Cryptography meets social media with Tweetcracker

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Courtney Boyd Myers

Courtney Boyd Myers is the founder of audience.io, a transatlantic company designed to help New York and London based technology startups gr (show all) Courtney Boyd Myers is the founder of audience.io, a transatlantic company designed to help New York and London based technology startups grow internationally. Previously, she was the Features Editor and East Coast Editor of TNW covering New York City startups and digital innovation. She loves magnets + reading on a Kindle. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter @CBM and Google +.

To promote the release of the new Samsung Series 9, NYC’s Barbarian Group created Tweetcracker, a cool throw back to code-cracking in the social media age. The web app lets users pretend to be spies to win a Samsung series 9 laptop and $10,000 in gold.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could crack a combination, use lasers to blast open a safe containing a Samsung Series 9 notebook, and carry off $10,000 in solid gold?” said Anthony Dines of The Barbarian Group.

And indeed, they did just that. Using Twitter, users are given 3 chances per day, with all guesses published as tweets. To help increase chances of winning, they’ll also be giving away clues through @boostedtweets, Boosted’s Facebook page and they’re even opening up a downloadable CSV file of all recorded guesses.

Should someone win the contents of the safe during the 6-week long contest, it will be refilled with another laptop and two, around the world plane tickets. According to Barbarian Group, the odds of guessing the right number are close to 9 billion to one. I have to admit, just typing in 10 lucky numbers to win 10,000 can get a bit addicting. Good thing they’ve limited the count to 3 guesses per day. Get Tweetcracking here.