Google's Project 10 to The 100th

Google’s Project 10^100 (pronounced as Project 10 to the 100th) is a call of ideas to change the world by helping as many as people as possible. About 150,000 ideas were submitted by people and Google selected 16 top ideas under different categories. Now, we folks need to vote for them before October 8, 2009. And Google is commenting $10 million to implement these projects and their goal is to help as many people as possible. Which ones should Google make real? Cast your vote, and help Google change the world.

"We received over 150,000 ideas from users which far surpassed our expectations," said Jamie Wood, a Google spokesman. "We've never managed a project like this and it's taken much more time than we imagined to judge and sort through the ideas." Wood promised that "within a month" Google would announce the next phase of the competition. That will likely involve the release of 100 proposals for the public to vote on and choose 20 finalists, from which a Google board will choose the five lucky winners.

Categories:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

Criteria that is considered:

• Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
• Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
• Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
• Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
• Longevity: How long will the idea's impact last?

And, I am sure you would like to know the TOP 16 ideas and here they are -

1. Community: Create real-time natural crisis tracking system
2. Community: Make government more transparent
3. Opportunity: Help social entrepreneurs drive change
4. Education: Provide quality education to African students
5. Shelter: Create more efficient landmine removal programs
6. Energy: Drive innovation in public transport
7. Everything Else: Build real-time, user-reported news service
8. Education: Make educational content available online for free
9. Education: Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
10. Opportunity: Build better banking tools for everyone
11. Environment: Work toward socially conscious tax policies
12. Community: Collect and organize the world's urban data
13. Community: Create genocide monitoring and alert system
14. Education: Enhance science and engineering education
15. Health: Promote health monitoring and data analysis
16. Community: Create real-world issue reporting system

Why this project?

Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time, so many people, of all walks of life, could use so much help, in both little ways and big.

In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people.

Thanks Google.

Also friends, please take out sometime to vote on the projects. Voting ends on October 8, 2009.