Thaindian News

By Meena Kar
Sep 25, (THAINDIAN NEWS) The winners of project 10^100 were finally announced on Friday. Since the last two years, when this initiative was first taken by Google, for the sake of public interest, thousands of people, from more than 170 countries, have contributed with more than 1.5 million ideas. The best five of them, who received the maximum votes were declared as the winner, getting a gross price amount of $10 million.

Google came up with the “10^100 project” idea back in 2008. It invited for all those ideas that could bring about a positive change in people’s life and help in improving the social conditions. People and institutions were invited to contribute with new ideas and vote for the visions, which they considered to be the best. Google also resolved to fund the execution of the best ideas, by giving each winner a lucrative prize amount.

The five best ideas voted for were- to make educational content available online for free; enhance science and engineering education, make government more transparent; drive innovation in public transport, provide quality education to African students. The institutions who proposed these ideas are ‘Khan Academy’, “FIRST”, “Public.Resource.Org”, “Shweeb” and “African Institute for Mathematical Sciences” respectively.

“Khan Academy”, which strives to provide free online education, received $3 million. “FIRST”, an NGO that promotes scientific learning was given an amount of $3 million. “Public.Resource.Org”, an NGO that works for free online accessibility of primary legal materials on net, got $2million to fund its purpose. “Shweeb”, a concept of short to medium distance, urban transport system, that uses human-powered transports on a monorail, was funded with $1 million. “African Institute for Mathematical Sciences” got $2 million, to support science education for graduation level for the poor African students.