[www.project10tothe100.com]

This could be a good opportunity for RepRap. Maybe someone with a passionate pen could fill a nice form...
If it reaches the finals, I believe that the publicity alone will make a great impact.

well, indeed a nice project....

BUT:
it's meant to make money out of the ideas,
by companies you cannot choose nor control.

read terms and conditions of the project!

It's NOT a good idea to send your idea there;
if it's possile to make money out of it,
you lost (money at least, reputation for sure)
if it's impossible to make money with your idea,
it will not even reach the "second" round

Quote

FAQ:
Q: Can an organisation submit an idea for this project? A: All ideas must be submitted by individuals. You may submit an idea on behalf of an organisation you're affiliated with, but please note that we cannot guarantee your organisation will be selected to implement the idea if it is chosen. Once we've selected up to five ideas for funding, we will use an RFP process to identify the organisation(s) that are in the best position to implement the selected ideas. We will be providing funding to these organisations to implement the ideas.

see what i mean?

"Once we've selected up to five ideas for funding, we will use an RFP process to identify the organisation(s) that are in the best position to implement the selected ideas. We will be providing funding to these organisations to implement the ideas."

Ha! So they can take your idea and then fund somebody else to develop it. Sounds like they hired an old National Science Foundation project managed that I used to know many years ago. He was very fond of taking interesting grant proposals and then handing them to friends who would rewrite them and submit them to him. He'd then fund his friends leaving the innovator to whistle for his supper.. He once told me quite blandly that there were good ideas and good developers of good ideas ... and they were rarely the same people. ><

Yeah, I know the risks of this kind of competition or sponsorships, so that's why I won't fill any forms; I think that's a decision for the core team of RR to make, if they're interested.

I think that Google may have his own personal,greedy, intentions with this project; but the romantic goal of the competition is to GIVE your idea for the benefit of the world, not for some personal recognition or control over the development of the idea. Also in the FAQs it's very clear:

Q: What do I get if my idea is chosen?
A: You get good karma and the satisfaction of knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of people.

So you don't get anything

Of course, nobody wants to drop an idea for free to the world, and then watch how Google captures it and make its own. The terms also states

As between you and Google, you retain ownership of any intellectual and industrial property rights (including moral rights) you have in and to your submission.

Of course, this this a little ambiguous, because next paragraph says:

As a condition of participation, you grant Google, its subsidiaries, agents and partner companies, a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, adapt, modify, publish, distribute, publicly perform, create a derivative work from, and publicly display your submission and the proposal provided therein (1) for the purposes of allowing Google, the advisory panel and users to evaluate your idea for purposes of the call for submissions, (2) in connection with advertising and promotion via communication to the public or other groups, including, but not limited to, the right to make screenshots, animations and video clips available for promotional purposes and (3) for the purposes of putting your submitted proposal into effect.

le_chiffre Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yeah, I know the risks of this kind of competition
> or sponsorships, so that's why I won't fill any
> forms; I think that's a decision for the core team
> of RR to make, if they're interested.
>
I can't speak for the rest of the core team, of which I'm a member, but I'm not interested at all.
>
> I think that Google may have his own
> personal,greedy, intentions with this project; but
> the romantic goal of the competition is to GIVE
> your idea for the benefit of the world, not for
> some personal recognition or control over the
> development of the idea. Also in the FAQs it's
> very clear:
>
Yeah, sounds like Hillary and Obama... "You really have a patriotic duty to hand me whatever you're have so that I can take it and use it to make me look beter, and more importantly, stay in power".

Screw that. I'd rather cut out would-be middlemen. In that regard, I think that Reprap is doing an admirable job already. We don't need Paige and Brin.
>
> Q: What do I get if my idea is chosen?
> A: You get good karma and the satisfaction of
> knowing that your idea might truly help a lot of
> people.
>
Whoppee! That's like wetting yourself while you're wearing a dark suit. You get a nice warm feeling, but precious little else but an odor after a while if you've been eating asparagus.
>
> So you don't get anything
>
> Of course, nobody wants to drop an idea for free
> to the world, and then watch how Google captures
> it and make its own. The terms also states
>
> As between you and Google, you retain ownership of
> any intellectual and industrial property rights
> (including moral rights) you have in and to your
> submission.
>
> Of course, this this a little ambiguous, because
> next paragraph says:
>
> As a condition of participation, you grant Google,
> its subsidiaries, agents and partner companies, a
> perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free,
> and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce,
> adapt, modify, publish, distribute, publicly
> perform, create a derivative work from, and
> publicly display your submission and the proposal
> provided therein (1) for the purposes of allowing
> Google, the advisory panel and users to evaluate
> your idea for purposes of the call for
> submissions, (2) in connection with advertising
> and promotion via communication to the public or
> other groups, including, but not limited to, the
> right to make screenshots, animations and video
> clips available for promotional purposes and (3)
> for the purposes of putting your submitted
> proposal into effect.
>
Sounds like now that Paige and Brin have got greedy and begun to run off all the brilliant people who made them billionaires they're looking for fresh suckers.

Ok fine, I think everyone agrees that RepRap doesn't need Google's money and it would probably be foolish to apply for this.

But that doesn't mean that it's necessarily a bad program - I suspect that there will be a lot of really great ideas that come out of this from unexpected sources that would otherwise be neglected. Someone with a brilliant idea and access to lots of venture capital and time to develop it would presumably have already done so. This is aimed squarely at the sorts of innovators that usually have NO access to traditional sources of support, and so would probably have never made a dime off of their idea anyway.

When I was younger I had an idea for an online database of digital sheet music that would allow the user to hum a few bars of a song in their head into a microphone and run a match, giving them the name and artist of the song so they could look it up. In the years since then, there have been several implementations of this that have been moderately successful. I didn't take the initiative at the time, and so of course I don't personally receive any benefit from this. If google's program would have existed at the time perhaps I could have submitted my idea to that, and even though I still wouldn't have received a dime of money, at least I would have gotten some credit.

For the record, I'm sure I'm not the first one to have thought up this idea but the same point stands for everyone else who thought of it before me and never pursued it.

The chief problem that I see with the concept is that it takes ideas from out in the community, runs off with them, hires a private industry team to work out the bugs and then fields them. That simply grafts a "cathedral" development model onto ideas that are best left in Reprap's "Bazaar".

[www.catb.org]

The whole strength of Reprap, in my opinion, stems from the "swarm" development model that has evolved here. People publish their ideas about how to improve or evolve the system and everybody listening in is welcome to grab the ideas and run with them. It has lead to a VERY fast development cycle and what is turning into a VERY robust technology. I don't think a "cathedral" team would have anything to bring to that.

Quote

Sounds like now that Paige and Brin have got greedy and begun to run off all the brilliant people who made them billionaires

On the contrary, this is google business as usual. Pretty much all the exciting products that have popped out of google have been designed by someone else, and then purchased, ajaxified, rebranded and released. I can't think of anything that they developed solely in-house which went on to become a widespread success, but that doesn't mean that such a thing doesn't exist

Remember that google take specific exception to GPL3 because it would stop them taking and modifying open source projects and then never returning the improvements to the community because they merely host the services, not redistribute the software.

You don't get to be a multibajillion dollar company by being nice, after all.

That said, they have done all sorts of good things.

Anyone ever looked at their summer of code programs?

Ru Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> On the contrary, this is google business as usual.
> Pretty much all the exciting products that have
> popped out of google have been designed by someone
> else, and then purchased, ajaxified, rebranded and
> released. I can't think of anything that they
> developed solely in-house which went on to become
> a widespread success, but that doesn't mean that
> such a thing doesn't exist

Web search? Adsense? Gmail? Google docs? Google reader?

I think google does a lot of their own legwork. Google Earth, Blogger and Youtube are prominent exceptions, but still exceptions.

Kyle Corbitt Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> Web search?
>
I know for sure that the current generation search is the result of a guru that they hired from outside.
>
> I think google does a lot of their own legwork.
>
That's not what I hear and San Jose is about an 90 minutes by road from where I live.
>
> Google Earth, Blogger and Youtube are prominent
> exceptions, but still exceptions.
>
Nope, they're more the rule than the exceptions these days.

It's like claiming that Visual Basic was created by Microsoft. No way, it was bought from Alvin Cooper's little firm in 1991 and turned from what Alvin intended as an end-user development tool into an IDE for programmers. I was around when all that happened.

Quote

Web search? Adsense? Gmail? Google docs? Google reader?

They did a serious number on search, and they turned ads from animated annoyances into multibillion dollar and relatively unobtrusive text strings. This is impressive work.

Gmail gave us giant inboxes, and provided a welcome replacement for the lousy yet free incumbants. Gmail was announced in 2004; thats a little while ago now Google docs is largely based upon third party work, though it looks like the spreadsheet might be their own. The reader I can't comment upon, as I don't use such things. I'll leave it to someone else to say how useful/exciting/innovative it is (or isn't, as the case may be)

Things like youtube are more interesting, as they represent a total failure on google's part (see google video, or not) which they attempted to fix by spending a frightening amount of money for no equivalent gain, unless perhaps they own some law firms.

Google aren't dumb, or parasitical. They've brought a lot of good things to us, and it requires serious brains to keep their colossal systems running usefully. But don't confuse packaging and presentation with innovation. I'll direct you towards Windows, and how it saved us from things like super-expensive-yet-pretty macs Whilst I'm ranting away, I shall pause to mention that the outlook web interface (orders of magnitude better than its desktop equivalent) laid the foundations for AJAX (in the form of XmlHttpRequest) upon which most of google's fancy toys are based. Now that's innovation!

I don't get it because someone does well in business by making the right decissions re buying other companies/ staff they become the devil. Google have transformed the Web for the better if they didn't maybe some one else would have but as it happens they did it and for free as far as most people are concerned even with the might of Microsoft against them. For me that makes them good guys.

As for this competion i couldn't agree more a good inventor is not by default a good business man if fact that is a very rare person indeed. So to say they will get it developed else where would seem well sensible if it's the right thing to do.

---

Ian
[www.bitsfrombytes.com]

Quote

I don't get it because someone does well in business by making the right decissions re buying other companies/ staff they become the devil

Not at all; and in fact I don't see anyone here saying so But they are as much our angelic saviours as Steve Jobs is.

Google are mildly unpleasant, mostly due to their cavalier attitude towards privacy, their effective monopoly on the search and ad market and their slightly strange relationship with open source software (see gpl3 comment above). They aren't really any worse than any other large corporation... thats just the way these things work. But 'don't be evil' went out the window some time ago.

I would like to know if it is not to late to submit my proposal to project 10 to the 100? Please contact me ASAP, would love to be involved and share my invention with the project. Also if it is to late can you keep me posted on any other special events in the future that google is celebrating for the 10to the 100th.

Thanking you in advance

Donna Floros
818-448-9363

this is the kind of thin that makes brilliant, though naive, inventors homless. hopefully, google will follow their company policy of not being evil and graciously offer some recognition of some kind to the unfortunate participants of this program.... but it will be under no legal obligation to do so.

the way things go in america these days legal obligation passes for moral responsibility and most definitely not vice versa.

it would be nice to think we're all past things like vanity and commercial gain, but we're not; and that's only half the issue. after google has your-no, THEIR new idea, they'll outsource a development team and turn it into whatever they want.

Who wants an at home tshirt disigner that will print logos in sot plastics right onto the fabric? (think 'flat darwin', no z axis) it's worthless, but a hell of a lot more marketable than the DIY journey that is RepRap. also, once it's on the market you might as well burn your designs and bury the ashes, because you will never find a legal way to market them again and you might get sued for distributing them freely.

---

David

Thanks for sharing. I don;t know what ideas you are talking about ? What is this project10 to the 100th?
How did I get on this.
Please remove my name from this RepRap.
How did I loose my reputation?
With what project?
I do not have a project?
What does Google do with ideas? Steal them?
Help.