4th Place in the 2014 Dreamforce Hackathon!

This past weekend was the annual hackathon hosted by Salesforce in San Francisco leading up to the Dreamforce conference. If you’ve never participated in a hackathon before I highly recommend it (especially this one); you would be hard pressed to find another event that was simultaneously the source of both so much fun and so much stress.

Our team built SalesCrypt — a mobile Point of Sale system for merchants to accept the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. As Bitcoin adoption continues to grow this will be a very valuable tool as the fees for Bitcoin transactions are negligible in comparison to the high CC fees many merchants pay today.

After less than 48 hours of development we were ready to showcase our product for the first round of judging; here’s a look at our ChallengePost submission and a demo video.

Thankfully we were selected to move on to the semi-finals for our category (Force.com + Heroku)! This meant giving a live presentation to a panel of judges at the Developer Zone theater during the Dreamforce conference. After getting some long overdue sleep our team reconvened to work on our pitch.

The next morning it was time to present-here’s a video of our presentation to the panelists. After several hours we were called back for the award ceremony — SalesCrypt was awarded the 4th place prize of $20,000!

What an amazing few days-I’m so thankful for all the hard work that Salesforce, BeMyApp, and many more put into making this hackathon possible. I’ve been really inspired lately by all the amazing people from these companies, by the Salesforce foundation, and by Salesforce’s 1/1/1 model.

Given this inspiration, along with some recent personal events that have happened in my life, I’ve decided to donate my portion of the prize money to charity; I’m hoping I can convince Salesforce to match the donation as well. :-)

In the meantime I’ll be brainstorming ideas for the 2015 Dreamforce hackathon…

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