Top Innovation Prize Goes to Kiwi

Auckland-based designer Nelson Rayner has won an international prize for innovation run by Google and the Advertising Club of New York. Rayner, Australian-born but raised in New Zealand, won the Young Innovators Award for his creation, Donate Your Desktop (now branded Little Lot) an application that effectively rents out users’ background desktop to advertisers, with 75% of revenue from ad placements going to charity.

The 28-year-old from Mt Eden originally developed the concept in 2006 and last year launched it to a receptive audience.

“Donate Your Desktop is a simple application designed to change the world, one desktop at a time,” reads Rayner’s spiel. “It helps redirect money spent on online advertising towards a charitable cause by unlocking a potential advertising space that sits idly on over a billion computers around the world.

“That space is your desktop background.”

“I came up with the idea whilst working as a Digital Creative at an advertising agency in New Zealand,” said Rayner, “One of our non-profit clients came to us asking us for an innovative idea to generate funds for their causes. Donate Your Desktop came about when looking at figures illustrating the disparity between haves and have-nots.”

Charities listed include Oxfam New Zealand, Amnesty International and NZ Breast Cancer.

The contest asked creatives aged under 30 to post their concept using Google tools online, where the Google community voted on their favourites. Projects with the most votes went into the finals but the overall winner was selected by a group of panellists.

The competition is designed to celebrate excellence and promote “forward thinking among the fresh, young minds of the advertising, marketing and media disciplines.

Rayner said the US$5000 prize money would assist in launching his application in Australia, the UK and US.