Every so often, we get pinged about Google’s Project 10^100. The program, which asked for ideas that could change the world which Google would in turn put money towards, launched exactly one year ago (in honor of the company’s 10th birthday). But voting was meant to start in October of last year and conclude in January 2009. That never happened. People started to question if Google was quietly letting the ambitious project die. It wasn’t. And today it’s back.
With a post on the Google Blog today, Google has let everyone know that it was simply overwhelmed by the response it received about Project 10^100 (Google’s Marissa Mayer has made comments recently saying the same thing). Over 150,000 idea submissions came in written in 25 different languages. Google says it took over 3,000 employees around the world to go over all of them. But they’re still not done. And they need your help.
Because there were so many submissions, Google has decided to group them together into 16 different overall theme ideas. And starting today, they’re asking you to vote to help figure out which of the 16 themes the project’s advisory board should be looking at to pick the 5 projects that will get funded.
In its post, Google notes multiple times that this process has taken much longer than anticipated. It’s taken so long, that it’s actually surprising that they didn’t turn to this crowd-sourcing method earlier for help. The fact that 3,000 employees were tied up in this seems rather insane.
Still, the project remains a good idea and the themes seem interesting. So go vote and help Google let their employees actually go back to their regular jobs.
Voting will end on October 8 (two weeks), at which point the the advisory board will pick the five finalists which Google will then reveal. Then it will ask for proposals from individuals or organizations that want to help implement these ideas.
Here are the 16 themes:
- Enhance science and engineering education
- Create real-world issue reporting system
- Promote health monitoring and data analysis
- Create genocide monitoring and alert system
- Make government more transparent
- Provide quality education to African students
- Help social entrepreneurs drive change
- Create real-time natural crisis tracking system
- Build better banking tools for everyone
- Collect and organize the world’s urban data
- Work toward socially conscious tax policies
- Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
- Drive innovation in public transport
- Make educational content available online for free
- Build real-time, user-reported news service
- Create more efficient landmine removal programs
Update: As Andrew Mager notes in the comments, this also appears to be Google’s first use of reCAPTCHA the anti-spam service that also aims to help digitize books.
That’s a lot of zeros
MG, you should also note that this is Google’s first implementation reCAPTCHA.
reCAPTCHA screenshot: http://img.skit...q1ueie14mss.jpg
I don’t see why this was so hard for them. yes, 150,000 submissions is a lot. But wasn’t the whole idea from day 1 to crowdsource this? If I remember correctly, initial submissions were to be narrowed down by voting by employees and the finalist would be voted on by the public.
Despite, what I had initial thought by the title, this is NOT a CunchPad update…
What a total cop-out! I just looked at the site and they have totally taken the easy way out. No longer are we voting on the ideas of individual ideas, we are voting on 16 concepts developed by Google! Completely different than how they pitched the project a year ago.
So the original submitters get no credit for their ideas anymore and have no chance of getting them funded? Total BS.
I tried to pull up cached versions of their About and FAQ pages but of course they have blocked them with a robots.txt file.
I agree. It doesn’t give a chance to the truly unique ideas. If these groups of ideas were seen so many times, then other people have thought about these ideas plenty of times before. It really takes away from the innovation of the project. I thought Google was the “innovation company.” I guess now they are the “take the easy way out” company.
These are only themes in which the idea’s were categorized, it will narrow it down to about 1/16 of all submissions. Wouldn’t say that’s ‘’such” a bad thing.
And about these 3000 people google had working on it, I guess that’s 3000 people spending one or two of there free google days on it (the 20% rule).
It looks to me like they are just using category voting to narrow down the list of submissions from 150,000 to 10,000, which is a lot more manageable. Of course maybe they did throw away all the ideas, we can’t really know until they tell us or this phase is complete.
Google Project 10100 is disapointing. Were are the unquie and creative idea? This makes me question about using Google as a search engine.
I would go as far as to say their should be a class action suit against Google. Is no one seeing this? Let me tell you why. What they have done is ingenious. They got entrepreneurs around the world to send them their ideas without recourse, and then proceeded to change the rules mid-game and not identify individual ideas, but rather broad esoteric concepts. This gives Google the ability to choose specific ideas without giving credit to the inventors, and funneling funds to comanies and incubators without giving any funds to the original inventor. Google develops the idea, owns the equity with the partner they select on the RFP, and the inventor is completely out of the picture. Quite ingenious.
Google made it clear from the beginning that you were competing for Kudos only, not cash or contracts. My idea is in the shortlist, and I don’t feel cheated at all. Arguably this way of doing things makes it easier for people to vote for what they care about rather than getting caught up in the nitty gritty of who invented what. I presume once the final 5 ideas are agreed on Google will acknowledge the individual innovators behind the submissions. For the moment we at least have enough information to see that our idea is in there and make a blog post about it, as I have done.
http://sethop.c...-100-shortlist/
“We’ve narrowed 154,000 submissions down to 16 top ideas.”
The idea within that 154k submissions that has the best chance of changing the world would not place itself within the top 16 submitted ideas, let alone the top 1000.
The best ideas are hiding behind the “save africa”, “make government more transparent” and “improve health monitoring” ideas, that are already the goals of many charities and organizations.
I’d rather see Google throw millions of dollars at a game-changing idea that is truly innovative and has the potential to either completely fail or absolutely succeed.
Actually, if you consider it, they narrowed it down to LESS than 16.
How different is “Encourage positive depiction of scientists and engineers” in the Education category from “Enhance science and engineering education.”
And how biased were the scientists and engineers at Google to believe those were two whole worthy categories among the 154K submissions.
Consider whether there are actually substantial differences in the infrastructure for “A real world issue reporting system” and “A real-time user-reported news service.”
The main difference is the instructions to users about what to post in it. But that difference is pretty blurry to begin with. Some people consider a broken water pipe in the street news, while others consider it an issue to report, and it’s kind of both.
Now consider that a third category was for a real-time natural crisis tracking system. If you overlook the sci-fi UAVs, a bunch of the infrastructure is the same as the prior two also.
You might argue that a key difference is the mapping stuff. Then also consider “Create genocide monitoring and alert system” with mapping and alerts of where atrocities are happening, etc.
The real point is that when you remove all the substance of a submission and boil them down this sort of drivel, you can hardly tell them apart, much less cast a vote that makes a difference.
The votes create a blanket justification for Google to do whatever they want and just say that’s where the $10M they promised for the 10^100 project was spent.
Not cool of Google to not give credit to the original contributor(s).
This is pretty interesting:
“Create an integrated personal health data system that uses data collected from toilets to transmit and analyze health and nutritional data”
Who knew TOILETS had so much of informational value!!
PS: note that the listings randomly rotated to reduce bias
They’re all a bit vague, beauty pageant style hopes for world peace. What a cop out.
+1. Nothing worthwhile on the list. You don’t change the world by dealing with the symptoms of today’s world system.
All of the comments above accurately reflect the problem with categorizing great ideas. We are one of the applicants, and our proposal crosses several of the categories… how would someone know how to vote? I understand the difficulty involved with so many submissions, but as someone suggested, crowdsourcing and some duplication algorythms could reduce this to a more manageable number.
yeah, they should have done it the digg dialogg way. (http://digg.com/dialogg/) The quality of questions/ideas to come out of that was pretty impressive.
Unfortunately, they’re all very expensive ideas. Putting a cyber school in every town and city throughout a continent as large as Africa? Hell even us rich-bastard Americans can’t afford that!
The sad thing is, the stuff that can change the world the most and the best is either very cheap or free – teach peace to your children. Just stop producing and broadcasting programming like this:
http://www.yout...h?v=gi-c6lbFGC4
because if you don’t teach your children the concept of peace, if you only teach them war and supremacy and not cooperation and mutuality, then how can you make peace? How can you make peace with someone who literally does not have peace in their vocabulary?
Innovation grows in peacetime. When governments do not have to spend over half of their tax income on the military (and only spend what is necessary for deterrence) , it can spend it promoting social projects – building better schools and improving infrastructure. Peace is the domino that starts the chain reaction that actually lets the above innovation actually happen.
I don’t think its entirely unfair not to give credit to one person, are you going to give credit to all 2345 people who had the unique idea to “Enhance science and engineering education”?
I voted for “Drive innovation in public transport”
Create real-time natural crisis tracking system pulls me. Great efforts. will have to wait for its rewards.
My idea made the top 16 and I’m very proud to say we’ve been actively lobbying congress and the local university to make it happen – free online college. Although the University of Illinois seriously tanked it’s attempt at an online university, we’ve been in contact with the new head Nick Burbules. We pitched the idea to him to make the Global Campus free supported by appropriate advertising and microtransactions similar to flatworldknowledge.com and if this idea wins the prize the funding could help get the ball rolling.
The is an absolute amazing step in the right direction and we need all the help we can get. Please contact me daniel@vidakovich.com
Congratulations on your submission Daniel and good luck in the rest of the process. We have all waited for this day for a long time. I will be interested to see if Google identifies any ideas that will fall into the, Good Carma Classification, that they passed along to be implemented by someone else. My inrest revolves around a particular submission to the contest I made called Kash for Clunkers. I think it is great the Government was thinking almost the very same thing that I was on how to help the economy and the environment when they introduced “Cash for Clunkers” Either way, there are some great ideas and you should be proud to be in the selected few.
I loved this idea last year and we submitted my wife’s company Manners Made Fun for her cultural and eco etiquette series.
What was interesting (if I read the fine print correctly) was that they basically said that they may take the idea, with or without the person who submitted it. Essentially, they could assemble their own team and you might be marginalized or not involved as they ran with it.
We did not make the cut. Congratulations to Daniel Vidakovich for making the top 16 though.
Although all the ideas Google groups would somewhat change the world and bring some benefit to people I think Google has highly regretted the competition and finally chose ideas which don’t disturb capitalism. The ideas that would really make an impact must be political and Google has not even created such a group. I believe my idea troubled Google. You may find it here http://www.saro...gle_project.htm .
Even if my idea is wrong which it is absolutely not, it could still open the door to the new way of thinking. In today’s world, NOT ONE idea exists about what comes after capitalism. My idea clearly presents what will come next. One day it will change the world and make it a wonderful place to be. Google still likes capitalism much more than a good world.
Aleksandar Sarovic
http://www.sarovic.com
Although all the ideas Google groups would somewhat change the world and bring some benefit to people I think Google has highly regretted the competition and finally chose ideas which don’t disturb capitalism. The ideas that would really make an impact must be political and Google has not even created such a group. I believe my idea troubled Google. You may find it here http://www.saro...gle_project.htm.
Even if my idea is wrong which it is not, it could still open the door to the new way of thinking. In today’s world, NOT ONE idea exists about what comes after capitalism. My idea clearly presents what will come next. One day it will change the world and make it a wonderful place to be. Google still likes capitalism much more than a good world.
Dear Google,
you really don’t need to ask people to identify themselves like you will give them individually credit and come up with this jerk result. I believe you keep specific ideas for your own business (you will work on it to make more money) and throw 16 ideas that I can all together jot down in less than one hour. I know my idea is there but so general that its implementation rises questions and doubt. Being smart is not easy… writing a search engine, yes.
What a joke !
Google has a curious opinion on what will change and improve the world.
There were different categories and it seems that only one has been retained (social, education).
I’m now convinced that this game was setup by Google to grab ideas for free and take patents and make business.
As an axample, I’ve submitted the Energy meter at the beginning of the game and 4 months later the Google Power meter was published with exactly the same features.
Very sad.
Has Google committed fraud?
Well, so far, they haven’t at all done what they said they were going to do.
Google was careful to say that even if you submission won, it didn’t mean you would receive the funding. So I think in the set up of this, they were careful about what they said about money.
However, they obtained the submissions with an understanding that people would vote on the top 100 projects. That’s at least 100 projects who benefit from the exposure even if Google took another approach as far as funding. Now none of the projects get exposure.
So they took in all those ideas… and haven’t fulfilled on the process they said they would do. I don’t know if it’s technically fraud, but if they’re just using those submissions for their own strategic benefit, then they were certainly obtained under false pretenses. And for a company whose motto is “Don’t be evil,” that may have crossed the line.
that’s 150k pissoff .
google lose big this time.
150k/3k/52weeks < 1
For all those who have submitted an idea to the project, I just created a very simple wiki where you can add your proposal.
http://project1...wikispaces.com/
Why criticize google, when we can take the the discussion into the public realm ourselves?
We ARE the “crowd”. So let’s connect to each other on the “Unofficial Project 10 to the 100 Wiki”.
154,000 world-changing ideas turned into 16 vague paragraphs of crap.
A much better approach is totally doable through crowdsourcing. Maybe we can get many of the original submitters to send resubmit their entries. I still have mine.
We shouldn’t use old-fangled “vote for your favorite” methods because it would produce crap results completely skewed by Pareto Effect, But I think there are some real/viable options for approaching this in a manner which would build collective intelligence.
* Use Google’s 5 pre-announced criteria: (Reach, Depth, Attainability, Efficiency & Longevity) as a multi-dimensional five-star rating scale. You can rate as many projects as you like.
* You cast your “vote” by creating a top 10 list. You can only put projects on your top 10 list that you have rated on all 5 dimensions.
* Each entry in a top 10 list is weighted according to it’s slot number with slot 1 being 100 times higher than the last slot. The weights build from the bottom, so if you put one project in your list, it counts as if it’s #10. If you want it to count it as #1, then add 9 more projects to your list below it. You can continually modify your top 10 list.
* For each project you add to your list, you must rate 3 projects who have received fewer ratings than the norm. This ensures that all projects are garnering attention and being rated. Yes, this means that you have to rate at least 3 projects to vote for 1, and 30 projects to make a complete top 10 list. It’s part of how you reduce bogus voting.
* Reduce noise by ejecting non-serious submissions flagged as spam by X people or well below a quality threshold after Y votes. And/Or there could be some quality review process/panel of volunteers to send back submissions for editing until they meet some agreed upon threshold.
* Allow hierarchic folksonomy tagging pre-seeded with Google’s categories (Community, Opportunity, Energy, Environment, Health, Education, Shelter) but allow new and richer categories to emerge (so people can specifically search for projects in their domain of interest).
Then we just have to team up with various social enterprise funders to support the projects.
for me i liked this Idea :
Build better banking tools for everyone.
we can send and transfer the money via SMS mobile.
Coool! I’ll vote for it . ‘
somehow related to this topic
http://www.tech...ment-portfolio/
“I will pass on the best single pitch I get in the next two weeks.”
So, what was the best pitch ?
How Google has changed the contest rules:
When I’ve submitted my proposal, I’ve made a pdf copy of the original rules and FAQ.
They obviously have removed the paragraph related to the pickup of 100 ideas and the vote on the 20 best ideas (public vote) and finally the selection of the 5 very best ideas by a comitee.
Now they have decided to directly select themselves 16 ideas.
It’s a shame to change the rules during a contest !
In happening on a site featuring one of the submitted ideas for the Google Project 10, I shared my disappointment. Much of which stems from the fact that Google is a company that is actually in a position to SIGNIFICANTLY help humanity — VERY capable with an array of top talent. But of course, money talks – and it seems clear this project is about “partnering”. Not giving where it is MOST needed.
Ho Hum Google. Now just like many other “great, progressive companies” in past that *could have* made a real difference – but for money sake… didn’t.
Frankly, Googles Project 10 sucks – it smacks of underlying agenda and doesn’t appear to be intentionally set to help anyone other than: the “super secret” companies it refuses to name.
Meanwhile, they admit they are not in the position to actually “support” the project but will “partner with companies they believe can best do so” — Right. Convenient.
I am disappointed in Google both in their selected ideas(most of which surround someone else OTHER THAN common people getting an opportunity) —And also in their slap dash delivery of it. Particularly comical was the “transparency” in government proposal. That’s hilarious.
“The votes create a blanket justification for Google to do whatever they want and just say that’s where the $10M they promised for the 10^100 project was spent.”
Which is why I have decided not to participate in the voting
I have submitted my idea named as FLOTTING CITY for this project. I was disappointed by the google’s evaluation. I thought that my ideas were not that much strong enough to impact the world. But today while browsing I saw in the net that one pro gramme/video which was captioned as MEGA ENGINEERING/FLOTTING CITY added to discovery channel on 19 Jul 2009. This date is far from the closing date of google’s 10 100 project. And this video must have been telecasted in discovery channel much before the date of google’s 16 finalist’s announcement. I believe that google must have stolen my idea for its benefit. I never thought google will do such a fraud.
I have submitted my idea named as FLOTTING CITY for this project. I was disappointed by the google’s evaluation. I thought that my ideas were not that much strong enough to impact the world. But today while browsing I saw in the net that one pro gramme/video which was captioned as MEGA ENGINEERING/FLOTTING CITY added to discovery channel on 19 Jul 2009. This date is far from the closing date of google’s 10 100 project. And this video must have been telecasted in discovery channel much before the date of google’s 16 finalist’s announcement. I believe that google must have stolen my idea for its benefit. I never thought google will do such a fraud. And now I am worried about my other submitted idea of GLOWING EARTH which describes that providing sun light to the earth at nights. Google may steel this idea too. What should I do to protect my ideas from google’s theft hands.
I have submitted my idea named as FLOTTING CITY for this project. I was disappointed by the google’s evaluation. I thought that my ideas were not that much strong enough to impact the world. But today while browsing I saw in the net that one pro gramme/video which was captioned as MEGA ENGINEERING/FLOTTING CITY added to discovery channel on 19 Jul 2009. This date is far from the closing date of google’s 10 100 project. And this video must have been telecasted in discovery channel much before the date of google’s 16 finalist’s announcement. I believe that google must have stolen my idea for its benefit. I never thought google will do such a fraud. c