The MIT Balloon Challenge Team just sent out an email to their “thousands” of team members congratulating them on winning the great DARPA balloon hunt.
Apparently it will take them quite some time to determine how to divide the award. You see, the first person to correctly report the coordinates of a balloon (within .1 of a mile) will get $2,000. The person who referred them will get $1000 and the person who referred the referrer will get $500 and the person who referred the referrer of the referrer will get $250. Mercifully, the final $250 goes to some charity.
Then MIT will have to 1099 the winners of the $2,000 and $1,000 awards and if MIT is like any other educational institution they will probably 1099 all the awardees. Let me see…. collecting social security info on 40 persons, that should take about an elapsed 60 days.
Oh, and mid terms are coming.
Dudes, just tell DARPA to send a trophy.
Your incorrect, finals for the fall semester are coming up; Most colleges today have a school year divided into two semesters.
MIT acted as a broker to the DARPA project by dividing the winnings according to a race-reward-sharing model for anyone who delivered the coordinates to MIT. They acted more like HBS than MIT on this one. In my opinion this test demonstrates that the Web and social networks are not ready to rival institutions who can basically shortcut and inject themselves as brokers. Additionally, very little was learned or demonstrated as MIT hijacked to potential innovations that could have to emerged from the challenge. MIT won by bribing instead of innovating. MIT should not exhibit confidence in the victory. MIT’s victory did not teach DARPA was that wars can be won by trade and economics; the history of conflicts have thought us that very well. I am disappointed in MIT’s approach and feel for all who tried to use new technologies to discover new ways to gain awareness.