Google today announced $10 million in prizes to promote development for its new Android mobile platform.
To put this in perspective – that is the same amount as the Ansari X-Prize that birthed Spaceship One, Virgin Galactic, hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment, and the emergent non-governmental space industry.
Throwing that amount of money around can generate a LOT of motivation.
Cherie and I have been pondering things we should focus our time and energy on over the next few months – and guess what just jumped WAY up in contention… I am still thoroughly excited about iPhone application development, but you can be certain we’ll be brainstorming a few ideas for Android now.
The relatively feeble funding for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge provides an interesting contrast on our priorities as a society:
Launched in July, The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is an international design science competition which will award a prize of $100,000 to a single winning solution that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity.
Save the world for $100k, or build great next generation mobile applications for a slice of $10mil… Tough choice.
I think we’ll be pursuing choice B, but hopefully managing to save the world along the way. I’ve even got a few ideas already on how we might just be able to combine the two pursuits.
For the first time in a long time, the future of mobile application development is looking bright again. At last!
Here is Google’s amazingly dry video showing off Android and announcing the developer challenge…
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