how many winners we can expect.