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July 6, 2000

Foundation spotlights best Web sites created by teen-agers

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (ANS) -- Ara Anjargolian says he's "horribly disorganized." For the past four months the 18-year-old has been busy developing a Web site, not only to keep his schedule in check, but to enter in ArsDigita Foundation's Prize 2000 competition.

The competition, open to noncommercial Web designers ages 18 and under from all over the world, gives recognition to the most innovative and helpful sites. This year, Anjargolian's Web site -- www.SecondSaver.com -- came away with one of three $10,000 cash prizes.

This is the second year ArsDigita Foundation, a nonprofit spinoff of Cambridge-based ArsDigita Corp., a data-based Web service company, has awarded prizes to young Web designers.

"This isn't a contest. It's a prize -- like the Nobel Prize," said Phillip Greenspun, founder of the ArsDigita Foundation and a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was himself a computer whiz kid. He entered MIT at age 14 and graduated at 18.

"We reward good work," he said. "The Web has the potential to finally give people the tools we need to work together. Yet the products developed by the software industry limit our collaboration. Each ArsDigita Prize finalist site has software that helps people work together."

The foundation prize is a philanthropic "giveback," said Greenspun, explaining that by helping young people, he's trying to have an impact on the Web 50 years from now.

Two other Web sites, created by teams, also won this year, with their developers splitting the $10,000 prizes awarded to each. One site -- www.openweasel.org -- a portal toolkit, was designed by Andrew Widdowson, 16, Dan Blanchard, 17, and Greg Moyer, 16, of Fleetwood, Pa. The other -- www.dev-center.com – was built by Ara Mahdessian, 15 and Arthur Chaparyan, 16, from Glendale, Calif., and is a site about Virtual Basic, a programming language.

All 14 finalists, representing five countries as far apart as Australia and Denmark, with two finalists as young as 13, flew to Cambridge for the awards ceremony and a week of "boot camp" computer science training. Each finalist won $1,000.

There were 170 applicants this year from every continent, said Barbara Link, executive director of the ArsDigita Foundation. "These kids are of the Web culture," she said. "Some of them have been on the computer since they were 4 or 5 years old." The prize aims to encourage young people to use the Web to create solutions to problems -- be it a problem in the community or in their own lives, she said.

To be considered for the prize, applicants must be no older than 18 and the Web service entry must be noncommercial, contain no banner ads and charge no subscription fees. Several hundred people selected 30 finalists in a public vote via the organization's Web site, Link said. Programmers at ArsDigita Corp. made the final decisions.

The sites that have brought the finalists to this point are creative and ambitious. Thirteen-year-old Aaron Swartz from Highland Park, Ill., built a site -- www.theinfo.org -- designed to contain all human knowledge. Hilverd Reker of Amsterdam, Netherlands, built "SiteMapper" -- http://thor.prohosting.com/~h-reker -- a service that will instantly index a Web site, given its URL.

Emily Boyde, 17, of Sydney, Australia, built MatMice -- www.matmice.com -- to help other young people create their own Web sites. All finalists' Web sites can be seen at www.arsdigita.org.

Anjargolian said he and other finalists are rounding out their week at ArsDigita's computer "boot camp" in Cambridge solving Web problems and learning how to create and run a professional-quality Web site. There's also the added bonus of lunch with Web luminaries such as David Clark, the chief protocol architect of the Internet in its formative years, Tim Berners-Lee, developer of the World Wide Web, and Michael Dertouzos, head of the MIT Lab of Computer Science.

Anjargolian, an Armenian born in Iran who emigrated to the United States with his family when he was 5 years old, said aside from the $10,000 prize money -- which he will use partly to travel to Italy and to give his friends a "great night out" -- the most exciting part about becoming a finalist has been the computer "boot camp."

"It's been intense," said Anjargolian, who has just finished his freshman year at the University of California at Berkeley majoring in electrical engineering and computer science. "Just to give you an example, the first class I took in college on Web design, my professor held up a book and said, 'This is the best book written on Web design.' And just this week (at boot camp) that author walked in! This is an opportunity very few people get."

After some thought, he added: "This prize has meant that working in the technology field really pays off. And it's fun. Before this, I wasn't sure if this is where I wanted to go with my life. But now I know for sure that I want to be in the middle of this."

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Contacts:

Barbara Link, executive director, ArsDigita Foundation, Cambridge, Mass., 617-386-4118; Web site: www.arsdigita.org

Ara Anjargolian, winner, ArsDigita Prize, contact through Barbara Link, 617-386-4118.