Hello World! The Awesome Foundation-San Francisco had its kick-off meeting last week and we are psyched to start awarding $1K grants to men and women with awesome ideas! We’re focusing on Bay Area projects/submissions and our first submission review meeting will be mid-May. If you have a project that rocks, be sure and submit your idea by May 11, 2010 for our chapter to consider. Can’t wait to see what’s out there!

The Awesome Foundation is pleased to introduce our latest chapter, San Francisco. We’re thrilled to have such an amazing group of people involved, and on a personal level, I’m proud to call several of them friends. Ladies and gents, here are your AF-SF micro-trustees: Amit Gupta Brynn Evans Ivan Kirigin Jesse Farmer Kevin Adler Krista Sanders Mitch Altman Raffi Krikorian Rod Begbie Tim Bentley and Jesse Taggert as AF-SF’s Dean of Awesome We anxiously await their first grant. I’m sure it will be amazing! Now that the Awesome Foundation has reached the Pacific, where do we go from here? Stay tuned to find out. https://apotheek247.com

Every month the Awesome Foundation NYC gives away $1000 a month to something that is awesome. It can be anything, anywhere….then we throw a party give out the award (always cash in a brown paper bag), and celebrate all things AWESOME that month. You are invited to the: Awesome Foundation NYC April Party Monday, April 19, at 7pm D.B.A. in the East Village 41 1st Ave. btw 2nd & 3rd RSVP at http://awesomenyc.eventbrite.com In previous months we have funded a laser tractor beam that prods amoebas in a bus and an Arduino-powered Anywhere Organ. This month we are funding something more reptilian in nature. Just what exactly? Come see for yourself in the flesh on Monday, April 19 at 7pm. These things have a curfew. Who is the Awesome Foundation NYC? Jesse Chan-Norris, Lee-Sean Huang, Sam Lessin, Steve Rosenbaum, Douglas Repetto, Dawn Barber, Clay Shirky, Colin Nederkoorn, Brandon Kessler, Catherine White, and Elizabeth Stark. And how do you apply for an Awesome Foundation grant? http://awesomefoundation.org by the end of the month, awesome. Hope to see you next week, The Awesome Foundation NYC

Welcome to the new Awesome Foundation website! While it’s still a work in progress, we hope it does a better job of conveying what the Awesome Foundation is all about. In particular, we wanted to make it clear that what started as a simple idea in Cambridge, MA last July has grown well beyond Boston’s borders and is becoming a nationwide – and perhaps soon international – movement. When we started this thing, we knew we were in for a fun ride. I mean, really, how could you not love reviewing submissions about cotton candy cannons, giant guitars and laser tractor beams?! But we were blown away by the immediate response from friends in other cities who wanted to start chapters of their own. We figured we’d better give it a few months to work out the kinks first, but Providence opened up shop in October, New York City followed closely behind in January, and now as we turn the calendar to April, San Francisco is raring to go. And that’s not counting the handful of nascent chapters that you may hear about in the coming months, or groups like ScaleWell who are applying the same model to entrepreneurship. We’re… read more →

Things have been quiet from Boston for a little bit: we’ve been swamped readying the new, improved, and expanded Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences website — and been repping it up at conferences and the like. But, to all those who have been asking, yes, yes, we’re still in business. Extremely proud today to announce that our March Awesome Fellow is Charles Fracchia (that guy above). His idea? To create pens that draw from actually living, growing ink cartridges. Excerpting from his proposal: “I want to develop a set of bioengineered inks to be used with various pen types ranging from gel pens to fountain pens. As an intern at ginkgo bioworks and avid DIYbiologist, I have access to a number of bugs engineered with proteins that result in colour production. I want to make special cultures that can then be packaged as ink cartridges to be used with ordinary pens.” For all you science dorks out there, there’s some neat little possibilities when you start growing your own ink: “This would allow artists and enthusiasts to draw with awesome engineered inks. The great thing about using bioengineering to produce the colour, is that you can engineer them in… read more →