challenger

Give James Cameron this much: He's unafraid to follow his passions where they lead him. Even if that place is seven miles below the surface of the ocean.

Yesterday Cameron became the first person to make a solo dive to the ocean's deepest point -- a portion of the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench known as "Challenge Deep." Cameron piloted a "vertical torpedo" of a submersible he dubbed "Deepsea Challenger" to the bottom of the trench, 35,756 feet down, then spent three hours filming and taking samples before safely returning to … Read more

If you had to track down fugitives hidden in five cities around the world, would one day and a $5,000 reward be enough to succeed? And if so, how?

That's what the people behind the TAG Challenge want to know--and what the whole world will soon find out.

On March 31, mug shots of five "suspects" will be published, and it'll be game on in a global hunt for "jewel thieves" in Bratislava, Slovakia; Stockholm; London; Washington, D.C.; and New York City, each of whom will spend 12 hours that day in … Read more

Pin It

Leap day: what better time to launch a new iPhone app, especially if the app's name happens to be Leap? Leap uses challenges to motivate users to accomplish various tasks. Following the "pics or it didn't happen" mantra, users are only awarded points for pictures they upload of a completed task. The challenges can be serious in nature, or something to create some laughs.

Once you have uploaded a photo to a challenge, you will earn a point and your competitors (friends) will be notified of your latest post. If they feel you have … Read more

Looking to hire smart college kids? Here's a new tool that will help you find them: MindSumo.

It lets you create challenges, or contests, to help you solve problems you have at your company. You have to put up prize money, but in return, you get (hopefully) solutions to your problems, and (more hopefully) youth you can hire to work for you full time.

The prizes are not winner-takes-all; the challenge posters select the top solutions and the prize money is distributed among the best of them.

CEO Trent Hazy says that even for the entrants who don't … Read more

Love brainteasers? Brainiacs from a California university hope you can help decipher a mind-draining 10,000-piece puzzle through their collaborative Web site.

The DARPA Shredder Challenge aims to discover new ways the U.S. military can process and decode shredded documents confiscated in war zones, as well as test vulnerabilities in the shredding methods used by the U.S. national security community.

The Shredder Challenge is made up of five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the documents' subject matter, and the shredding methods vary to present challenges of increasing difficulty. To complete each problem, participants must provide the answer to a puzzle embedded in the content of the reconstructed document.

Three out of the five puzzles are still available to be solved before the contest ends December 4 and DARPA awards $50,000 as the prize. Manuel Cebrian, a research scientist at the University of California at San Diego, and a team from UCSD have created a way to solve the remaining enigmas by "combining advanced computer vision methods with shared tasking and referral-based crowdsourcing," says the USCD Web site. … Read more

The University of Michigan's Solar Car Team is hoping to break the U.S.' 24-year dry spell at the 2011 World Solar Challenge this weekend. An American team hasn't won the international solar car race since GM took home the trophy in 1987. But a lighter, faster car could give UM the edge it needs to cross the line first.

The World Solar Challenge is a 1,800-mile race across the Australian Outback in an ultralightweight, single-passenger vehicle powered solely by the sun. Teams race their solar vehicle between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., setting up … Read more

SANTA ROSA, Calif.--On-demand aviation, the idea that mobility one day can be just as personal and convenient in the air as it is on the ground, is a lofty goal. And it's what competitors at NASA's Green Flight Challenge going on here this week are trying to attain.

Aerospace Engineer Mark Moore said the challenge, which is one of NASA's Centennial Challenges and sponsored by Google, is about finding ways to use the layers of uncluttered 3D space above us to get around--and how to do it in an energy-efficient manner.

Commercial planes currently average about … Read more

Samsung's television application marketplace is starting to gain some steam.

According to the company, nearly 10 million applications have been downloaded from its marketplace since the service was made available last year.

The rate of growth in Samsung's store has been quite impressive. Late last year, Samsung announced that its store hit the one-million-downloads mark, 268 days after the marketplace launched. In January, the store reached 2 million downloads. What's more, the company's applications inventory is growing quite rapidly. According to Samsung, it now has over 900 applications available to folks to download to their HDTVs.… Read more

Out with the old. In with the new. That's been the way of the personal technology industry for as long as there's been a personal technology industry. (I cut my computing teeth on Radio Shack's TRS-80--a personal computer that helped render the original personal computer, MITS' Altair, obsolete in the late 1970s.)

It's also the beat I'll cover here in Challengers. This blog is focused on new things--companies, products, services, and technologies--that aim to go head-to-head with established ones. I'll explore what makes them different and, in theory at least, better. And while I'… Read more