• Sign up to receive a link.
• Invite your friends using your link.
• If anyone you invite finds a balloon, you all win!

This Saturday, December 5th, DARPA will be deploying 10 large, red weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the United States. (more info)

DARPA is giving $40,000 to the first team of people to find all 10 balloons. Join the MIT team, invite your friends and you can win money, help science, and help charity! (see how it works)

The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team is interested in studying information flow in social networks, so if we win, we're giving all the money away to the people who help us find the balloons!

When you sign up to join the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, you'll be provided with a personalized invitation link, like http://balloon.mit.edu/yournamehere.

Have all your friends sign up using your personalized invitation. If anyone you invite, or anyone they invite, or anyone they invite (...and so on) win money, then so will you!

We're 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 http://balloon.mit.edu/alice. Alice then e-mails her link to Bob, who uses it to join the team as well. We make a http://balloon.mit.edu/bob link for Bob, who posts it to Facebook. His friend Carol sees it, signs up, then twitters about http://balloon.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.