We’re starting to update the team profiles..  first up, Team 0xDEADBEEF!

Their profile: 0xDEADBEEF

All team profiles: Team Profiles

Keep watching this space over the next couple of days for more profiles!

Just like the Christmas party, we’ve got literally thousands of dollars in prizes purchased for non-racers.  How you win them will be a little different.  Let me give you a little hint..

Here’s how it will work.  Prior to the race kickoff, everybody that wants to be in on the prize drawings will submit the name of their favorite team.  Your name will go in a ‘hat’ with everyone else that is betting on that team.

At each checkpoint, if your team arrives first – we draw from your team’s ‘hat’ for a prize (or prizes).  The more checkpoints your teams hit first, the more chances you have to WIN!  There are some rules, of course.  Nobody will be allowed to win more than one prize.  Racers are not allowed to win the checkpoint prizes.  Finally, if there are no more remaining names in a hat – we’ll go to the 2nd place hat.  That could happen if a long shot overachieves.

We’ll announce how to submit your team in the coming days.  Until then – start handicapping!

For Minneathlon 1.0, we gave away iPod Touches and iPod 3G Nanos for the race prizes and many other door prizes such as GPS units, external hard drives, cameras, etc.

We’d love input on what we should give away for Minneathlon 2.0 – both for the contestants and door prizes for non-contestants!

We’ve got a pretty good size gift budget – but we want to spread it around a lot.  Also, gifts that require service plans (i.e. cell phones) are tough as well.

Please leave any prize/gift suggestions as a comment to this post.

Thanks,

-us.

The Minneathlon 2.0 planning committee is happy to announce the following field for Minneathlon 2.0 to be held on June 27th, 2008

• Lefty and Skinny (Jason Sheard and Mark Benson)
• XLR-99 (Jemiah Aitch and Jason Braucht)
• 0xDEADBEEF (Mike Scheidnes and Matt Hilden)
• TRYIT (Eugen Feraru and Gary Groven)
• Intern (Matt Nelson and Nick Rydberg)
• C4 (Steve Sheldon and Dan Reichstadt)
• Southern Fuego (Glenn Jackson and Gerardo Rojas)
• Boston Tea Party (Ludy Liu and Cassidy Rehl)

Thanks to everyone who entered – and good luck next time for those that didn’t have luck on their side during the selection process.

Start picking your favorites – fame and fortune – or at least fortune – may depend on it!

One of the toughest early challenges to putting together Minneathlon 2.0 was deciding how to pick the contestants. It was easy last time – put the names in the hat and draw 6. This time, we’ve got 8 teams, we’ve got three automatic entries (more on that later), and we’ve got teams that both raced before and applied before. We also realized that there is a problem with precedence – assuming we’ll do this again.

In the end, we really wanted to favor multi-time applicants that didn’t get selected before. We also still wanted to give a small chance to everyone – even if you raced last time. We ultimately used a weighted probability system where a varying amount of points were awarded depending on a few factors. Here is the ruleset we finally landed on:

• Boston: One automatic entry, decided by the Boston office
• Austin: One automatic entry, decided by the Austin office
• Prior race organizer: One automatic entry

The other five spots were drawn using the random method and the following formula:

• 10 points per person for their first application without having been previously selected
• 5 points per person for each subsequent application
• 1 point per person for having run the race before (the score resets to one once a person gets selected)

We ended up with the following weighting:

• Lefty and Skinny – 30 points
• XLR-99 – 30 points
• 0xDEADBEEF – 25 points
• TRYIT -25 points
• Intern – 20 points
• Clueless Jokesters – 20 points
• Team Tim – 11 points
• Team Ramrod – 2 points
• DJ Lloyd and Mixmaster Harry – 2 points

Stay tuned for the actual announcement of racers! We’ve already made the selections and we’ll publish them soon.