InnoCentive has lots of other crowdsourced projects and problem solving challenges on their site than the PopSci challenge, it is worth checking out if you haven't heard of them before or read our article from several years ago here.

This is the week for contests. Over on our ReadWriteHack site we mention a contest being run by the US Defense Department for wannabe computer forensic examiners. And over on our Enterprise site, we wrote last week about how Intuit paid out a series of prizes for QuickBooks and Quicken App developers .

Microsoft will be accepting submissions until April 1, 2012 and the contest will be judged by Microsoft engineers. A winner will be announced at next year's Black Hat conference. The goal of the contest is to get developers to focus more on the big picture as opposed to individual bugs or issues. Is the lure $200,000 enough for developers throw themselves head first into Microsoft's challenge?

Microsoft has sold more than 400 million Windows 7 licenses to individuals, enterprises and government and many of those same institutions still use older versions of Windows such as XP or Vista. Windows is, by far, the most used operating system in the world and is still the primary target for malware and malicious attacks because of its ubiquity.

Microsoft has a market cap of $223.95 billion on the NASDAQ exchange , according to Google Finance. The company spends billions on research and development and security. Yet, the best Redmond can come up with as a bounty for the next advanced security technology is $200,000? Netflix offered $1 million for predictive technology in 2009 and had a very positive developer response.

We wrote in January 2010 about how prize contests can be a great boon for company's core technology. Microsoft is offering more ($250,000) for information that leads to the arrest of the operators of the Rustock botnet. With security threats making the news every day and the scale of intrusions increasing, Microsoft could do more to incentivize its developer community.

AWS and other cloud providers like RackSpace have been pivotal in the next-generation explosion of web and mobile applications that have changed the dynamic of the current era of technology disruption. Amazon's ease-of-use and elastic pricing model has lowered the bar for startups looking to experiment with their products and scale quickly. By opening the contest to a worldwide audience this year, Amazon has set its sights not just on the Silicon Valley crowd but also on disruptive developer hotbeds across the globe.

Sonian is an interesting example. Its goal is to archive electronic communications, files and unstructured content to create actionable intelligence (decision making through data analysis). After a couple of false starts, Sonian and CTO Greg Arnette were able to employ AWS in a cost-effective way that makes Sonian an interesting archiving engine and example of the powers of the cloud. Arnette frequents speaking engagements to help to explain businesses how to institute a cloud strategy and what the pitfalls will be with any cloud infrastructure, especially a third-party one such as AWS.

Each of the 15 finalists will receive $2,500 in AWS credits and six finalists will be awarded a $10,000 package including credits and a trip to Palo Alto, Calif. for the final round of judging. The winner will receive $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in AWS credits. Entrants must have made $10 million with their product but also not have accepted more than $10 million in venture funding. This way Amazon can whittle down potential winners or acquisitions by those that have had a degree of success but are also still in early-stage funding rounds, hence ripe to be integrated into Amazon, should the company choose.

This year, 16 winners from 4 countries were selected, and they are very consistent with cutting edge trends in the tech industry at large. They range from government accountability tracking systems to a tool that sends an SMS to people in water deprived areas when water is available. John S. Bracken runs the Foundation's grant-making in digital media and wrote today on the Knight blog that this year's winners seemed to touch on three common themes: the rise of the hacker/data journalist, a broad interpretation of "news" and the need to make better sense of the stream.

It is important to note that there may be even more exciting news technologies being built around the world that didn't fit the Knight criteria, which includes some open source technology requirements and an extensive application process. Nonetheless - this is a pretty inspiring group and a good place to look to get some ideas about how the Web and world will change in the next few years.

Knight News Challenge 2011 Winners Around the World

View Knight Foundation 2011 Winners in a larger map

Below, a Twitter list. To subscribe to all 16 of the winners on Twitter, click the words "join the conversation" in the widget below, then click "follow this list."

Congratulations to all the winners - now please go forth and change the way we learn about the world each day!

Evernote has raised around $45 million with its latest round a Series C $20 million injection in October 2010 from Sequoia Capital. Developers can use the Evernote API to build extensions or features onto the platform with the grand prize winner taking home $50,000. Evernote developers and users: what do you want to see built onto the platform?

"When coming up with your app, be creative," the company wrote. "We're not expecting an Evernote-powered jetpack (though that would be sweet) but, why not create an Evernote-enabled location-based shopping companion or a game that uses your notes to strengthen your memory? The possibilities are endless."

Busy Growing A Platform

Evernote was founded in 2007 and has around four million users across any operating system or device you can think of. It can clip the web, save personal notes, record audio from a mobile device and upload to the web, store pictures or articles to read later.

It has been busy rolling out updates over in the last couple years. Its Windows app got a social feature, redesigned its iPhone app, made its Android app more secure, updated its Web interface, integrated with StudyBlue, opened an app store, created a Mac interface, will introduce Android tablet functionality, created a Web clipping extension for Chrome and other browsers and created sponsored accounts.

So, it has certainly been putting its funding to good use. Perhaps they are out of ideas after rolling out so many new features, mostly in the last six months. Nothing better to dangle a carrot to developers and have them create new features for your platform. The move is similar to what Netflix started in 2009 with a developer prize of $1 million to create new products, features or technology to its predictive technology.

We wrote in Jan. 2010 that prizes can be a good way to foster a community around your platform, support innovation, gain recognition and create a set of challenges for developers to strive for. Contests are also a sign that a company has matured past just trying to survive the market and trying to conquer it, a la Netflix and its competition.

Another sign of Evernote's maturity is their first conference - the Evernote Trunk Conference in August in San Francisco. Winning apps will be showcased then.

Beginning next Monday, we'll give away one notebook each day via our new @ReadWriteMobile Twitter account. To be eligible, you'll need to do the following:

• Follow @ReadWriteMobile on Twitter

• Sharpen your brains. We'll be asking a brain-busting trivia question on topics to be determined by our crack team of quiz show drop-outs. The first one to answer correctly wins!

• Be on your toes (or tweeting toes). We'll ask our daily trivia question at completely random times. We'll give about ten minutes notice, but that's it. Devious!

• Be sure to tag your official answers with #chromeOSmas, otherwise you're getting coal.

We'll collect the email addresses of the winners and send them along to Google, who will contact you to collect more information. Then you'll be getting your Chrome notebook right quick, just in time for the holidays.

UPDATE: We got word from Google that they can only send notebooks to U.S. addresses. Apologies to our international friends.

Thanks for playing and happy holidays from ReadWriteWeb.

However, we wanted to call your attention to the competition, and also highlight a new video on the Extensions Contest Microsite (also embedded below) that gives a great less-than-three-minute overview by John Bristowe on Visual Studio Extensions and how to build them.

So check out the video above and then get started on your entry!

Discloser: This post was done from the road using a complimentary review EVO 4G from Sprint.

Anyone is invited to submit a video to YouTube Play, even video creators themselves, and the submission deadline is July 31.

The videos may consist of animation, motion graphics, narrative, non-narrative, or documentary work, music videos and even "entirely new art forms" that challenge the perception of what's possible to do with video, explains the YouTube blog post about this unique collaboration project.

Two hundred of the leading videos will be selected for further attention by an international jury of experts from the worlds of art, design, film and video. Twenty of those initial 200 videos will then be presented at the Guggenheim. Yes, that's right - at the Guggenheim itself. The YouTube videos will appear in the Guggenheim network of museums in New York, Bilbao, Venice and Berlin on October 21 and will be made available for the world to see on the youtube.com/play channel.

This isn't a contest per se, as the winning videos don't receive a cash prize or other sort of physical reward. But having a video dubbed "art" and being showcased internationally in one of the world's most famous art museums, is a reward in and of itself, most would agree.

This isn't the first time YouTube has proven itself the medium of choice for artists worldwide. Last year, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, an online experiment in music, sought out musicians to participate in the world's first collaborative online orchestra where the endgame was a performance at Carnegie Hall.

YouTube: Internet Leads to Instant Success?

What's most interesting about this current art competition as well as the Online Orchestra is the way that it is able to surface undiscovered talents and allow them to achieve fame without all the requisite toiling and tolling for years in "starving artist" mode, as was once par for the course for those wanting to break into the art world. Instead, with YouTube, a handful of videos can lead to a lifetime of success. Just ask Justin Bieber. Or Soulja Boy. Or Esmee Denters. Or Journey's new singer Arenl Pineda, discovered a few years ago. Or FRED, the annoyingly overactive boy whose high-pitched voice befuddles parents but whose videos and associated kid-friendly merchandise have made the teen rich beyond belief.

But while the above are certainly high-profiled examples, let's be clear about one thing: When it comes to art and music, YouTube hasn't surfaced the next Leonardo or Monet, the next Beatles or Stones, the next Janis Joplin or Jimmy Hendrix. To date, the folks who have made their way up through YouTube are not necessarily, forgive me Bieber fans, going to make their mark in the annals of history as being among "the best of the best." In some cases they may be great... but are they the greatest? Really?

However, with this contest, that may change. For next-gen video artists, there's surely no better place than YouTube to flex your artistic muscles. It should be interesting to see what video creation wins this latest attempt to elevate YouTube to art form. The end result will likely be just that: art.

Tonight, after an all-star panel of judges had reviewed more than 80 apps over a month-long period, a handful of winning applications were announced.

The BigApps prizes also included a Popular Choice Award, which was decided by an online public vote from people around the world.

The grand prize winner for the competition, Wayfinder, is actually an Andoird app that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations. It was also selected as the Grand Prize winner for the Data Visualization Award. That team received a total of $7,500 for both prizes.

Other winning applications include:

• Actuatr, a platform that simplifies opening up data to developers;
• NYC Way, an iPhone application that bundles a variety of NYC resources for tourists and locals (also the Investor's Choice for monetization potential and Popular Choice winner, a $5,000 prize altogether);
• PushpinWeb, a platform for public data;
• Trees Near You, an iPhone app that shows data about trees around New York City;
• UpNext 3D NYC, an interactive 3D map for exploring and discovering the city;
• Overview New York City Parks and Recreation Online, a web app for finding New York City parks; and
• Bookzee, a location-based library book search.

"We opened up the 170 datasets of City information to unleash the creativity and ingenuity of New Yorkers, and we were not disappointed," said Mayor Bloomberg, who announced the awards at a dinner tonight. "The apps submitted offer a range of unique capabilities, many of which use the data in ways we hadn't considered. We want New York City to stay ahead of the innovation and technology curve, and we'll continue to capitalize on our greatest asset - New Yorkers - to make sure we do. Thank you to all of those who submitted apps, and congratulations to the winners."

The New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications worked with around 30 agencies to provide more than 170 datasets for the competition. The data included geographic locations of all sidewalk cafés, laundry facilities, playgrounds, dog runs, city landmarks, as well as census data, extensive property valuation and assessments, the results of restaurant inspections, lists of permitted citywide events and even side parking and traffic updates.

This morning between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST every Google search result displayed the notice "This site may harm your computer." Clicking on the link would take you to a support page effectively blocking any access to all sites in the results.

"We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning." Mayer said in the post, "unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs."

Google reports the errors first appeared between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m.

If you're interested in learning more about Google's efforts when it comes to malware, take a look at their analysis of malware in The Ghost in the Browser (PDF).

Update: The StopBadware blog talks about the 'Google Glitch'

StopBadware says that the glitch "led to a denial of service of our website, as millions of Google users attempted to visit our site for more information."

Additionally, StopBadware claims Mayer's statement about Google getting URLs from StopBadware is not accurate: "Google generates its own list of badware URLs, and no data that we generate is supposed to affect the warnings in Google's search listings. We are attempting to work with Google to clarify their statement."

Update 2: Google post updated

Google updated its post to say that StopBadware does not in fact provide a list; instead, it helps Google to "come up with criteria for maintaining this list."

Matt Cutts tweets that the error was on Google's side

In a world more swamped with content options every day, recommendation technology is poised to make a huge difference in our experience online. We identified recommendation tech as one of the 5 most important trends for 2008 but we may have jumped the gun just a little bit. Below is a quick profile of each of the five Strands finalists working to bring more of this paradigm into the present market, followed by our thoughts on which one we're most interested in.

Gravity R&D

Sentimetrix is another four person team, this one from the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Sciences. This startup analyzes text content around the web and "has automated sentiment extraction/analysis/scoring, the ability to find and quantify opinions in text." If this kind of technology is of interest to you, see also our review yesterday of the new BooRah API.

iletken is a mysterious project built by four Turkish college students at Koc University. It balances personal and social behavior to recommend advertisements "based on relevance."

Reccoon is a stealth project built by Peter Tegelaar and Dominiek ter Heide in the Netherlands. Ter Heide also worked on the Japanese social learning platform iKnow, which launched an API yesterday. Recoon appears to use the iPhone's GPS, user attention data like Last.fm listening history and the GeoNames reverse lookup API to notify you when you're near the location of an event you might like to participate in.

Commendo is a four person team from two universities in Austria. Team Commendo is both the Grand Prize winner and in first place for the Progress Prize in the Netflix Prize leaderboard.

Strands describes Commendo like this: "Commendo uses recommendation technologies to optimize the drug design process in the pharmaceutical industry, including speeding up drug development and the minimization of adverse drug reactions."

Our Take

All of these sound interesting but the one we're most excited to learn more about is Commendo, the pharmaceutical drug development recommendation engine. We're dubious about the political and economic world of big pharma, but we love innovation and that's a field where there's enough money and science on the line that there's a premium put on magic. Strands has products for all kinds of industries (we think their banking service is the coolest) but we'd love to see what Strands plus the Netflix Prize champs Commendo can do in pharma research.

Will Any of These Make a Difference?

Could these startups change the world? With a little bit of funding and possible acquisition by Strands, they could. Strands has customers around the world in everything from music to banking and mobile. They have a lifestreaming service, ala FriendFeed, that doesn't seem to be going anywhere yet, but getting backing from Strands is a great step for any little recommendation startup.

Bring on a smart future augmented by powerful recommendation technology!

Disclosure: Strands is an RWW sponsor. We'd have written about recommendation startups anyway, though, because we think they're really cool.

Google is definitely using its 10th anniversary to enhance the visibility of its philanthropic efforts. Google has lately been using its official blog to talk about its energy and health initiatives. Just yesterday, Google wrote about its Predict and Prevent initiative, a project that is looking at novel ways to detect the threat of a pandemic before it can turn into a crisis.

Submissions for Project 10^100 are due by October 20.

To be in to win one of the 3 prizes, we asked: for the 'Web Meets World' charity auction at the Web 2.0 Summit later this year (5-7 Nov), what would YOU bid on that web celebrities could offer? The 3 best answers, subjectively chosen by the RWW team, are printed below.

"I'd bid to send three web celebrities on a week long trip to visit AIDS orphanges in Malawi, Africa, with the condition that they would write web articles about these two things upon their return.

A. Their experiences with the children and orphange operators while there.

B. Their ideas on how "Web 2.0" can make a huge impact on really, really big problems like this."

The second full pass goes to Andraz Tori of Zemanta (comment #11):

"I'd bid for very first versions of business plans of MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Wordpress, Skype, eBay, ...

Comparing them with where they are now would be a fun and very very interesting reading!"

And for the consolation prize, we liked this suggestion by Alex Capece:

"A Metallica CD signed by Shawn Fanning." (comment #37)

Congratulations to all of the above, we'll be in contact by email regarding your prizes.

Though basing a business on a browser extension might seem crazy, for the select few companies highlighted in Mozilla events like this it can lead to a big increase in user numbers, especially if support from Mozilla continues.

The Winners

The most sophisticated winner may be the most niche-targeted, and that's the Minimap Sidebar Extension, by Tony Farndon from the UK. This extension lets users do all kinds of things by dragging and dropping map and location data in their browsers. Whether it's just text identifying a location or a whole KML file, Minimap lets you quickly view map data in a wide variety of platforms - from the big online mapping services (G/Y/M) to Google Earth of map mashup maker Platial. User created sidebar maps can also be saved for later reuse. Many readers might not have a daily use for this extension, but I know I might find myself working on a particular project for which this cool tool would be perfect.

SamePlace IM is an XMPP based multiclient IM service with a sidebar display or flyout client. It was built by Massimiliano Mirra in Italy. You can drag and drop images and text into conversations, play games, sketch together and extend SamePlace with an internal scriptlet editor. There's Twitter and OpenID support, too. While Meebo isn't intended for power users, SamePlace clearly is.

Finally, Jay Meattle's Shareaholic lets you quickly post any URL to 13 of the coolest social bookmarking services online. From Ma.gnolia to FriendFeed to Tumblr. It also lets you easily email a link to friends and see how many times it has been tagged in Del.icio.us and Dugg.

I appreciate all of the above, but personally I only foresee myself using the Minimap extension, and that only rarely. It might be a good idea for me to use Shareaholic, too, so that I can get the superior features of Ma.gnolia but participate in the public space of Del.icio.us. I really like the Ma.gnolia submission tool, though. Don't forget to check out the runners up, too, if you love Firefox extensions.

Details will be posted soon for the next contest, Extend Firefox 3 , kicking off in early March.

"Right now, if you want images, you have two options. You could hire an artist (expensive, difficult, and time-consuming) or you could surf microstock sites (cheap, but frustrating and time-consuming). Pixish seeks to be a middle path," writes Pixish founder and CEO Powazek.

Powazek compares Pixish to Threadless, which uses the wisdom of crowds to design t-shirts, with the key difference being that Pixish members can create open submission calls for any visual product or need. But a better parallel would be design contest sites. There are a number of them, but one of the biggest and most well-known is SitePoint's Contest area (which is in the process of being spun off and rebranded as 99Designs.com).

Similar to Pixish, SitePoint facilitates open calls for design jobs where designers submit work. Unlike Pixish, SitePoint requires that winning designers are compensated with cash. Which approach will work? I know from experience as a volunteer moderator at SitePoint that the design contest approach is often the target of criticism from people who believe that spec work is detrimental to designers. I personally disagree, and know plenty of designers who use spec work like design contests to gain real world experience, build their portfolios, and have also found long term clients by participating in sites like SitePoint's Contest area... but I digress.

I think it is likely that sites like SitePoint's will likely attract more professional designers, while Pixish will attract people who do art and design for fun. For someone who is trying to pay the bills with design work, competing for copies of a magazine might not be the best way to spend their time. But for someone who does design as a hobby, it might be a fun way to hone their craft.

Full disclosure: I recently sold a design contest site that I co-founded in 2005 called GFXContests.com and remain a volunteer moderator on SitePoint's forums (moderators of which also moderate the contests area).