Have you read this informative article on different types of incentives? An interesting backdrop to your call for prizes.

Sam

To start things off it might even be better to talk about doing something, rather than just doing it.

Why just talk, you ask? Well I won’t go into the physics of energy, and how the measurement of applied work in joules, versus wattage loads demanded by reviews & impact studies.

Advertisors understand the difference, and make fortunes based upon better promotion of mousetraps, amongst a field of equal verminators, rather than inventing better mousetrap themselves.

What I can tell you is that cheap oil, and worldwide backing of heavy military-industrial complex development has left many great ideas in the dust of this last century.

Enterpreneurs spend fortunes vetting inventions worldwide, to ensure legal patents.

Smarter promoters (or even wiser yet Venture Capitolists) will instead seek out those dark horses, previously under-supported, or ‘small’ inventions already out there, and find new ways to award attention on potentially deserving alternative technologies.

For far too long we have ignored many ideas outside of the mainstream. Critical changes in the paradym, caused by the current economic downturn (and the possibility of peak oil), should encourage us to reexamine some of those ideas which came out before their time.

“It is easier to save energy, than to create it.”Amory Lovins