Genius Rocket

Super Bowl Ads and the Rise of the Prize Economy - New York Times -

Mark Walsh, chief executive of the start-up Genius Rocket, loved this year’s Super Bowl — not so much the game, but the hit Doritos ad, the $1 million prize it won for the two brothers from Indiana and what their triumph represents. ...

His current venture, Genius Rocket, runs an online marketplace where people compete to get paid for their work, ranging from 90-second video ads for the Web to product logos and book covers. ...

The buyers, mainly consumer marketers, issue a request for work, describing what they want. Then, far-flung creators submit their work and the buying company picks one or a few winners. The prizes typically range from $5,000 to $500, Mr. Walsh said. ...

His stable of enterprising amateurs and freelancers possess “incredible talent,” Mr. Walsh said, and they can do advertising and marketing projects for a tenth the cost of traditional ad agencies. ...

Google Prizes

I've mentioned the Google Lunar X PRIZE many times, and the Android Challenge and competitions related to Google Earth as well. Here are some recent posts on other competitions that Google has run or supported recently. They're all from the "Offical Google Blog":

It's Jam Time - on the Google Code Jam

Gingerbread architecture for all

Gingerbread Competition results are in - on the SketchUp Gingerbread House Design Competition

Make over your site using the wisdom of the crowd - on the Website Workout contest using Website Optimizer

How to become a Dummies.com author - on the Knol for Dummies.com contest:

Simply go to the official contest page, create your own knol about a subject you know well, and the contest judges will select five finalists who will be eligible to have their knols featured on the Dummies.com site. In addition, the best entry overall will be awarded a $1,000 grand prize.

Building engineers - on a Google-supported FIRST Robotics Team called the Thunderbolts

Project 10^100 Voting Phase Approaches

Project 10^100 - The phase where ideas are sent in to Google's competition is over, but the voting phase will start on January 27, 2009.

Loebner Turing Test Prize

Loebner Prize Winner Announced; Is He Human? - Buzz Ya!

Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence - The computer system that comes closest to passing the Turing Test (fooling people into thinking it's a human) wins the prize.

Google: $10M to Implement Good Ideas

Google will award $10M for ideas that benefit the world - neXt PRIZE (future X PRIZE blog) - The content is from CNN Technology:

Got an idea that could change the world, or at least help a lot of people? Google wants to hear from you -- and it will pay as much as $10 million to make your idea a reality.

To help celebrate its 10th birthday, the ambitious Internet giant is launching an initiative to solicit, and bankroll, fresh ideas that it believes could have broad and beneficial impact on people's lives.

Called Project 10^100 (pronounced "10 to the 100th"), Google's initiative will seek input from the public and a panel of judges in choosing up to five winning ideas, to be announced in February.

Google announced the project live on CNN on Wednesday morning. ...

People are encouraged to submit their ideas, in any of 25 languages, at www.project10tothe100.com through October 20. ...

A Google spokeswoman was reluctant to set parameters for the submissions, although the project's Web site suggests that successful ideas should address such issues as providing food and shelter, building communities, improving health, granting more access to education, sustaining the global ecosystem and promoting clean energy.

To be clear, the $10M is for implementing the winning ideas, not for the people that submit the ideas (unless, I suppose, they're the ones that would implement them).

Will contests ever get old? Not if Google’s in charge - Venture Beat: It’s interesting that Google has chosen yet another contest to plow its philanthropy efforts into. Google, you may recall, was also the sponsor of the Lunar X Prize, and also ran Android Developers Challenge for its mobile platform, children’s drawing competition Doodle 4 Google, the Google Programming Contest and Desktop Gadget Contest, and others.

Red Bull Flugtag (Flying Day)

The Red Buill Flugtag is a human-powered aviation contest that combines innovation with creativity and showmanship. Let me translate: you're more likely to see a giant bag of beer (or energy)-soaked French fries try to take off than a human-powered plane as practical as a bicycle. Don't discount the fun, though - they show an X Wing attempt, and I've seen X Wing model rockets, too.

From the What is Flug? site, here's a brief overview:

Red Bull Flugtag challenges teams of everyday people to build homemade, human-powered flying machines and pilot them off a 30-foot high deck in hopes of achieving flight! Flugtag may mean "flying day" in German, but all these crafts ultimately splash into the waters below. They are judged not only on their flight's distance, but creativity and showmanship as well.

As you can see, distance is a factor ... so it counts as a technology innovation prize. There's more at Life in the Fast Lane.

I couldn't find the Yahoo News! article whose headline I noticed yesterday, but this is probably what it was about.

I Prize Finalists

Cisco Pays Big for New Ideas - Business Week - This article, care of the X PRIZE Foundation news ticker, describes some of the finalists in Cisco's I-Prize competition.

Clear Prize for Aviation Security Innovations

Wired posts on a %500,000 prize from Clear for airport security technology innovations. Rather than improved security, their goal is for faster processing through security checkpoints. Presumably the faster processing would have to at least keep security the same as it is without the innovation. In addition to the cash prize, Clear will commit to a contract for business. An industry event will be held on Feb 13 for the prize.

SciAm 50 Awards

Scientific American has one of those "year in review" wrap-ups. This is for the "SciAm 50" awards. The third award of the 50 is for "Policy Leader of the Year", which goes to the X PRIZE Foundation (which may be why I found the link to the article at their site).

A Big Prize List; Kavli Prizes

Site Big Fat Prize (apparently in beta test) keeps, well, a big fat list of prizes, including prize value, links, and short prize descriptions. A lot of the prizes covered are the ones typically covered here - space prizes and technology innovation prizes. There are plenty of others.

I see a lot of business plan competitions, for example (including space business plans like Lunar Ventures or the Space Frontier Foundation's Business Plan Competition).

There are categories for space and science prizes, but those are empty. Since the link I gave at the beginning of the post has plenty of space prizes, I imagine they'll fill in these categories at some point. They do have a lot in the lists for invention and technology, and they even have a separate section for The X PRIZE Foundation's prizes.

I don't know exactly where they're going with the site, but it has potential. I hope they can fill in the missing spots, get the blog going, and add some more database lookup capabilities (for example, searches based on not just prize category but amounts, past and future events like prize registration timeframes, and other useful criteria). I have all sorts of other ideas that might work for the site ... who knows how much work it would be to implement, though.

One prize they list that I should mention is the Kavli Prize, which is like the Nobel Prize in that it looks back at past achievements rather than giving an incentive for a future achievement. It includes three $1,000,000 prizes every 2 years (starting in 2008). The fields are Astrophysics, Nanoscience, and Neuroscience. The way they bring together those 3 diverse fields is "The prizes focus on the science of the greatest physical dimensions of space and time, the science of the smallest dimensions of systems of atoms and molecules, and the science of the most complex systems, especially living organisms." It sounds pretty symmetric now!

I'll give the Astrophysics prize a bit of special attention by adding their description of its scope:

The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics will be awarded for outstanding achievement in advancing our knowledge and understanding of the origin, evolution, and properties of the universe, including the fields of cosmology, astrophysics, astronomy, planetary science, solar physics, space science, astrobiology, astronomical and astrophysical instrumentation, and particle astrophysics.

Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International Student Competitions

The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International has (and has had for many years) a number of student competitions. There are so many competitions, so many years of competitions, so many teams, and so many details for each team (sponsors, designs, papers, etc) that I can only give the briefest of overviews here.

AUVSI International Aerial Robotics Competition - Apparently this competition has been held since 1991. The Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems has defined a communications protocol for unmanned vehicles, and offers $750 for any team that can demonstrate basic proficiency with this message set. The JAUS has specifications that can be used in the Aerial Robotics Competition, and also in a couple of the other competitions.

The main competition has $80,000 in prizes, and involves an airborne robot that can fly 3km to find a town, identify a building and any openings, and get pictures of a target inside the building. The pictures have to get back to the beginning location. As you can see, the competitions have a military flavor. The competition is held at Ft. Benning.

There are links to the registered teams at the competition site. Many, but not all, of the designs are helicopter-based.

2008 UAS Competition - This is an Unmanned Aerial System competition with a similar-sounding mission to the above one. However, this scenario is in support of the U.S. Marine Corps. There will be a pre-defined mission, route, and objective to photograph, but as circumstances change, new objectives or routes may need to be taken. A quick mission is important. "At least $20,000 in prizes have been awarded the past two years".

Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition - This competition is for a rugged unmanned ground vehicle that can carry a 20 pound payload. It has to be able to navigate an obstacle course. It brings to mind the DARPA Grand Challenges. There are numerous monetary awards for this competition.

International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition - This is brought by the AUVSI and ONR (Office of Naval Research). It's for unmanned submarines (AUVs). The challenge involves control (depth, speed, direction), accousting and visual sensing, and dropping or getting an object. There's a wealth of information about this year's teams (each has a website and paper) here.

International Autonomous Surface Vehicle Competition - This is also brought by the AUVSI and ONR. It's for unmanned boats. They need to be able to navigate, avoid obstacles, and find GPS-based objectives marked by a buoy.

These are all for Earth-based applications, but they seem relevant to me to many space applications, too. I picture satellites, Europa submarines, Mars or Lunar rovers, planetary air vehicles, human-assisting robots floating in a space station, and so on when I read these competitions and think about the space "angle". In fact, I would not be surprised if there are great opportunities with these competitions for space organizations to participate or interact with this unmanned vehicle community.

Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition

Here's another human-powered vehicle prize (which reminds me of the prizes for human-powered flight and human-powered land speed records): the Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Prize. You can learn a lot more at HumanPoweredHelicopters.org. The American Helicopter Society offers $20,000 for a controlled flight of a human-powered helicopter.

More Prize Competitions in Several Fields

Also from the X PRIZE news ticker, Business Week has an article on several innovation prizes:

- The Picnic Green Challenge to generate ideas for products and services to help reduce greenhouse emissions with a 500,000 euro prize

- The Buckminster Fuller Challenge, an annual $100,000 competition to design solutions to our biggest problems

- The Knight Foundation News Challenge, a contest with $5 million in prizes for ideas to "use digital communities to enhance physical communities".

Philanthropic Prizes Back in Vogue

Here's another article brought to you by the X PRIZE Foundation news ticker.

The San Francisco Business Times reports on the growing number of prizes that are being kicked off for philanthropic purposes. Some of the prizes are of the "technology innovation incentive" variety that this blog usually emphasizes, while others address social, political, or educational issues. The article describes the reason why I emphasize the innovation prizes here:

"Prizes are a really good tool for sparking new ideas and new collaborations and getting new people involved in the mix," said Lucy Bernholz, president of Blueprint R&D and a philanthropy blogger. She cautions, however, that prizes may inspire change but are a poor mechanism for sustaining that change. Indeed, the most successful prizes, like the Goldman Prize, provide ongoing support for winners beyond a crowning ceremony."

A well-designed innovation prize will give competitors the incentive to try multiple approaches to get past a "technology hurdle" that is preventing a commercial or government market that can sustain itself once the hurdle is overcome. The trouble with some prizes, and this tends to be true more often with non-innovation prizes, is that even after the prize is won, the advance that won the prize needs ongoing maintenance to thrive. Of course this is not always the case, and at any rate sometimes the goal is important enough to make the ongoing cost worthwhile.

Other than the X PRIZE, the prizes mentioned in the article are:

The Purpose Prize, which "provides five awards of $100,000 and ten awards of $10,000 to people over 60 who are taking on society’s biggest challenges".

The Goldman Environmental Prize, which is "the world's largest prize honoring grassroots environmentalists. Founded in 1990 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman, the Goldman Environmental Prize annually awards US$125,000 to environmental heroes from each of the world's six inhabited continental regions".

Ruckus Nation, which "is awarding up to $300,000 in cash and prizes to individuals and teams that join Ruckus Nation and submit the best ideas for new products to increase physical activity among kids".

ESA Playlist Prize

RLV News posts on the winners of the ESA ATV playlist competition, involving selecting an insipiring music playlist to be sent to the European ATV on its way to the ISS. The competition was only open to citizens of countries contributing to the ATV competition. (For comparison, NASA Centennial Challenges are open to non-U.S. teams with some U.S. connections). The prizes:

"The Grand Prize for the overall winner will be a trip to see the ATV launch in Kourou, French Guiana (South America) as well as having their playlist sent to space on board the ATV.

One prize for the best entry from each country. Each national winner will win a day trip to the European Astronaut Centre in Germany. "

The winning playlist:

Here Comes The Sun - Beatles
Come Fly With Me - Frank Sinatra
Rocket Man - Elton John
Up Where We Belong - Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes
Imagine - John Lennon
Flashdance - What A Feeling - Irene Cara
Walk of Life - Dire Straits
Fly - Celine Dion
Rockin' All Over The World - Status Quo
I Believe I Can Fly - R Kelly

KEI on Prize4Life

The KEI Policy Blog posts on a medical science prize, Prize4Life, modeled after the X PRIZE, for solving problems related to ALS. According to the Boston Globe, they've raised $4.5 million. One way they attract donors is to promise to return the donor money if the prize isn't won. Their first large prize, the ALS/MND Biomarker Challenge, is for $1 million. It can be found at Innocentive. See more from Innocentive here.

The Boston Globe article notes that drug companies avoid ALS research because the risk is too high.

Find out more at the Prize4Life site. Some excerpts from the site:

"The Prize4Life concept is inspired by other prize awards for stimulating research, such as the X-Prize for commercial space travel and DNA-decoding, the U.S. government’s H-Prize for hydrogen renewable energy, and Eli Lilly’s venture, InnoCentive, which outsources difficult R&D problems to a distributed network of scientists using prizes."

"What will we offer prizes for?

1) Biomarker/diagnostic tool: a test or exam that will allow us to measure how good a potential ALS/MND treatment is much more precisely than just measuring patient survival.

2) High Throughput Screening for ALS/MND: a lab experiment that allows the fast and cheap testing of large numbers of chemical compounds for their potential as ALS/MND drugs.

3) New Treatment Therapies: new drugs that extend the life of ALS/MND patients by significantly compared to the current standard ALS/MND therapy."

Here's more from the Wired Blog, including some congratulations from the X PRIZE Foundation in the comments.

Here's an article from Yahoo! about Keith Powers from the X PRIZE Foundation moving to the Board of the Prize4Life Foundation.

From Boston Magazine comes an article on the Prize4Life organization and Avi Kremer, including several paragraphs that describe their discussions with the X PRIZE Foundation on making the Prize4Life an X PRIZE. Even if this alliance doesn't work (and it makes a lot of sense to me to consolidate some of the prizes that are out there under organizations that have track histories, experience, already-existing overhead costs that can be shared, and name recognition), hopefully the different non-profit prize organizations (in this particular case and others) can be mutually supportive in other ways (news, exhibits during events, etc). Anyway here's the excerpt:

"Finally, you have to wonder whether patients’ fear might lead them to make the wrong decisions in their research work. Prize4Life is a case in point: Kremer modeled his organization on the Ansari X Prize competition, which in 2004 granted a $10 million award to the team that realized the long-held goal of private space flight, and last month announced a similar bounty for developing a car that can get 100 miles per gallon. Kremer admired the prize’s ability to stimulate innovation—but pay only for results—in a field that had seemed stagnant; maybe, he thought, prizes could “revolutionize” ALS research in the same way.

So successfully did Prize4Life imitate the X Prize model that Kremer’s people eventually began to talk with its leaders last year about turning his organization into an X Prize for ALS. By joining forces, Prize4Life would have access to more money (the minimum award would be $10 million) and a bigger, better-established operation. Much like Warren Buffett’s giving $36 billion to the Gates Foundation, it appeared to be a natural fit.

The X Prize Foundation was receptive. But its representatives felt strongly that to capture the public’s interest, and that of the very best scientists, the prize had to be linked to breakthroughs in neurodegenerative diseases as a whole. Upon hearing their terms, Kremer declined. He was worried that Prize4Life’s funding and previous work might ultimately go toward research that had no benefit to ALS. Determined to maintain his foundation’s tight focus, he opted to go it alone.

If Prize4Life were subject to a Harvard Business School case study, many students would have urged Kremer to “find synergies” and merge with the X Prize Foundation. But when it’s your life hanging in the balance, your tolerance for risk is greater. After all, for Kremer, what’s there to lose? "

Knowledge Ecology International on Prizes

Recently in the comments of this Space Politics post on a big Mars prize, Anonymous (the one who eloquently dissects the problems with the ESAS implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration) presented a list of historical prizes during the discussion. The list is interesting in and of itself, so I'll provide the source here. This link is a great place to start in investigating space or other prizes, and in fact I've used some of the same references here (gained unfortunately through hard searching, not this nice page, as my original paper was written last summer). There's a good chronological description of prominent technology prizes, and then a good list of references (mostly web sites and press articles, but some academic papers too) at the end.

That list isn't the point of this post, though. This post is more to point out the prize resources available at Knowledge Ecology Interational (KEI), of which the linked page is just the beginning. Here are some more prize items at KEI:

KEI's web site has a large section on Prizes to Stimulate Innovation. A lot of the rest can be reached from this high-level page.

There are lots of KEI Blog entries on prizes. There are a number of prize-related posts here, and they probably deserve separate treatment since there is a lot there (if you follow the links).

Here is a list of KEI/CPTech papers on prizes for medical innovation. This list is followed by lots of other references on prizes for medical innovation, including a section that is mainly favorable to the idea and another section that tends to be against it. Finally there is a section on other ideas besides prizes.

One prominent KEI paper is The Big Idea: Prizes to Stimulate R&D for New Medicines.

Here's a talk that Robin Hanson gave on Why Grants Won Over Prizes in Science. From the overview of the talk: "Hanson explained that historians of science have traditionally argued that the shift reflects a recognition that grants are a superior strategy for getting innovative scientific results. But Hanson hypothesizes that ... more centralized and democratic governments tend to prefer grants, perhaps because they are more susceptible to pressure from establishment scientists and scientific societies which stand to benefit from more discretionary spending (much in the same way that such governments are more susceptible to pressures leading to “pork” spending)." Here's the Powerpoint summary and here's the paper.

Drug Development Blog with Prize Posts

One of the papers that's been linked on this blog since the beginning is "Perfecting Patent Prizes", one of the academic papers on prize economics focused on comparing the patent system to various versions of prize systems, especially in the area of pharmaceuticals. In preparing another post, I stumbled across this blog post on a talk by the author, Michael Abramowicz, on the paper. The blog post gives a good high-level summary of the paper (and presumably the talk as well), although naturally the paper was much more detailed than the blog post. There is also a link to a Powerpoint presentation on the talk that's another easy way to digest the main points.

You can find more pharmaceutical-related prize posts at the same blog:

Peter Pitts on Prizes

Bio-generics and prize systems

Note that the types of prize systems discussed in these economics articles tend to be a bit different from the space prizes usually discussed here. Typically the subject of the economics papers is a macro-economic level change to the economy, such as replacing the patent system with a prize system or an industry-wide change of this sort like the Medical Innovation Prize Fund. (However, see this in-progress proposal for a small-scale test version of a medical prize system). In contrast, the space prizes are isolated incentives for particular achievements without a change to the overall national or global economic system. There isn't any kind of push to replace the existing NASA or DOD contracting system, research grants, or commercial space regulatory environment with a prize environment - just a push to give some incentives to solve a few very difficult problems like CATS. Nevertheless you can learn a lot about one type of prize from studying the other.

Science Documentary Film Award

Space for All has a press release about a new film award, the Kistler Documentary Film Award, for science documentaries that "shape the long-term future of humanity". The first winner is for the producer, Thomas Levenson, of the miniseries "Origins" and writer and director of part of the miniseries. The cash part of the annual prize is $10,000. This year there will be an award ceremony at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, including a showing of part 4 of the miniseries. See the press release for many more details about this award and other annual Kistler awards.

Also see the Foundation for the Future site for links to information about the winning miniseries and details about the other Kistler awards and related work like the seminar Humans and Space: The Next Thousand Years.

Foresight Institute Feynman Prize

The Foresight Institute is concerned with nanotechnology, especially with advancing beneficial nanotechnology. They have organized their thoughts into Foresight Nanotechnology Challenges, including clean energy, clean water, health and longevity, preserving the environment, information technology access, and of course enabling space development. The Institute also offers the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology. There are prizes for communication, government policy, and research that promotes beneficial nanotechnology. The ultimate prize, the Feynman Grand Prize, for $250,000, is for making a nanotech-sized robot arm that can manipulate atoms and molecules, and also a simple but extremely tiny computer (which I assume would need to be built with the nanotech assembler).

The chairman of the Foresight Institute's Prize Steering Committee is Peter Diamandis, also known for many space prize and space business activities.