Find DARPA’s Balloons and Win $40,000

December 2, 2009 — Facebook. Twitter. Flickr. Blogger. MySpace. It doesn’t matter what social media you use, but if you’re always connected to friends and family, you can put those networks to use and maybe win big money this weekend. It’a all part of a DARPA contest that is using balloons to explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in timely communication. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will award $40,000 to the first person who can identify the latitudes and longitudes of 10 red weather balloons positioned across the United States as part of its Network Challenge. The balloons will be located in public areas and only be visible from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. EDT on Saturday, December 5. Each team has approximately nine days to collect the locations — including the precise latitudes and longitudes — of any balloons and submit its entry. "We are not interested in the balloons. We already know where those are," Norman Whitaker, DARPA's deputy director of transformational convergence technology, told CNET. "It's the techniques people use to solve the challenge we're focused on. We have people who are going to be actively watching from the sidelines to see how this plays out." Whitaker is hoping the contest will offer insight into how the Internet and social networks can help people build teams and collaborate with each other to solve real problems and challenges. DARPA is leaving it up to the contestants to best figure out how to work with others to track the balloons, CNET reported. Whitaker said people can use a Web site and offer a portion of the prize to anyone who shares information about the locations of the balloons, or people can work with a charity and donate their winnings. People can also ask for help through Web-based tools such as Facebook or Twitter, connecting via computers or smartphones. DARPA isn't sure yet what it will do with the information it finds. But that's never stopped the agency before. "We're DARPA," Whitaker told CNET. "We like to do things that are really out of the box." .

On Saturday, DARPA will launch 10 red weather balloons, somewhat larger than the one shown here, around the continental United States. The first person to identify the locations of all the balloons will win a $40,000 prize. Photo credit: DARPA

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