$40,000, was the prize money for the proposed online challenge. The US government competition was won by a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – just hours after it was launched. 3000 teams entered teh competition.
The Darpa Network Challenge, which took place on Saturday, offered a cash prize for the first group to successfully locate 10 large red weather balloons hidden at a string of secret locations across the US.
Competitors were asked to use the internet and social networking sites to discover the whereabouts of the balloons, in what Darpa – the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – said was an experiment to discover how the internet could help with rapid problem solving.
It was all done and dusted in just 9 nine hours.
The winning team has not explained precisely how they came to discover the location of all 10 balloons, but the process detailed on the team website explains that they created a viral campaign to encourage people to put forward information they gleaned about the locations.
This shows us how quickly, using social media, a bit of financial insentive can spread things around America in relatively super fast ways.
Simple pyramid formation and social networking = great viral oportunities.
