What do the teams do before the hackathon? The point of having HackerEarth is to give time for team formation prior to the day of as well as getting teams to brainstorm and even work on their project beforehand so that when the day of the event occurs, there is more time for coding and community.

What do the teams do the evening of the Hackathon? The Hackathon will still run the same time as the previous years (6PM-midnight) so there will be more than enough time to work on projects and if teams have spent adequate time before and only need to do finishing touches, then it provides an opportunity to meet other members of the community. This being said, judging will on be based on what is done at the Hackathon itself so that everyone is judged equally.

Will teams be provided with a demo environment? No

Will there be (sufficient) bandwidth on the evening of the Hackathon to do stuff? Yes, It will be running the same time as in previous years, almost 5 hours so there will definitely be sufficient time to work on projects. Participants will only be judged on what they create the night of so we have made sure that there will be enough time to create.

Do I need to pay any money to register for the Hackathon? No. You do not have to pay anything to anyone to register yourself for any Hackathon on HackerEarth.

Do I need to have any specific qualifications to be a participant for the Hackathon? If you love to code, you are more than welcome to participate in the Hackathon.

Do we need to have the entire idea fully working? The entire idea need not be fully implemented however, the submission should be functional so that it can be reviewed by the judges.

A fully developed application need to have a solid backend for data storage like SQL, SharePoint etc. since its online, is it accepted to show only the proto type of it? Yes it's absolutely fine to submit just the prototype. If you use any database like MySQL or PostgresSQL you can also submit a database dump along with your submission. However you are allowed to submit just the prototype.

If it is a team submission, does that mean all team members will have access to work at the same time? Yes, all team members can login from their account and do application submission on HackerEarth.

Who will own the IP(Intellectual Property) Rights to the product that I have built? The developer/developers of the web/mobile application will have all rights and own the IP of the product. However, all code needs to be in public domain (open source) so that it can be evaluated by the judges.