Congrats to the NetSquared Winners!

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I'm finally home and off the red eye! 

The last leg of the journey was to attend the Netsquared Conference (N2Y3) where three winners of the NetSquared Mashup Challenge were selected by conference participants.   I was on a team of video bloggers who conducted formal interviews with representatives from the 21 featured projects. 

I had the pleasure to do a formal interview with Erik Hersman from Ushahidi which took first place.  (I got quick lesson from David on how to pronounce it and if I had to announce the winners I would had have to practice it).  Erik shared his excitement in a post over at NetSquared.

• First Place ($25,000) — Ushahidi: Mapping Reports Of Post-Election Violence In Kenya
  
• Second Place ($15,000) —  KnowMore.Org Firefox Extension - Get Alerts Of Corporate Abuses When You Visit Company/Brand/Product Websites
• Third Place ($10,000) — A Mashup Of 29+ Social Action Platforms — Social Actions

I did some qik coverage of Marnie announcing the winners and quick reactions from Peter Dietz and Joe Solomon (and team) but the video I found on YouTube is far better.

David and Erik were thrilled!

There were two winners announced for the Case Foundation DonateNow Mashup Challenge:

• Social Actions — Find Social Actions. Create Social Change. (Also a NetSquared winner.)
• Tweet4Good — Donate a fundraise using Twitter

N2Y3 was a successful, high energy event.  Marnie Webb and Daniel Ben-Horin offered a few words at the conclusion of the event. JD Lasica did a more in-depth interview with Marnie Webb during the conference.

Comments

[John Powers]

Sometimes I feel like I never vote for anyone who wins. Online participation is beginning to whittle away that stereotype in my head. I'm thrilled that Ushahidi won first place. I also love that you interviewed Erik Hersman. Both you and Erik are names that so often roll off my tongue when talking to others. The reason is you both make new and challenging subjects about technology comprehensible to techno-challenged folks like me. It's more than that, both of you are idealistic and make good things happen. I can't thank you enough for your blog and online activism. Thank you.

[Beth Kanter]

John, I'm honored that you put me in the same category as Erik. All the projects were pretty amazing ... so it was hard choice to vote for only three.