Last year on its tenth birthday, Google announced its Project 10^100, a call for unique ideas to help as many people as possible.
In the 12 months between then and now, the company has fielded around 150,000 submissions in 25 languages; the ideas were reviewed by around 3,000 employees around the world. Now Google is asking the public to vote on which of the final 16 “big ideas” are worthy of being implemented. From better banking to landmine removal to real-time news and disaster reporting, the ideas are broad in scope and ambitious in the problems they address – just the sort of problems that Google enjoys tackling.
Users’ votes will be used to guide Google’s advisory board, which will choose up to five projects to receive funding. Google will then launch an RFP (Request for Proposal) process to find organizations to implement those ideas.
Here’s some background info on the project:
So far, the ideas involve community, environmental, economic, and energy-related solutions and include the following:
- Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
- Build better banking tools for everyone
- Work toward socially conscious tax policies
- Collect and organize the world’s urban data
- Create more efficient landmine removal programs
- Drive innovation in public transport
- Build real-time, user-reported news service
- Make educational content available online for free
- Create real-time natural crisis tracking system
- Make government more transparent
- Help social entrepreneurs drive change
- Provide quality education to African students
- Create genocide monitoring and alert system
- Enhance science and engineering education
- Promote health monitoring and data analysis
- Create real-world issue reporting system
Interestingly, some of these ideas sound a lot like the driving concepts behind existing organizations and startups we know. For example, the final idea is so akin to current tech media darling CitySourced that we have to wonder about possible duplication of effort.
What do our readers think? Which idea will get your vote, and why? Let us know in the comments!
