You may recall that last year we poked fun at Pepsi for sending us a few cases of Aquafina water bottles. First of all, we’re a tech blog. Secondly, the point of the outreach was to showcase Aquafina’s new plastic bottles that apparently use much less plastic than the old ones. Of course, they sent God knows how many carbons into their air shipping us not one, but two crates of these things for no real reason. This year, the company has a better idea. Or rather, they think you do.
Pepsi is calling for you to submit ideas to their Refresh Project before the SXSW conference taking place in Austin, TX next month. During the conference, people both there and across the web would then vote on their favorite ideas (through their site, Twitter, Facebook, etc). The winner, announced on the last day of SXSW’s interactive portion (March 16), would get a spot grant to make their idea a reality. The Refresh Project for this month is currently giving away $1.3 million in funding, for example.
The Refresh Project traditionally breaks up ideas into the following categories: Health, Arts & Culture, Food & Shelter, The Planet, Neighborhoods, and Education. But for this SXSW event, Pepsi is looking for “digital pro-social” ideas. Not really sure what that means, but I assume it means they’re looking for something involving the Internet that can make the world a better place. At the very least, they’re looking for a better idea than shipping plastic water bottles to blogs.
Kidding aside, Pepsi is investing more than $20 million this year for fund ideas through this Refresh Project. Start thinking about some good ones to submit for SXSW next month.