Google Struggles To Give Away $10 Million

theodp writes "On Google's 10th Birthday in 2008, the search giant promised $10 million to the best five ideas for using technology to improve the world, through Project 10^100. CNN reports that while Google's intentions were good, of course, the company's follow-through leaves much to be desired. Google announced the cash prize contest in September 2008 and closed public voting on 16 finalists chosen from over 150,000 ideas in October 2009. Over eight months later, the company has yet to announce the winners. 'While genocide and other pressing problems relentlessly advance,' remarked contest finalist Daniel Meyerowitz to Wired.com, 'it would seem that Project 10^100 does not.'"

Comments

Maybe...

[BronsCon]

They can't find the winners?

Re:Maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they could try Googling their names?

Re:Maybe...

[bberens]

Well, the system which counts the votes is still in Beta.

Re:Maybe...

[Cytotoxic]

Asked and answered - from the FAQ:

Q: Why did this take so long (original deadline was mid-January)?

A: When we put out our initial call for ideas, we didn't expect so many, over 150,000! Reviewing each idea -- and we really did review each and every idea -- took a long time, and also forced us to revisit how this project would work. Ultimately, we recognized that many of the ideas we'd received were similar and could be strengthened by being combined with other ideas. The result is the top 16 finalist ideas. We know this took a long time and is organized a little differently from what we originally envisioned, but we hope that the solutions we ultimately arrived at will allow the greatest number of our interested users to have a real impact.

Re:Maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

New? Microsoft has labeled their betas as release versions for ages.

Re:Maybe...

[severoon]

Google is a horrible company! Remember the time they offered up $10M to improve the sad lot of humanity and it took them longer than expected to make sure the money was put to best use? They're just like Hitler!

Not Good Enough

[BiggoronSword]

Maybe Google just didn't think the ideas were good enough to meet the requirement of "using technology to improve the world."

Re:Not Good Enough

[Missing.Matter]

With finalists like "making engineering and science 'cool'" I'd love to see what ideas didn't make the cut.

Re:Not Good Enough

[blahplusplus]

I don't buy that for a second, I think google's problem is underestimating the $ required to actually _do anything_ suggested by the 150,000+ people that makes those things they suggested worthwhile.

Re:Not Good Enough

[quantumplacet]

No, he's saying that out of the 16 final ideas, all them already have governments and charitable organizations dedicating years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to do the same thing. $10 mil won't do shit to remove the worlds landmines or improve education quality in Africa.

Re:Not Good Enough

[Kell Bengal]

You know... god forbid they should take their time and think carefully about giving away a heap-ton of money. It's their cash, it's up to them to decide when they'll hand it out.

Priorities?

[IBBoard]

I think the guy gets it right with the priorities in his quote by making a poor comparison:

'While genocide and other pressing problems relentlessly advance,' remarked contest finalist Daniel Meyerowitz to Wired.com, 'it would seem that Project 10^100 does not.'

Given that most of the major "pressing problems" (like genocide) can't easily be resolved with technology and need simple discussion and agreement, why not ditch the unimportant and stalled competition in favour of putting the money into the pressing problems?

Re:Priorities?

[oodaloop]

why not ditch the unimportant and stalled competition in favour of putting the money into the pressing problems?

The problem isn't that they've given out the money to the wrong people, it's that they haven't given it out at all, and they've stopped answering questions or discussing it. It's like Google has completely forgotten about the project.

Re:Priorities?

[DerekLyons]

It's like Google has completely forgotten about the project.

Which really shouldn't surprise anyone. Google has, as far as I can tell, a short attention span and a tendency to easily be distracted by shiny things.

Re:Priorities?

[Ephemeriis]

Of course, Meyerowitz's allegedly-winning idea was to use technology to map genocide events in real time and use the info to "provide early warning" of new genocide locations, assist relief organizations, etc. That's worth putting money into and would be, essentially, "putting money into the pressing problem" as you said.

Except that it's a pretty lousy idea.

I mean... Sure, genocide is bad and all... And stopping or at least reducing it would be good... But how the hell do you think technology is going to assist here?

Who is going to report the genocide events? Are we going to design a new gun or something that phones home when used for genocide? And what's the genocide threshold? And who's going to maintain the hardware? And what's the penalty for not using one of the new anti-genocide rifles when you commit your atrocities? And then what's going to happen once we've got this data mapped in realtime? We're just going to look at the maps and say wow, that's a lot of genocide? Is somebody supposed to act on that data? Or is it just supposed to provide awareness?

It seems to me that you can already create custom overlays in things like Google Earth and Google Maps. Seems to me that there are plenty of ways to distribute information. Seems to me that we don't really need $10 million worth of new technology. What we need is willingness to act on all the atrocities that we are currently aware of.

Re:Priorities?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Be fair. Once I announced that I would be leveraging the social graph and web2.0 crowdsourced collaboration to enable grassroots Ethnic Cleansing Beta, Google acquired me for a juicy pile of stock almost immediately.

Microsoft responded by announcing the imminent release of an enterprise-grade PurityPoint Ethnicity rights management server, complete with robust AD integration, and a bookburning management console snap-in to allow administrators to easily purge documents from SharePoint, or delegate purging rights to their most depraved henchmen. Unfortunately, their truth_and_reconcilation_ml, an ostensibly open-standard XML-based atrocity documentation markup language turned out to be a ghastly quasi-proprietary mess, rammed through ECMA...

Re:16 finalists?

[enoyls]

There are 16 ideas. I agree it could be clearer but those might be the finalists.

Re:Problem?

[oodaloop]

Try reading for comprehension. The verb is advance. The problems advance, but the Google project does not advance. Read it again. He is not saying they are both problems.

Give them time...

[Zocalo]

After all, almost everything else they do goes through a length beta programme before it's ready; several years in the case of GMail. Why should we expect "Google 10^100 Winner Section Process (Beta)" to be any different?

Re:16 finalists?

[GigsVT]

Nevermind, I found them, under "Ideas". No wonder Google hasn't given out any money, the ideas are really terrible.

"Create a single world bank or supra-national currency, uniform rules and transparent public accounting"

Oh yeah, that's a great fucking idea.

Serious lack of forethought

[Banquo]

I looked at the contest and at the time I was considering entering there was just too much of a lack of information. I found it insane that a company that huge running a "contest" with large sums of money involved had a rules/regs sheet that looked like "Dave in shipping" had typed it up. I had several good ideas (vetted by industry professionals) that I finally didn't enter because the "For additional questions send mail here" people never responded to any of my mails asking basic rule/regulation questions (most of the information a serious "inventor" would need was lacking in the 1 page rules sheet they offered. They may have updated by now but I got a bad vibe from this at the start. If you can't even set up the contest right, the followthrough is suspect from the start.

They had no information at all concerning simple questions such as:

"Winnings":
How are the prize winnings distributed (are they administered by google or payed out as services or cash or ? (it never said)

Intellectual property:
Is this (they typical)internet VC front where they dole out some prize and in exchange you get all rights to IP and any revenues/future development etc that come from it? The HP "Design our next computer" contest comes to mind. They outsourced years of R&D time to tens of thousands of people on the internet and gave away 1 laptop to 1 person for the privilege of working for them.

I mean,..at least the Tribecca film "Pitch a movie" contest has the decency to tell you in the rules and regulations that by "winning" you're signing your life away to them.

Re:Serious lack of forethought

[Monchanger]

The problem with this view is the 10^100 project can not be compared to the standard marketing-based lottery system where a company gives out some large amount of cash in exchange for lots of even-larger revenue.

"Competing" in 10^100 wasn't about making money by presenting a good idea, cashing out on IP as suggested. Corny as it may sound it was about making the world a better place. You don't get the money just because you proposed the idea, but you could get funded if you had the capacity to follow through on the idea.

And that's exactly the difficulty I would assume Google ran into. It would a piece of cake to just hand $10M to the Red Cross to help out in Africa. But Google's vision goes beyond this. They were thinking bigger, like coming up with something like the RC and unleashing it as a force of good on the world. That's a hard problem which Google is not built for. It's generally the role of governments and people who have nothing else to do. I doubt Google hired someone specifically to run this project, and maybe that's where the idea fails.

I'm really glad this is getting publicity because I want Google to go forward with this project. It's a great idea, but unfortunately many people are unable to appreciate the difficulty involved so they'll just complain about Big Bad Google again. It's a damn shame Google hasn't done more to help the world, but to criticize them for only starting? What harm will have Google done by not following through? People gotta remember that most companies don't even care enough to try.

Re:Serious lack of forethought

[dzfoo]

>> It's a damn shame Google hasn't done more to help the world, but to criticize them for only starting? What harm will have Google done by not following through? People gotta remember that most companies don't even care enough to try.

Google is not being criticize for "only starting" to help the world, but for setting this so-called contest for what appears now to be largely a PR stunt, and then brushing it off. In that light, what Google did is perhaps worse than other companies not caring enough.

      -dZ.

Solution to everything

[Midnight's Shadow]

I have a fix for this along with:

genocide

hunger

crime

pollution

war

greed

stupidity

and almost everything else.

I call it the Dr. Strangelove solution, however I don't think the money will do any good afterwords. Don't worry the cockroaches will survive.

Significance

[qoncept]

'While genocide and other pressing problems relentlessly advance,' remarked contest finalist Daniel Meyerowitz to Wired.com, 'it would seem that Project 10^100 does not.'

Huh? The maggots growing in the disgusting bucket behind my garage are advancing through larval stage. What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Is this guy complaining? Noting? Does he mean "if so-and-so can progress toward the annihilation of a people, why can't Google just pick an entry?" Does he mean that the holdup is making the world a worse place? Does he think mass murder and delaying a contest are comparable?

Re:16 finalists?

[Crudely_Indecent]

Create a single world bank or supra-national currency, uniform rules and transparent public accounting

Wait, isn't that already in the works? Well, probably not the transparent public accounting, but global currency is definitely on the mind of our global rulers.

Just the FAQs ma'am

[webmosher]

This isn't exactly a "prize". No one who submitted any of the ideas is the intended recipient of any of this money. Google's corporate board (re:advisory committee) will decide what to do with the money, and its going to places where the ideas can be implemented.

Just a couple of notes from the FAQ:

How many ideas are you funding?
We have committed $10 million to fund up to five ideas selected by our advisory board.

How will Google implement these ideas?
Once we've announced up to five ideas for funding, we'll begin the process of identifying the organization(s) that are in the best position to help implement the selected ideas.

How involved will Google be in the implementation of the ideas?
We didn't focus on ideas that Google would implement alone; instead, we looked for ideas whose implementation will required another organization's expertise or resources. These organizations will be the recipients of the funding grants.

Re:16 finalists?

[Xest]

I wish I'd entered now. My "Free HD porn for everyone" idea would've been in with a chance of first place after all :(

TED.com

[tusam]

There's many well thought out ideas floating around at TED, why not just pick one of those?
Like this one http://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html for example, real lasting results with practical amount of money.

On things advancing

[Captain Spam]

'While genocide and other pressing problems relentlessly advance,' remarked contest finalist Daniel Meyerowitz to Wired.com, 'it would seem that Project 10^100 does not.'

Wow. I love that quote. While it may be true and relevant, at face value, it's perfectly smug and smartass. I've gotta remember to use quotes like that in day-to-day life...

"While genocide and other pressing problems relentlessly advance, it would seem that my order at Taco Bob's does not."

"While the plans and schemes of terrorist organizations relentlessly advance, it would seem that this line at the DMV does not."

"While the oil spill in the gulf relentlessly advances, it would seem that, due in large part to the ladies nearby, my love life does not."

Re:On things advancing

[Monkeedude1212]

While the rating of your comment is relentlessly advancing, it would seem that your karma does not.

Science is not Automatic

[jazman_777]

You don't just input money and people and voila! out comes good Science, automatically. Mostly you get fraud and junk and research jobs programs. At least it shows Google is looking for good Science, not just any Science.

Re:16 finalists?

[Crazy Taco]

Nevermind, I found them, under "Ideas". No wonder Google hasn't given out any money, the ideas are really terrible.

No kidding. These are some of the WORST ideas I've ever seen, for a couple for reasons.

1. They are really vague with no specific ideas on how to accomplish any of them. It's unclear how ten million would help any of them to happen, or even what the money would be spent on.
2. They don't even make sense half the time. Take this one for instance "Help social entrepreneurs drive change". What the heck is that supposed to be? What is a "social entrepreneur"? Anyone who knows what an entrepreneur is knows there isn't any such thing. The google picture representing it was a guy standing around idly blowing flower petals, which is a pretty apt depiction of this supposedly great idea.

Kudos to google if they keep their money and pay nothing out for any of these. The money will be put to much better use if google uses it to develop more products and services instead.

Side Note: As a freedom loving individual who believes in limited government and free markets, I'd actually rather see the money burned than used for most of these ideas... "Work towards social conscious tax policies"? I might puke...

Re:16 finalists?

[CraftyJack]

This one blew my mind:

Create a minefield-clearing machine that works by simply "rolling" across landmine-suspected areas and detonating mines.

It exists.