Balloons found for $40K
By Pulkit Sharma

DARPA is the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense. DARPA's mission is to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from threatening American national security. DARPA funds unique and innovative research through the private sector, academic and other non-profit organizations as well as government labs.

DARPA had announced a competition where the challenge was to “locate ten moored red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons would be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives”. The competition took place on Saturday, Dec 5, 2009.

The idea of the contest was to see how people on the internet and social networking sites could work together to resolve any challenge.  The US military would then use this knowledge to improve its processes.

Ivy League tech institution MIT won the contest in less than 12 hours. MIT explained their solution on their website.  This is crowdsourcing at its very best including a cut for charity.

“
MIT is giving $2000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that's not all -- we're also giving $1000 to the person who invited them. Then we're giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on... (See how it works).

It might play out like this. Alice joins the team, and we give her an invite link like mit.edu/alice. Alice then e-mails her link to Bob, who uses it to join the team as well. We make a mit.edu/bob link for Bob, who posts it to Facebook. His friend Carol sees it, signs up, then twitters about mit.edu/carol. Dave uses Carol's link to join... then spots one of the DARPA balloons! Dave is the first person to report the balloon's location to us, and the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team is the first to find all 10. Once that happens, we send Dave $2000 for finding the balloon. Carol gets $1000 for inviting Dave, Bob gets $500 for inviting Carol, and Alice gets $250 for inviting Bob. The remaining $250 is donated to charity.
“

(Techgoss had published the following on Oct 30, 2009)

$40K to find 10 balloons
By Pulkit Sharma

First things first,  I have checked the rules for this competition and we Indians are eligible to participate.

DARPA is the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense. DARPA's mission is to maintain the technological superiority of the U.S. military and prevent technological surprise from threatening American national security. DARPA funds unique and innovative research through the private sector, academic and other non-profit organizations as well as government labs.

DARPA has just announced a competition where the challenge is to “locate ten moored red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives. All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM (local time) on Saturday, December 5, 2009.”

Naturally,  satellites are one good way to find such balloons.  Will ISRO take the challenge?  Google Maps perhaps?