Comments on: How to spend a billion (Google) dollars

Consultant Paul Lamb suggests that making a difference in the world could itself become the next big thing.

[attitlaw]

finaly the correct rules

bravo I am very impressed that common sense will prevail and correct the mistakes of our senseless drainage of our natural resource's

[itispals]

Heal the World

It is one of the wonderful moves. It is true that all the giants are trying to contribute back to the society. The thoughts from the founders of Google that "our contribution would be innovative" is really meaningful. If Google attempts, it can change the world. Then Google can rightly sing "heal the world" and "We are the world".
http://www.buckleupnow.com

[hoppina]

Social Return on Investment: empower

Paul, I love this article-- thanks. While the scale of Google's
investment is remarkable, the most important impact of the
Foundation's work could be to mainstream the notion that
foundations and non-profit organizations can be nimble,
efficient, and entrepreneurial, all in service of leveraging the $
invested to greater impact. While "SROI" (Social Return on
Investment) and Venture Philanthropy may seem like old hat to
those of us blowing the dot-org bubble in the Bay Area these
days, they may still be bleeding-edge concepts in Peoria. If
Google.org leads by example by taking on transformative social
projects that are worthy of incurring the risk failure in order to
create the possibility of profound success, and does so in a
transparent high-leverage entrepreneurial manner, they will
blaze a trail of knowledge and precedent that 100,000s of
smaller foundation and non-profits can be inspired to follow.
To that end, I'd love to see Google.org invest itself in helping
other foundations and non-profits to themselves innovate. And
I'd love to see the project-specific work of Google.org include
executing small projects and also regranting large numbers of
other smaller projects, rather than throwing vast resources at a
few large projects. If, by contrast, Google takes on a few
hundred million dollar projects, few others will be able to follow
in their footsteps.

[Blito]

Now where getting somewhere

I was falling asleep with all this talk of money and monopolies latley. It's tiresome.

This is more of a reneawble resource approach that creates a dependency on Google for realworld objects and services to sustain their business and make it more diuturnal.

I wouldn't want Google to just throw money or even a search engine at a culture. Allot of people don't even like to use the Internet for too long or if it's not geared toward a specific service.
This could also calm some privacy rights fears as the services could be monitored and controlled better to avoid abuse and promote maintenance.

Also I went to the author's website and posted how I think Non-Profits would become more the norm in the future as they usually are more focused on their objective.
So they really wouldn't be called 'Non-Profits' anymore as it would be more the mainstream.

[Blito]

Services avoid spam advertising

Also serevices help to avoid spam/viruses and mass advertising. If you have a small footprint device as a service then just a geeral webrowwer it help s to control the costs.

Try the math again, and it looks a little better...

Half a million people per year, with a five year gestation period does not mean 2 million -- that would be an investment once every 5 years. If invested every year you get twenty investments, so after 25 years the number affected would be ten million (assuming one could wait that final 5 years to count the benefits.)

If I ever get a billion dollars, that sounds like a good investment. On the other hand, where can I send my $110 today?