Early this morning (around 7 am) before church I read about DARPA's red balloon challenge. As my mind wandered during Pastor Mark's sermon (sorry!) I thought ... gee ... between my corporate Yammer network, and the Yammer Best Practices network ... I could put together a virtual team that would reach across the USA into hundreds of large corporations and involve their techies!
Thus, when I got on my computer after church and got ready to set my plan in action. Darn! Wouldn't you know ... a bunch of MIT students set a network into action and located all the ten balloons in under ten hours. I was already too late before I even started! Next week I'll pay more attention in church!
One of DARPA's goals was to see how quickly social networks could be utilized to achieve a common goal. In this instance the answer was "fast". For an interesting analysis, link on over to General Electric's Global Research Blog. They have a nice post with links which will fill you in on the competition.
The map below shows where the balloons were found (click to view full sized). Thus, as you can see the task was both difficult and a geographical challenge.
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