Source: The Guardian"A $40,000 online challenge proposed by the US government has been won by a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - just hours after it was launched.
"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."
What a great project! At an average of &10 prize money per team, Darpa got 4,000 teams to focus on how to use social networking. In the process Darpa demonstrated the power of the approach. Who would have thought a team in Cambridge (Mass.) could locate ten balloons released all over the United States in nine hours? In addition, Darpa got worldwide attention to both itself and to the power of social networking. And all was accomplished at low cost!
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