How to trade your great idea for nothing

Posted: October 15th, 2008 | Author: Panos Karageorgakis | Filed under: Technology | 1 Comment »

Have you ever had an imaginary friend? Well maybe not (I haven’t), but for once let’s imagine that you do have one. Picture a cloudy-like, fuzzy-shaped form with unlimited knowledge and memory, always willing to answer any question your soul could possibly want to ask (expect maybe for the Ultimate Question which has already been already been answered anyway).

Specifically, your imaginary friend’s characteristics could include (but not be limited to) the following:

• It’s your best friend.
• It’s always available to you, wherever you are.
• It has instant access to all the facts of the world.
• It has a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know.
• It can tailor answers to you based on your preferences, your existing knowledge and the best available information.
• When a question is vague, it could ask for clarification.
• It would present the answers in whatever setting or media worked best.

Now, that sounds nice! Our imaginary friend (which we’ll lovingly call “Cloudie” for the sake of our paradigm) would be the perfect companion. Omnipresent and omnipotent, it would have a (pretty much) thorough knowledge of everything regarding you, as well as the whole world, thus being able to answer any of your questions. The perfect friend, companion and tool.

Before you start imagining how privileged you would be with such a best friend, I am sorry to spoil this by informing you that Cloudie would not be exclusive to you – it would have other friends of its own as well. And it would be best friend to every one of them, not only you. Oh, and picture that there would be millions of them (thus explaining how Cloudie could possibly have access to all the facts of the world).

So how would you feel about that? I imagine I would be terrified , knowing that someone had that much information about me and about every person in the world as well. First of all, what if Cloudie, my best friend, disclosed some of my private information to a third party? Sure, it says it would never do that, but how do I know? Sometimes even your best friend can’t be trusted; and also , what could such a powerful all-knowing being evolve to, if it decided to be malevolent? It’s terrifying, really.

Back to reality

Frightening as it may sound, our fictional friend already exists and its name is Google. It’s not yet capable of doing all the nice things I’ve mentioned, but it’s what it yearns to become – and this is not my point of view, but rather the definition of the ideal search engine according to Marissa Mayer, the Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google, as seen in this TechCrunch article. So before you begin to question my conspiracy/totalitarian/big-brotherish fears, you can check out for yourself that it’s all true.

But that’s not why I decided to write this article, really. It’s another thing that made me write about Google – their newest project, coded Project 10¹⁰⁰.

We don’t have the answers, but we believe that you do. And we want them.

Basically, project 10¹⁰⁰ aims to make the world a better place, by doing something that would help 10¹⁰⁰ people all around the globe (that’s orders of magnitude greater than the population of the Earth). But it turns out that the all-knowing search engine giant doesn’t have the answer to every question; quoting their blog:

But what would help, and what would be most helpful? We don’t believe we have the answers, but we do believe the answers are out there.

So since they don’t have the answers, they ask us, ordinary people, to provide them . For this reason they’ve made a submission form which you can use to submit your idea for helping a lot of people and making the world a better place. Google experts will review the submitted ideas and the best 100 of them will be announced for the public to pick the semi-finalists, then “an advisory board will choose up to five final ideas for funding and implementation”, according to the project’s webpage.

That’s right, the company has committed $10 million to fund the top-5 ideas. They will own your idea, implement it and make the world a better place. Oh, and they’ll probably make tons of money by integrating their ads in the final product (not to mention the information gathering by the product itself).

So what do you get for giving Google your best idea on how to make this world a better place? Nothing, except for “fame”. If you’re the kind of person who would fancy your name being announced in the top 5 ideas that will change the world and that will make you live happily ever after, go ahead and submit your idea before the deadline expires on October the 20th, 2008.

If you’re not that kind of person, and would imagine that Google was searching for the brightest minds to incorporate with them, to fund them and help them create a product that will change the world for the best, you’re out of luck. Sorry, you still need to seek funding.

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