It was firsthand. I'm not entirely sure how many people were invited to the call. They talked about the hackathon (mostly marketing stuff). In the QA afterward they were asked some details about teams (if everyone had to be there, etc), but the question of preventing people from bringing premade apps came up. And the answer given was almost exactly (per my memory) "You may use an existing application, however, you will only be judged on your contributions for the hackathon". It's weird that no one really dug deeper for more clarification, and I'm ashamed for not doing so myself.
Wow. Thank you. Who issued the call from their side? I can't imagine they passed that information to the judges. But even before then it should have been made public and applied to the entries. That would have made the winning app a text field with Google voice that shows an arbitrary link
