Great for these guys to have their event sold out! (Though... the justin bieber comparison is a bit disingenuous, but hey, i clicked the link so it worked.)
Here's a question: for companies that sponsor hackathons, do you find value in doing so? That is, are you able to measure the effectiveness of that channel from the perspective of making more people use the product, recruiting better-quality candidates, or anything else to help the business? How do you even measure and track the value?
The point is not at all that PennApps is more popular than Justin Bieber. The point is that, for a certain demographic, hackathons are getting crazy popular.
There are a lot of things that are scaled here. For one thing, this is about perception and expectation--who would think that a hackathon would sell out in less than an hour? Everyone expects Justin Bieber to do that, but a hackathon?!
Here's a question: for companies that sponsor hackathons, do you find value in doing so? That is, are you able to measure the effectiveness of that channel from the perspective of making more people use the product, recruiting better-quality candidates, or anything else to help the business? How do you even measure and track the value?