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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