• What projects are the most likely to take off and succeed?
• What projects will achieve the greatest impact?
• What projects will be best leveraged by the social change community?

These were the three criteria N2Y2 Participants were asked to use when choosing which of the 21 Featured Projects should receive the $25,000 First Prize, $15,000 Second Prize and $10,000 Third Prize from the Technology Innovation Fund. The remaining $50,000, of the $100,000 Fund, was divided among the remaining 18 Featured Projects in prizes of $2,777 each.

Each Conference participant got three voting chips to cast for either their top three projects, or they could toss all three of their chips towards one project. When the votes were cast, the Featured Projects with the most chips were:

First Prize: MAPLight.org: A Light On Money and Politics
Elevator Pitch: "MAPLight.org illuminates the connection between money and politics. We connect campaign contributions and votes for U.S. Congress, providing groundbreaking transparency so that bloggers, journalists, and citizens can hold legislators accountable."

Second Prize: Miro, Open Source, Open Standards Video
Elevator Pitch: "We are to Google, AOL and YouTube what public television is to the big networks. We are a nonprofit, fully open source and open standards, dedicated to creating the next Firefox of web video."

Third Prize: The Freecycle Network
Elevator Pitch: "By empowering globally local social networking, we have created a gift economy/community. The magic: it’s easier to give something away than throw it away & keeps it out of landfills; a cyber-curbside; a digital segue from commodity to community."

You can hear MAPLight.org, Miro and The Freecycle Network's introductory presentations from the Conference, as well as the other Featured Projects' introductory presentations, on the NetSquared Podcast.