Pentagon floats weather balloons to examine how social networking sites help people collaborate

Yesterday morning 10 eight-foot red weather balloons went up across America, put up in secret locations throughout the country by Darpa, the research arm of the Pentagon and a real world version of James Bond’s Q.The launch marks the start of a competition to see how social networking sites such as Twitter can be used to help people collaborate to resolve real life problems, such as searches. The first team to give the exact location of all the balloons wins $40,000 (€27,000).
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/public_sector/article6946164.eceAlso see:MIT team wins Darpa’s treasure hunt in less than one day
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.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/07/darpa-challengeMIT wins DARPA balloon challenge
A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has won $40,000 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for correctly finding the locations of 10 red balloons scattered across the U.S.Launched on Saturday, the DARPA Network Challenge released the 10 red balloons into the air, then dared contestants to find their latitude and longitude by the end of the day. Since no one person could track down all 10 in just one day, the point of the contest was to see how participants would use the Internet and social networking to team up with others to solve the quest.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10410403-93.html