The X Prize challenges so far have spurred great competition and amazing innovation, but yet one of the latest – the Google Lunar X Prize leaves me with the sour taste of lameness.
In a world where everything seems to have some version number slapped on it, web 2.0, (and God help us; web 3.0), why the big-brains at Google couldn't noodle up something even remotely creative is beyond me. Moon 2.0? Really? That's all you got? I can see what someone was going after; trying to make all trendy and cool – but it's not. It's lame. The Moon isn't new, in fact it's actually something like 4 billion years old, so throwing down a Moon 2.0 tagline/logo/thing is a sophomoric attempt to make it seem cool.
The poster is actually pretty nice though (image to the right), and it gets completely ruined by the Moon 2.0 crap splattered over a great image. Then for the t-shirts, there is no Moon image, just the lame logo on a shirt.
Maybe it's just me, and the fact that I am so tired of the web 2.0, and now web 3.0, crap being slung around that it all just makes me want to hurl. Most of the people who toss it around have no idea behind the actually meat of it, so it makes it a worthless acronym for a movement on the web, and how RIA development is changing the face of the web as we know it.
With a winners' booty of $20 million smackers, it just seems to me that someone should have made the decision to hire a top-notch designer to come up with something a bit more creative than Moon 2.0.