Still somewhat awed at having been chosen to serve as a hub for Google’s Solve for <X> competition, Todd Nokamura, event organizer and founder of GDG North Jersey, and his partners kicked off the first of four preliminary rounds on December 11th at Montclair State University. The quest began for the best solutions in science and technology to global scale problems which Google has termed “moonshots.”
Flashing a slide on the conference hall’s big screen, Todd shared with the audience the list of other Solve for <X> locations that included: China, Georgia, Uganda, Indonesia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Kenya, Turkey, Sweden, Greece, as well as the USrepresented on each coast by the states of California and New Jersey. GDG North Jersey, a Google Developer Group founded in June 2014, was chosen to host the east coast competition via their submitted application that pleasantly resulted in Google’s acceptance.
GDG North Jersey will select four presenters for the regional competition that will be held at Rutgers University on February 2, 2015. The remaining three rounds will be held at Google NYC (January 7th), at the Grommet in Massachusetts (January 12th), and at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey (January 15th). The winner of the regional competition in February will go to the finals to be held at Google’s headquarters later in the year.
The New Jersey Solve for <X> event team comprised of entrepreneurs, developers and local Meetup organizers worked hard to draw in a range of participants willing to tackle a global challenge. Now with technology disrupting so many industries, global problems previously left unaddressed have the potential of being solved. In view of this Google for the first time opened up Solve for <X> to the general public via these global locations.
For the evening five presenters called “Pioneers” were chosen to give ten minute presentations of the global problem for which they have a proposed solution. This was followed by five minutes of Q&A by the panel of judges which included: Feliciano Center Director Dennis Bone, John Frankel, Troy Hollar, Susan Okin Goldsmith and Richard Moro.
The five selected presentations were:
- Food Waste Recycling by Green Waste Technologies, Inc.’s Olive Lynch
- “Gravitational Theory of Quantum Mechanics” by Mark Arnett
- “Synthetic Genomes on p-Chips” by PharmaSeq’s Richard Morris
- “Smart City Newark” by NJIT School of Management’s Michael Ehrlich
- “How We can Help the World Feed Itself” by SummaGrow’s Lou Elwel
Solve for <X> partner Clark Lagemann, founder of Scarlet Startups Meetup and entrepreneur, summed up the first round, “I am pretty happy how the first event turned out. We had over a 100 people in attendance. We received 19 applicants and we screened each pioneer via an initial application that was shared with a variety of thought leaders in their related specialty. A phone interview was also conducted by someone on the selection committee, and then the team came back together and discussed each applicant and weighed their submission against all others. Based on merits the top five were chosen for the first event.”
Taking the Solve for <X> competition on the road, the organizers encourage those now learning about the competition to apply for the upcoming venues. The deadline for Google NYC is December 28th.
Applications may be made at http://solveforx.gdgnorthjersey.com/
