Applications are fashionable and Salesforce wants to make sure to attract enough developers next month to their San Francisco conference. As part of its Dreamforce 2013 conference, the CRM and cloud computing provider is holding a Salesforce development contest that will reward the best mobile application based on its cloud platform.

The Dreamforce user conference 2013 is to be held from November 18 to 21 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. And the company has announced a hackathon to be held as part of this event. The key: a $1 million reward for developer or team that creates the best mobile application based on cloud technology.

“We’re in the midst of a mobile app renaissance,” said Adam Seligman, vice president of Salesforce Platform developer and partner marketing. “Developers are reinventing how business works, and how companies connect with their customers. With the Salesforce Platform, they have the proven mobile, social and cloud services to create exponentially more productive apps for the enterprise.”

The announcement was made last week and since then the company said that there is no need to wait for Dreamforce, but those interested can start now with Force.com, Heroku, ExactTarget Fuel, Mobile Service and other enterprise tools. Salesforce.com also said it will provide new technologies during the event. To be eligible, developers will have to be registered for special $99 Hacker Pass that will give developers access to the Developer Zone and main keynote at Dreamforce.

Those who participate this hackathon will face stiff competition as some 20,000 developers are expected at Dreamforce. Entries will be judged on four criteria each accounting for 25% – innovation, the commercial value, the user experience and the use of cloud platform. There will be price of $50,000 and $25,000 respectively given to those who will drop out the second and third place. Teams arriving in fourth and fifth position depart each with $10 000 and $5000.

Hackathon Towards a Solution

This contest not only demonstrates the growing interest of Salesforce in mobile technologies, but also give a chance for the company to attract more developers to its AppExchange marketplace and recent efforts to build out more tooling for mobile application development.

In July this year, Salesforce.com has expanded the number of mobile application development tools it supports including API support for four additional frameworks – Knockout.js, Appery.io, Sencha Touch and Xamarin. Salesforce.com’s own mobile SDK is also got a new feature called SmartSync, which allows developers to create applications that work with data both off and online.

Last week, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced a new “Cyber Grand Challenge” competition with a $2 million prize to build a fully automated cyber defense system that not only scans for and identifies vulnerabilities, but patches them on the fly. AT&T Developer Program and Intel recently invited developers, programmers, designers, gamers, coders, or IT students to participate in four regional “Internet of Things” hackathon and accelerator series. The hackathon program was aimed at school and educational students to introduce to the world of mobile and help them deploy new apps with website backends and fully hosted in the cloud.