X Prize

Collectively, X PRIZE's are financial incentives offered by the X Prize Foundation. This foundation is a non-profit prize institute that "creates and manages prizes that drive innovators to solve some of the greatest challenges facing the world today".

1. Based: Santa Monica, California
2. Aim: Encourage radical breakthroughs in technology for the benefit of humanity
3. Offer millions of dollars in prizes to generate interest and capture the imagination

1. Encourages creation of environmentally-friendly vehicles
2. Multi-million-dollar cash prizes
3. Aim: Design and build super-efficient marketable vehicles capable of 100 miles per gallon

1. Offered by X PRIZE Foundation
2. $10,000,000 prize
3. Aim: Find first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks
4. Won: October 4, 2004
5. Winner designed by Burt Rutan, financed by Paul Allen
6. Winning craft: SpaceShipOne
7. $100 million invested in new technologies in relation to the contest

1. Google sponsored the award
2. Prize: $20 million to the first non-governmental organization that lands a robot explorer on the Moon by the year 2012
3. Second place and bonus prizes of $5 million each also available

1. Full title: The Archon X PRIZE for Genomics
2. 2nd X PRIZE offered by the foundation
3. Announced: October 4, 2006
4. X PRIZE Foundation partnered with J. Craig Venter Science Foundation for the prize
5. $10 million prize
6. Prize goes to "the first team that can build a device and use it to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 days or less, with an accuracy of no more than one error in every 100,000 bases sequenced, with sequences accurately covering at least 98% of the genome..."