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Winners: Caitria O’Neill, Alvin Liang and Morgan O’Neill
Twitter: @recovers_org
Oneliner: To help communities recover from disasters by creating a dashboard that acts as a central hub for recovery efforts.
Summary: When a tornado touched down in her Massachusetts yard, Caitria O'Neill and her neighbors struggled to match the sudden wave of resources with massive community needs. While large aid organizations can deliver significant resources, in each disaster untrained local volunteers must help structure unofficial resources long-term. O'Neill and her sister Morgan O’Neill teamed up with engineer Alvin Liang to create Recovers.org, and to build and deliver web tools and local hubs for disaster recovery efforts. Their online organizing platform, located at [townname.recovers.org], can be launched before or immediately after an event, to turn interest into aid. Already their platform has helped turn the spike in interest post-disaster into money, items and volunteers in five communities. Post-disaster launches are pro-bono, but the team licenses the software to areas interested in preparing and enabling the community's response.
Knight Foundation President Alberto Ibarguen announcing the Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge, which should award a total of $5 million to innovative citizens media in 2007. See www2.knightfdn.org/newschallenge/index_flash.html.
Winners: Adriano Farano and Jonathan Lundell of UXNOVO
Twitter: @watchup @farano
Oneliner: To make it easier to find and watch high quality video news through a new iPad app
Summary: Available starting today in the iTunes store, Watchup is an iPad application that will help people find high-quality news videos. While identifying relevant content is often time-consuming, Watchup speeds the process with a curated playlist that aggregates news reports from a variety of networks into a simple interface. The service plans to sustain itself by selling video advertising on the site. Media organizations, which will have a branded presence on Watchup, will ultimately receive a share of the revenues.