Google Wants Your Ideas To Change The World

Today Google has unveiled a $10 million effort to implement ideas or "a call for ideas that could help as many people as possible, and a program to bring the best of those ideas to life."

As part of the Project 10^100 , Google is asking users from around the world to submit ideas for ways to improve people's lives. Ideas are due by October 20, 2008, simply fill out the submission form giving us the gist of your idea or supplement your proposal with a 30-second video.

After Oct. 20th Google will choose what it feels are the 100 best ideas and then allow users to vote on which of them we think should be funded. The list will be narrowed down to 20 finalists, and a panel of judges will choose up to five ideas that will receive funding, Google said.

What you win is not a prize for yourself but, as Google puts it, “the satisfaction of knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of people”

"We've learned over the last 10 years at Google that great ideas can come from anywhere," the company said in a statement. For example, "Google Chrome emerged when engineers realized they needed an entirely new browser to sufficiently engage with rich web applications. Google News began when on 9/11 an engineer became frustrated that he couldn't aggregate news sources from around the world in one place."

Submission Guidelines

Our goal is to set as few rules as possible. However, we ask that you put your idea into one of the following categories and consider the evaluation criteria below.

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:

• 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?