Remember Those Red Darpa Balloons? We Helped Find Three Of Them
May 11, 2010 at 11:46 AM EDT
Remember the DARPA red balloon challenge back in December? DARPA launched ten red balloons across the country and offered $40,000 to the first group of people who could identify the exact locations of all ten. All sorts of teams with different strategies participated, with the winning team coming from MIT. Well, it turns out that TechCrunch helped find three of those balloons, more than any other source. The way the MIT team, headed by Riley Crane from the MIT Media Lab, got people across the country to tell them where the balloons were was through simple economic incentives. Anyone who found a balloon got $2,000, and anyone who recruited a person who found a balloon got $1,000. The latter was us. We created a team which ended up signing up three of the winners.