MIT team wins Darpa’s treasure hunt in less than one day 

Bobbie Johnson in San Francisco

guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 December 2009 06.37 GMT

Article history

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.

Competitors were asked to use the internet and social networking sites to discover the whereabouts of the balloons, in what Darpa – the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – said was an experiment to discover how the internet could help with rapid problem solving.

More than 4,000 groups eventually registered to take part, but although the organisers had given players up to nine days to track the balloons down, the team from MIT scooped victory within nine hours of the launch.

“Darpa salutes the MIT team for successfully completing this complex task less than nine hours after the balloon launch,” said Regina Dugan, the director of the agency.

The winning team has not explained precisely how they came to discover the location of all 10 balloons, but the process detailed on the team website explains that they created a viral campaign to encourage people to put forward information they gleaned about the locations.

The team offered the first person to spot a balloon a $2,000 share of the prize money, but smaller awards would also be given to those who referred that player to MIT’s website – a scheme of incentives aimed at getting people to urge their friends to take part.

Whatever happened in the end, it appeared to work – and quickly.

“The challenge has captured the imagination of people around the world, is rich with scientific intrigue and, we hope, is part of a growing ‘renaissance of wonder’ throughout the nation,” said Dr Dugan.

In the end the eight-foot balloons were hidden in locations across nine states: Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

Good Morning! While meandering through the many inspirational design oriented blog sites I read, I came across this one that I thought I’d pass along.

Being someone who was trained as a graphic designer before making the leap to interactive design grid systems have played a pretty important role in the way I approach our projects here, at 1080 Media. The way I’ve always seen the grid is kind of like a house. All of the support walls and foundations hold the house together, and you build all of the ‘personality’ in the house out from the foundations. That is exactly what good grid work in design does. It would be like building a website without implenting any CSS, sure you could do it that way, but why?

This one comes from my friends over at www.aisleone.net. I’d recommend you guys check their site every now again for great info in dealing with grid systems in design.

A few myths and misconceptions about grids exist in the design community that can be detrimental, especially to designers who are new to the subject. I recently read this article claiming that grids have disadvantages and then it goes on to list them. As you can guess, I very much disagree with this entire article and feel that it’s providing a lot of bad information on grid systems. All of the listed “disadvantages” are distortions derived from the lack of understanding on how a grid works and functions.

In response to that article, here’s my attempt at clearing up this mess.

Grids are a design trend.

Grids have been in use long before graphic design became a discipline. During the 13th– and 14th-centuries, scribes used the Villard Diagram to organize their handwritten manuscripts. In the 15th-century, Gutenberg and others divided their pages using the Van de Graaf canon.

The use of a grid is not a trend, it’s a fundamental skill that designers should possess. Grids have been around a very long time and are an important part of the design process.

Grids can impede creativity.

Definitely the most ridiculous of the bunch, this myth suggests that a grid will cause a designer to be less creative. A grid should never define a design, it should work with it. To suggest that a grid can hinder creativity is the same as suggesting that a music tempo can as well. A grid is a building block that can never, and should never, impede creativity.

The legendary designer, Josef Müller-Brockmann, explained it well:

“The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropriate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice.”

Another outrageous claim is that grids are confining. When used properly, a grid will never limit or confine a design, it will grow and adapt to your liking. If someone tells you a grid gives you no freedom, that person doesn’t fully understand the purpose of a grid or how it should be used. Grids are flexible and allow for an infinite number of possibilities.

Graphic designer and writer Ellen Lupton explains:

“To say a grid is limiting is to say that language is limiting, or typography is limiting.”

Where people get confused is with the notion that a design utilizing a grid should look “grid-like”, giving a clear indication of columns. Fortunately, that isn’t true, and this poster by Brockmann is a great example. The text clearly falls on a grid but the concentric shapes have more of an organic feel, making the grid invisible.

Grids only benefit certain designs.

A grid can be used for ALL designs. I’ll repeat that. A grid can be used for ALL designs.

To suggest that only certain designs can benefit from using a grid is to suggest that a structural foundation can only benefit a certain type of building or that grammar is only useful for a certain style of writing. A grid is a foundation, and like with any architectural structure, it’s a vital part of the process.

Grids also do not satisfy a specific aesthetic. They do not require the use of Helvetica or the omission of images. A grid can be applied to any style of design, no matter if it’s scrapbooky, or clean and minimal. You don’t have to design like Brockmann to use a grid.

Here are two sites that exhibit completely different styles of design, but both make use of a grid.

Example 1 is predominantly white, doesn’t feature many colors or textures and uses a sans-serif typeface.

Example 2 uses a larger variety of colors, textures and a serif typeface.

Grids require a lot of content.

The amount of content in no way dictates whether a grid is required or not. A design needs to visually communicate an idea or message, whether it’s a 250 page story, or a 5 word sentence and an image. A grid helps achieve that goal through structure, organization and hierarchy.

Grids slow down the design process.

The opposite is actually true. A well-designed grid, used by a competent designer, can help solve a design problem in less time. A fully designed grid system will also provide a consistent structure and organization across a multi-page design, like a web site, making the process more efficient.

Grids only work in a fixed layout.

This is specific to web design. Many people believe that a grid needs to be fixed and as a result can only generate a fixed layout.

Not true.

A grid can be designed to be fluid and change with the viewport size, scaling itself proportionately.

A few articles have been written on the subject and there are even a few CSS frameworks available:

Fluid Grids
The Fluid Grid system
Fluid 960 Grid System

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has helped clear up a few myths and misconceptions about grids, and has allowed you to better understand the purpose of them and how they should be used.

If you’re interested in learning more about grid systems, visit my site The Grid System for helpful links to articles, tools, books and templates.

At 1080 Media we love using little tricks of the trade to give us an edge in the market… That being said… Here is our little SEO blurb boost for the week… 1080 Media is THE premier Ohio marketing firm. 1080 Media is THE Ohio advertising agency. Marketing Ohio and advertising Ohio with cutting edge media productions. For marketing in the Youngstown and Boradman Ohio areas and advertsing in the Youngstown and Boardman area call 1080 Media today at 330.482.5855! 

If you need a cutting edge Ohio advertising agency, or a knowledgeable Ohio marketing firm visit 1080 Media today…  Looking for a local Boardman or Youngstown marketing firm?  Looking for a local Boardman or Youngstown advertising agency? Well look no further… Call 1080 Media today for all of your marketing and advertising solutions.

LOL… God bless blogging… Google loves it so

At 1080 Media we not only try to keep up with current trends, we also ask the question… What’s coming next?  Below is a great article posted by Mercedes Bunz from the PDA Blog in the UK… check it out and leave a comment!

After social networks, what next?

Are social networks the internet’s last big development? And how much will they change? A star panel in Oxford asks big questions

Openness is important for the future of a company, says Biz Stone, CEO of Twitter

In digital media, as in fortune-telling, the future is pretty much treated as part of the present. “What is the next big thing?” is a question everyone who works with the internet asks continually. But after several years of boom, the question of what comes after social platforms is no longer so remote.

Luckily, some experts just gave us answers. On Monday evening, the Said Business School in Oxford had invited some very bright and successful entrepreneurs who spoke in front of a packed alumni audience as Silicon Valley came to Oxford for the ninth year. The event was chaired by the very lively and assertive Frances Cairncross, rector of Exeter college.

The first expert to confront us with an answer was Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and made early investments in Facebook and LinkedIn. He reminded us to evaluate first what stage we’re at with social networks. “With digital technology there is a tendency to underestimate when things are getting mature, but to understand the financial and technological situation it is really important,” he explained.

“If you look back from today, it becomes clear that in 2002 even experts missed that Google had already become the main search engine. If people would have understood back at that time that there was no chance any more to outrun Google, some investments would have been different. But back at these days we didn’t discuss Google like this.”

He asked the audience: “Where in the history of social network are we? Are we at an early stage, and most of the companies won’t be around in a few years’ time? Or are we in a late stage, when companies like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter are really mature and will be in business to stay?”

Then he floated a bigger and more daring possibility – that the development stage of the internet itself has come to an end: “Are we at the end of innovation of social networking? And is social networking the last innovation of the internet?”

“See, we went from the development of telecommunication to the internet and from the internet to social networking. Maybe there is no innovation left any more, and we have to look for it in a completely different direction. Maybe we have to go back to space and science fiction novels.”

Being the CEO of Twitter, Biz Stone was quite sure that for him that wasn’t the case. After having said to reporters earlier in the day that he was not thinking about selling the company but would rather go to the stock market if necessary, he started to relax the atmosphere, joking that he felt he was on a Seinfeld panel asking: “Social networks, what’s the deal?”

Then he shuffled himself out of the responsibility of answering that question, stating that Twitter isn’t even a social network. “Twitter never asked anyone to have a permanent relationship among each other. Indeed, we even changed the question we used to asked on Twitter ‘What are you doing?’ last week in ‘What’s happening?’ because everybody was ignoring it anyway.”

“I refer to Twitter as an information network rather then a social network. And here I believe in the trend of openness. Using an open technology, creating an open platform, and being more transparent that is where we are heading.”

Stone believes that technology has a political impact that shouldn’t be underestimated. Referring to Twitter’s involvement in the Iranian election protests, he said: “On a large scale, the open exchange of information can even lead to positive global impact. If people are more informed they are more engaged, and if they are more engaged they are more empathic. They are global citizens, not just a citizen of a nation.”

Ram Shriram, a founding board member of Google and one of the search giant’s first investors, pointed discussion in a different direction. “Combining social and mobile – there is a new wave of oppportunities coming up, a growth of users, so mobile internet is clearly the next major computing cycle. And this time this didn’t start in the US, but in Asia and Europe from where it is going to the US,” he said.

“In China and India people always used their mobile as their PC; that was the way they accessed data. We face powerful new waves of publishing with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and the social sits in the middle of this. There is a creation and production of information. There will be new distribution and consumption patterns which will impact society. This might even make newspapers even more irrelevant.”

Then he made a number of predictions: “Facebook will replace email for a new generation. The chat is moving to a multimedia format. Gaming will move from devices directly to the internet. And Apple has a big future because of its strong mobile focus.”

Otherwise, the coming mobile business opportunities would be taken by small young companies, because it was easy and cheap to build these applications, which would either fail or succeed at speed. Shriram also believes that advertising will grow less important: “Users tend to pay on the mobile internet for premium services.”

LinkedIn-CEO Reid Hoffman believes that there is more to come of the data generated by social networks LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, who graduated from Stanford University and Oxford with a master’s degree in philosophy, tackled Thiel’s social-networks-are-the-end thesis head on. “I actually think we are just beginning to see how people launch the eventualities of social networks into their life,” he said, reminding the audience of the way that mobile phones had grown from a tool for bankers to a part of everyone’s life.

“I think the phenomenon of the online relationship empowers our personal and professional life. You might think ‘Who wants to consume all this useless information?’, but with some information it is like with ice cream. It is not nutritious, but people still eat it. And to understand what will go on, you will have to switch that to business models.”

For Facebook, Last.fm and Flickr applications, he argued, using live data would become much more important. “Today you have everyone generating data.I think these massive amounts of data are perfect for new applications. There will be a lot of new applications come out of it. Obvious ones, like whom you should meet professionally, and some we don’t even thing about. There will be interesting mash ups liked LinkedIn and Twitter.”

An Oxford lecturer, Dr Kate Blackmon put this in a nutshell in saying that the future was not about crowd sourcing but crowd filtering.

So is social media over? There are now enough social networks to fill all the obvious niches; but making use of the stream of information that pours into them is something we’ve only just started.

Have a great Thanksgiving from 1080 Media!  We hope all our blog viewers and our customers have a great and safe holiday.

At 1080 Media we love a good deal… and free is even better!  That’s why we use and support Google Analytics.  For comprehensive and thorough data I can’t say I have seen a free analytics package that rivals that of Google’s… especially in ease of use over managing multiple domain names.  Not familiar with Google Analytics… go to google, setup an account and check it out!

At 1080 Media we strongly believe in keeping it SIMPLE!  Simplicity is a beautiful concept because it keeps things streamlined and efficient, and creates a better customer experience.  We incorporate simplicity in all of our design and in all of our development.  Simplicity means faster checkout concepts for shopping carts, logo design that is vectored for easy scalability and transposition to different media, and a general 3 click concept for websites… Whats’ a 3 click concept you may ask…  At 1080 Media, we feel that any customer using a site that we have designed should be able to find what they are looking for on that site with a maximum of three mouse clicks.

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”

                                                                              Confucius

From Linux to PHP and MySQL, open source solutions are growing exponentially in popularity… and it is rightly so!  Even Adobe has jumped into the open source market with its new flex code libraries.  At 1080 Media we are pro open source! 

What makes open source so great… let me count the ways… customization, vast code libraries, vast resources, affordability, oh and did I mention customization!  The embodiment of open source is that it brings coders and end users together in an effort to further the advancement of technology.  Since everyone can see and edit the code used to develope open source scripts and applications… with a little communication anything is possible… I like the sound of that!

At 1080 Media we believe in speed and efficiency in everything that we do… and We hope others feel the same way to…  so one thing I can’t understand is that if things should be as fast and efficient as possible… why have so many designers been casting away html tables for years?

Tables are old school yes… it doesn’t get much more basic then rows and columns… however stacking insane amounts of div structures and positions in a css file can slow things down rapidly and doesn’t always sync across a wide range of browser platforms.

For the best, and fastest, cross browser results why not use a combination of the two… OH MY! TABLES AND CSS WORKING TOGETHER!… Is the concept really that hard… I don’t think so people… you can add css to a table cell very easily… and it doesn’t take a genius to put a table in a div… GET IT TOGETHER PEOPLE… and your pages will GET FASTER!

Customer Relations Management systems or CRM’s are an incredible tool for businesses to track and analyze what their customers are doing and what they desire. Many of these advanced CRM’s are great because the customer themselves gets something out of the deal by participating in the program. Examples could include Giant Eagle Fuel Perks or the Best Buy Reward Zone. Some companies however are loosing site of keeping things simple and streamlined for the customer and for themselves.

I had a miserable experience this weekend trying to access my Best Buy Reward Zone points to purchase a new laptop online. I have been a Reward Zone Member for many years but have not bought anything online or cashed my points in a very long time. When trying to check out my purchase I assumed I was already a Best Buy member and tried to log into Best Buy with My Reward Zone Log in… this attempt failed miserably because reward zone membership and Best Buy membership are two separate things…. Why is this… Why would my Reward Zone membership not a be a direct extension of my Best Buy Membership… Where in a Reward Zone Account would automatically assume the creation of a Best Buy account. If a customer had a regular online Best Buy account but was not yet a Reward Zone member he could simply log in and sign up for the Reward Zone from their normal account and be able to access his Reward Zone information from that same account.

In my situation I had the hassle of logging into multiple accounts and switching back and forth between tabs to enter information that could have easily been automatically generated for me. The way these multiple setups are arranged is not only inconvenient for me the customer, but has to also be inconvenient and inefficient for those managing and trouble shooting the Best Buy site. We do people loose site of simple streamlined customer experiences and making things as efficient as possible on their end!