Still, the final results felt similarly weird. The winner was a (non-technical) dude who had been pitching his startup for months already and found himself an amazingly talented developer at the hackathon. They made use of most of the sponsor APIs and added PayPal as a payment option for the already existing service. To me it felt like the guy was just going to random hackathons so he could get work done on his website for free. Even though the developer seemed to be exceptionally good, it seemed like he was just being taken advantage of by a guy who couldn't get his startup to have more traction.
There were definitely much more impressive hacks out there. (Mine honestly wasn't one of them, so it's not just jealousy talking). In addition, the theme of the hackathon was 'solving local problems'. Now if not having a platform to get product X in city Y is a local problem, it might fit. For me though, the interpretation was more 'making the world a better place' and not 'building a purely profit-oriented application to sell stuff using PayPal'.
I think they simply chose the most monetizable product that was in the competition. Made the whole event, which, I repeat, was about the best organized and executed hackathon I've ever seen, suddenly feel cheap.
It is a running business, he pitched his company, that he has thousands of customers already. I heard the guy did the same at other hackathons in Berlin.
The Technical guy was a professional who knew from the beginning what he had to do, we spent half the time developing a concept.
The winning app makes it easy for consumers to find places to withdraw
small amounts of cash at a low cost, using businesses in their own
neighborhood and a PayPal technology that is very secure, said Alexander
Sjögren, who developed the app with Jose Pimienta and Osniel Gonzalez.
Sjögren is with the Miami company YellowPepper, which offers mobile
banking and payment solutions in Latin America. Pimienta and Gonzalez
co-founded Vinylfy, a startup catering to vinyl-record enthusiasts. [1]
About YellowPepper
YellowPepper Mobile Financial Solutions provides products and services
that enable mobile financial transactions between financial institutions
(banks), businesses, and consumers in Latin America. With 1.5 million
users, YellowPepper operates in Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Guatemala,
Peru, and Panama as a service provider for more than 50 financial and
non-financial institutions. For more information, log on to
www.yellowpepper.com. [2]
2. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/yellowpepper-and-fun...
http://miamiherald.typepad.com/the-starting-gate/2013/08/bat...
The winner in question was YellowPepper, who at the very least share their name with a startup also involved in mobile banking (http://www.yellowpepper.com/#/homeId/homeCB/page/home.html) and have issued a press release from Miami (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/yellowpepper-and-fun...).
(I'm not involved, I just saw this through Tom's Twitter.)