It may very well be. But does it matter? As a hackathon organizer/mentor, these are exactly the resources I'd recommend. Publicity by providing a service is not a new concept; I really enjoy this post about it in particular:

http://blog.crew.co/how-side-projects-saved-our-startup/

I don't think that post is the same situation at all - there, Crew made side projects that became popular and then received traffic from them. Here, corporate sponsors skew which tools a ChallengePost employee recommends for hackers - some of which I personally believe are not at all good tools for the listed jobs (S3 for static website hosting??).

OP here. Some of the tools are related to clients / hackathon sponsors - but most aren't. And s3 is an excellent tool for static site hosting. You can add cloudfront in a snap, it's stupid cheap, and you can deploy from the command line ( https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website is awesome for this.)

Also, I've actually used _all_ of these tools before, both for personal & hackathon projects. I know they work.