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Google To Fund Ideas That Will Change the World
Peace Corps Online writes "This week, as part of their tenth birthday celebration, Google announced the launch of project ten to the 100th, a project designed to inspire and fund the development of ideas that will help to change the world. They have called on members of the public to share their ideas for solutions that will help as many people as possible in the global community, offering a $10 million prize pool to back the development of those chosen as winners. 'We know there are countless brilliant ideas that need funding and support to come to fruition,' says Bethany Poole, Project Marketing Manager for Google. 'These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple — but they need to have impact.' The project's website asks entrants to classify their ideas into one of eight categories listed as Community, Opportunity, Energy, Environment, Health, Education, Shelter and Everything Else. Members of the public have until October 20th to submit their ideas by completing a simple form and answering a few short questions about their idea."
1: Some renewable energy source that actually can handle dense loads 24/7. Solar can't. Nuclear really can't because contractors are too inept or corrupt to do a job right. Pretty much, fusion is the only thing we got going.
2: Batteries (supercaps preferably) with an energy density approaching gasoline.
3: Automatic pilot for cars so dense highways can be created to allow for the maximum density out there, so one drunk driver wrecking doesn't hamstring thousands of people.
4: Reliable, reusable space vehicles that can do more than low Earth orbits. SCRAMjet planes to the moon for example.
5: Tape backup that has a modern arial density, and that is inexpensive. Hard disks are fickle and fragile, and tape isn't perfect, but can stand the test of time.
I'll admit, I didn't click through the three links needed to find the ToS. Of course, it still gives very little information as to how the funding is distributed. The guarantee of IP rights is nice, if they honor it. Problem is, it's really hard to prove the origin of an idea. I can see this being a legal headache for Google, since any new work they do that happens to overlap a submitted idea will probably lead to litigation.
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I think it's hardest to make something that truly makes peoples lives better and not not make a profit. Maybe I'm just too practical though...
Money is the root of all evil?
"relinquish control of their intellectual property"
It's assholes like you that prevent the world moving forward. Everything has its price in your world, even blood. Just maybe there are people out there who want better things for less fortunate people - no payment needed thanks !
May those who help most win so they say.
I made three entries - the hexayurt, the infrastructure package, and the low cost medical care.
The Hexayurt
The hexayurt is a reasonably well tested next generation disaster relief shelter built on free/open source principles and industrial supply chains. It comes from work done at the Rocky Mountain Institute. The basic idea is to take 12 standard 4âx8â industrial panels, cut six in half diagonally and fasten them into a cone (see the site for pictures) and use six whole panels for the walls, giving a durable shelter of 166 square feet, big enough for 5 people at UN standards. These shelters will survive 80 mph winds easily.
The emphasis on using standard industrial materials is the key. Nobody can afford to carry extensive stocks of emergency housing for disasters in the developing world, which often displace millions of people. Airfreighting tents is expensive and inefficient, and tents are lousy shelter for long term use, which is all-too-frequently how they are deployed. The Hexayurt idea is that industrial cities near regular disaster zones (Bangaladesh, strife-torn areas of Africa, the hurricane belt) take their existing industrial infrastructure and add a few simple new skills so that before or after a disaster they can mass produce a simple, long-life shelter for affected populations. This is a step towards disaster relief self-sufficiency at a regional level, so that these areas begin to be able to cope without being so reliant on patchy and poorly-funded international relief effots.
The Hexayurt concept has been tested by US DOD, and is an integral part of the STAR-TIDES program. American Red Cross and Netherlands Red Cross both think it is a great idea and have supported its development, and AMURT is considering the system. All of this has been done by a persistent self-funded open source development effort.
http://hexayurt.com/
The Hexayurt Infrastructure Package
The hexayurt is a free/open disaster relief shelter which has its own entry. However, a shelter alone is not enough to really help people after a disaster. If you have 100,000 perfectly good shelters in a field, the next problem you face is water and sanitation: without some deployed solution, people will get sick and die.
There are lots of appropriate technology solutions to sanitation, cooking without wasting wood or generating toxic smoke, purifying water to drink. All of them are under-funded, under-tested, and under-adopted. Millions to tens of millions die every year because this âoeappropriate technology infrastructureâ is not being properly funded, and the result is needless loss of life.
The key is to understand that credible candidate technologies exist to provide all the same basic essential services that people enjoy in the developed world on a budget of maybe $200. Furthermore, the services can be provided house-by-house. For example, rainwater is collected on your roof, then purified using a biosand filter to give you safe drinking water, rather than having a water purification factory down the road and pipes. These systems are basic, and some need work, but some combination of SODIS, solar water pasteurization, thermophilic composting toilets, sulabh toilets, solar cookers, rocket stoves, gasification stoves, biosand filters, microsolar, microwind and microhydro will provide all the basic essential services of life in nearly any climate anywhere in the world. What hasnâ(TM)t been done is a global systematic program of testing each of these individual technologies in each region of the world, making local adaptations, cleaning up and publishing the designs, making training videos, running educational courses, and looking for chances to integrated, combine and synthesize systems into whole packages which are proven to provide all essential services in the field. This is our proposal.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Two of their five "criteria" do not sit well together:
The rapid implementation requirement kills anything I would want to bring to the table, that is stuff we haven't been able to fix in a generation though the need has been increasingly evident because it requires a more patient approach than markets will tolerate (even while they burn googillions in retirement savings without a thought that we might like some priority to investments which at least try to provide a "better" world we might retire into.)
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
As an ImagineCup software design worldwide finalist '08 i concluded that ImagineCup has only one objective: To promote Microsoft and Microsoft's tools. Nothing else is even slightly important.
Maybe some of us aren't money grabbing assholes like you? Possibly (like Google) we want to give our ideas so that those less fortunate then us can benefit.
You sound like the kind of guy that asks for a pay check when sending a patch to an open source project. GTFO.