Google's Project 10^100 Finally Reaches the Voting Phase

Google has finally provided some updated information on the Project 10^100 it launched last year. To celebrate the company's tenth birthday, Google asked people all over the world to submit their ideas to change the world and promised to fund the best ones. It was supposed to end by January 2009 but it took a lot longer than anticipated because of the overwhelming response.

“We hoped to capture the imagination of people around the world and offer a way to bring their best ideas to fruition. We were overwhelmed by the response — you sent us more than 150,000 ideas (approximately 10^5.2) in more than 25 languages and it took more than 3,000 Googlers in offices around the world to review the submissions,” Google announced. “We've pooled similar ideas into a set of 16 top idea themes aimed at addressing some important common goals, from making government more transparent to driving innovation in public transport.”

While many were wondering what Google was doing with the project and whether it might have even abandoned it, the company actually pulled a lot of resources to sift through all the submissions. Google is a huge company but, even so, using 3,000 employees out of its total of 20,000 shows that it was more than committed to the project. Finally, though, it is ready to move to the next phase of the project in which everyone can vote on the best ideas to decide which will get the funding.

Because of the huge number of submissions and the overlap between ideas, Google has decided to group them together into 16 themes for the users to vote on to help the project's advisory board choose the five that will get funding. The voting process is now opened and will run for two weeks.

Here's the full list of 16 themes to choose from:
  - 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