Darpa has launched 10 balloons around the country as part of its “Network Challenge” contest. The first person or team to locate all of them will win $40,000.

Challenge winner will be the first individual to submit the locations of 10 8-foot balloons moored at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads. You can follow the news on Twitter,

Darpa says that the contest is meant to look at how “information spreads and propagates and becomes viral.”The contest will test how people organize themselves and how they validate information.

The balloons will only be visible during daylight hours beginning on Saturday, December 5. Collaborators will have approximately 9 days, until 12:00 PM (ET) on December 14, 2009, to collect the locations of any balloons not spotted, and submit their entry.

Teams from all over the United States have registered for this event. Some teams have developed iPhone apps while others are going to scour Twitter for clues. Even if you don’t belong to a group, you can still send out a tweet with the GPS coordinates if you happen to come across a balloon.

Internet entrepeneur Jon Cannell has launched www.red-balloons.com (above), one of the many websites dedicated to building the nationwide team to find DARPA’s red balloons.

The contest is meant to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the original Internet, Arpanet, which was developed by Darpa. Darpa hopes to discover “new, collaborative ways to approach problems that were not dreamt of 40 years ago.”

The Oregon Health Network (pdf), one of the largest projects funded by the FCC’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program, launched its network operations center today in Beaverton, Oregon.

OHN has a stated goal of bringing low-cost, high speed broadband to primary healthcare stakeholders in Oregon, potentially linking over 300 non-profit health care facilities, both urban and rural. Oregon Health Network seeks to be one tenant in infrastructure that also could be used for a wide variety of other governmental, educational or business applications (rfp).

The data capacity between each OHN user location and OHN exchange locations will be a minimum of 10 Megabits per second with an upgrade capacity in increments of 10 Megabits or 100 Megabits, up to 1 Gigabit, with future expansion to 10 Gigabits.

The Pilot Program will provide up to $20.2 million in funding for the project. The launch of the network operations center (NOC) will pull together multiple service providers into a single, consistent network to quickly resolve any network problems with a single call to the NOC.

“These critical improvements in the Oregon Health Network will further broadband’s role in delivering the best possible health care to Oregonians, no matter where they live,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski (pdf).

The FCC established the $417 million Pilot Program to increase patient access to care via telemedicine and support the transfer of electronic medical records. Nationwide, 62 projects are eligible to receive Pilot Program funding for telehealth networks serving approximately 6,000 health care facilities in 42 states and three U.S. territories, using broadband technologys.

At this time, 41 of these projects have either received funding commitments or developed requests for proposals to select vendors to build out their broadband networks.

Don’t tell me that you’re innocent. Because it insults my intelligence.
– The Godfather

The FCC has asked Verizon for more details about their increased Early Termination Fees (pdf), reports PC Magazine. Verizon increased their ETF from $175 to $350 on some smartphones. A customer who cancels their two-year contract after 23 months still owes Verizon $120.

The FCC asked, “If the ETF is meant to recoup the wholesale cost of the phone over the life of the contract, why does a $120 ETF apply?”

The move comes after Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, asked that the FCC examine the issue. On Thursday, Klobuchar also introduced a bill that would limit the amount a mobile provider could charge for ETFs and require that they pro-rate the fees. Klobuchar’s bill would prevent wireless carriers from charging an ETF that is higher than the cell phone discount. If, for example, you received a $150 phone for free on a 2 year contract, then the termination fee cannot be more than $150.

The FCC wants carriers like Verizon to pro-rate their ETFs, provide more clear and conspicuous information about ETFs, and put the current ETF balance on monthly bills. Verizon currently pro-rates the $350 ETF by only $10 a month, which would require 35 months on a contract.

The FCC also requested more data about $1.99 data charges, which were referenced in a recent New York Times article.

“The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data. NOT COOL. I’ve had phones for years, and I sometimes do that mistake to this day, as I’m sure you have. Legal, yes; ethical, NO.

“Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!

“Our marketing, billing, and technical departments are all aware of this. But they have failed to do anything about it—and why? Because if you get 87 million customers to pay $1.99, why stop this revenue?

Verizon must respond by Dec. 17.

The CTIA says the Klobuchar bill is pointless:

“This legislation is unnecessary simply because wireless carriers already pro-rate ETFs,” CTIA president and CEO Steve Largent said in a statement. “That was the response of a highly competitive industry to consumer demand, and this type of prescriptive mandate runs the very real risk of limiting consumer options in the future.”

Verizon has allowed pro-rated ETFs since 2006, Sprint and T-Mobile followed suit in late 2007, and AT&T implemented the same policy in 2008. Discounting the ETF balance monthly was only provided after the threat of legislation. Consumer complaints about Early Termination Fees prompted the the Cell Phone Empowerment Act of 2007.

Without too much noise and buzz, LG has announced a nice new mobile phone called the – LG Expo GW820.  Bringing a powerful computing and multimedia features, the LG GW820 boasts versatile and innovative design, engaging and intuitive user interface and a neat sliding QWERTY keyboard.

There are probably six main reasons why you would want to consider getting the LG GW820. First it has a large external QWERTY keyboard that slides out when you compose messages, emails and work on the phone’s contact list. Then its Wi-Fi features gives you access to thousands of AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots for internet access at broadband speeds. It also has biometric security feature giving you security and simplicity in preserving your personal mobile data.

The LG GW820 also features a 5.0 megapixel camera with built-in flash, autofocus and 3x digitial zoom. It’s preloaded with Microsoft Office applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, email and calendar. And finally, the LG GW820 has personal presentation station feature that allows you to project images, video and web pages to a screen up to 40 inches in size via a Pico Projector.

Other specs and features of the LG GW820 include – Windows Media Player, touch screen display, Bluetooth, Internet Explorer Mobile, GPRS/EDGE Quad Band feature, and full compact QWERTY keyboard.

The LG GW820 is a Quad-badn (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) UMTS/HSDPA Tri-band (850/1900/2100 MHz) phone.