Common Paradox Tech Blog

coondoggie writes “The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather balloons scattered at undisclosed locations across the country. The first person to identify the location of all the balloons and enter them on the challenge Web site will win a $40,000 cash prize. According to the agency, the 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 on Saturday, December 5, 2009.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I asked for sketches to feed into the magic Photosketch image compositing program. You delivered just a few weirdustrations, but enough to show that there’s one little pack of sick individuals reading Gizmodo:

gawkerGallery(5381699,7,’Photosketch Sketches’);

Too bad. If I could, I would name myself winner, and get the $10,000 prize in cash. In fact, if we had that cash prize, I would have done exactly that. [Photosketch contest]

The I am T-Pain iPhone app just got the song you were waiting for: On a Boat.

Not only can you sing your own version of On a Boat now, with your own lyrics describing how you are on a [plane, train, toilet, supermarket kiddie ride], Smule is having a contest that you can win actual money from.

Here’s what you have to do. Submit your video performances to YouTube, and Smule will search out the best one.

* One grand prize winner will receive a cash prize of $5,000 and a Big Ass Chain ($47 value, approximate weight of 10 lbs)
* Ten finalists will receive a cash prize of $500 and set of Grillz (gold teeth)
* Other cool prizes, including autographed items, will be distributed during the contest. These prizes will go to contestants who make us (the Smule and Nappy Boy teams) laugh the hardest.

$5000 and a big ass chain for just doing what we were going to be doing anyway? Yes please. Contest rules are here. [iTunes]

So after much deliberation by our judges, tallying of the votes from readers, after coming up with an algorithm for all of this to come together, we finally have the results for the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin Competition. The competition was very close with year with, and as one of the judges put it, quite a few gems were found in the rough.

There are two runner ups in the competition this year with the exact same scores and a final Grand Prize winner who eked past their competition by a single point. The runner ups will win a cash prize of $500 each and the Grand Prize Winner will receive a cash prize of $2000!

To break from tradition, we will release the runner ups today, followed by the release of the Grand Prize Winner on Monday. The following runner ups are in no particular order since they had the same final score.

The first Runner up is, drum roll please:

Advanced Export for WP and WPMU by Ron Rennick

Ron’s plugin provides WordPress users (both WordPress and WordPress Mu) the ability to break up their exports into multiple files with each file containing different sections of their blog. Ron wins $500 in cash.

The second Runner up is:

Live Blogging by Chris Northwood

Chris’ plugin provides live micro blogging functionality to WordPress blogs using Meteor technology. Both comments and posts are automatically updated on viewers’ blogs with the plugin. Chris wins $500 in cash.

Congratulations to the runner ups for their fantastic work! Check back tomorrow for the Grand Prize Winner of the Plugin Competition. A heartfelt thank you goes out to all the sponsors, judges, well wishers, readers, reviewers and to the plugin developers who participated in the contest. The winners will receive their prize money by the end of the following week.

TC50 DemoPit company AskYourTargetMarket is hoping to simplify market research for businesses and solutions by offering a comprehensive platform where businesses can both create and deploy surveys. Since the site is in closed beta, AskYourTargetMarket has offered 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. Each invite comes with a free survey package for up to 50 respondents; enter the beta code “TC50-2009″ here.

The site lets you define your target market demographic, then write a survey to distribute to focus groups. Because you are able to target a particular group, you don’t have to waste space on your survey with demographic questions. Once your survey is finalized, AskYourTargetMarket will launch it to your desired demographic within their consumer panel for as little as $29.95 for 50 respondents. The site, which says it has thousands of U.S. consumers on their survey panel, draws its respondents from its sister site, InstantCashSweepstakes.com, which offers users a cash prize incentive for filling out surveys.