End hunger, Web2.0 style!
Written on December 20, 2007 – 11:26 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
FreeRice is an interesting initiative by the founders of Poverty.com. Both websites aim to end world hunger. My guess is that the owners of the website read the excellent ‘Made to Stick‘ and decided to present their message in a new format. And this new format sticks!
It is very simple: you are presented with one word and a list of definitions. You have to pick the right definition for each word. If you get it right, you get a harder word. If you get it wrong, you get an easier word. For every good guess FreeRice donates 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. They can do this because they display an ad under each list of definitions.
A brilliantly simple solution. I only hope the service will scale and advertisers will keep advertising here. I can imagine people doing this instead of Sudoku or Solitaire. This way you make the world a better place while you get smarter and enjoy yourself at the same time. In fact, they should bundle this with Windows instead of Solitaire!
The site launched in Oktober 2007 and has donated 10,238,535,870 grains of rice since then. How much will you contribute?
I hope you like that post!
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
By Menno on Dec 21, 2007 | Reply
Very fun to play! Got to 4000 grains at vocabulary level 33. Without cheating ofcourse ;)
By Peter Evers on Dec 21, 2007 | Reply
I got to 100 grains! Very,very tough, but it works out as a perfect tool to improve my vocabulary!
By Martha on Dec 23, 2007 | Reply
totally hooked. Level 43 and climbing….