Hackathons Helped Facebook Evolve - Now South Korea Wants To Do The Same For Its Startups

Many large corporations have hosted a hackathon, including Google Inc GOOG and Microsoft Corporation MSFT. Few of them are willing to talk openly about how those events might have changed their businesses. Facebook Inc FB is the exception. Pedram Keyani, who served as the company's manager of engineering within the site integrity team, told Fast Company that hackathons are a way for Facebook to experiment without incurring any major expenses. He said a lot of the ideas don't make it into products, "but every hackathon tends to result in four or five things implemented on the site." "A couple have changed the direction of the company," he added. When asked for an example, Keyani pointed to a major one: chat. "For a long time, there was a lot of negative pressure in the company against building a chat client," Keyani told Fast Company in 2012. "The thing around here is, code wins arguments. You could argue something for two days, or you could just make it and prove your point in an hour."

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These are the benefits that South Korea hopes to reap from its enormous hackathon, which promises to be the world's largest hacking event. The Seoul Metro Government (the administrative organization of Seoul) announced this week that it has teamed up with Global Hackathon to host the first international, city-backed hackathon. The news comes only a few months after Google announced that it would open a campus for startups in Seoul. "We have an opportunity to import the mindset and innovative trends of the best hackers from around the world," KJ Yoo, Executive Director of Global Hackathon, told Benzinga. "We are carefully designing an experience so that many different nations become unified by code and creativity." Global Hackathon Seoul is scheduled to take place between July 29 and August 1, 2015. In the meantime, event organizers are working with a number of schools (such as Stanford, MIT and Princeton), all of which have previously hosted successful hackathons. Official sponsors have not been announced, but it's safe to assume Google, Microsoft or Facebook (or all three) will want to be a part of the event. Disclosure: At the time of this writing, Louis Bedigian had no position in the equities mentioned in this report.