About

About Team DeciNena

We are a group of smart and organized people trying to use our talents to have a good time, and possibly win the DARPA Network Challenge on Dec 5th 2009 (aka "B-Day").

We will use social technologies to assemble and coordinate a large group of Seekers across the US who will hunt down and verify the locations of the ten red balloons. A lot of our strategies will only be disclosed to team members as we get closer to B-Day, since we know many other teams are looking for an edge and would be happy to copy us. We are using virtualized hosting (at Red rocks Data Center and EC2/RDS/S3 cloud computing at Amazon Web Services). Our site is built using the amazing Drupal 6 Open Source Content Management System, without which none of this would be feasible.

We have devised some Rules to foster a friendly environment to pursue our goal, and a fair way of sharing the Prizes with our Team if we win.

The team is assembled by Chris 'Xenon' Hanson, founder of AlphaPixel, LLC. AlphaPixel is contributing various services including hosting and communications, book-keeping and payment services (if we win) and some funding for various expenses.

DeciNena is a geek pun on the name of the group (Nena) who sang the popular 80's song, 99 luftballoons (99 red balloons in the English version). Deci being the pun for 1/10th implies we're looking for about 9.9 red balloons. Since this is a DARPA project, the phrase "close enough for government work" cements the deal.

You can buy an MP3 of the song from Amazon and if you do, the team might earn a couple of pennies in affiliate kickbacks!

You can send general inquiries to us at decinena@gmail.com.