Kenya's Ushahidi wins We Media Game Changers Award

Online media star ZeFrank, mobile texting service Twitter, David Plouffe, the Obama campaign mastermind, Japanese digital designer Yugo Nakamura and Kenyan mobile alert service Ushahidi are among nine winners of the We Media Game Changers Awards to be presented at the We Media Miami conference in February 2009.

Other award winners are: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Innocentive's crowdsourcing for the science crowd, Humana's Freewheelin' and social network Socialvibe.

The winners will be celebrated and many will be featured speakers at the We Media Miami conference, from 24-26 February, 2009, where their stories will become the content of the conference.

The awards recognise people, projects, ideas and organisations leading change and inspiring a better world through media. Specific recognitions include:

Twitter, recognised for changing the real-time communication game;
Innocentive for taking Web 2.0 to the marketplace;
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for changing its own approach and everyone else's by shifting its money to media innovation and the information needs of communities;
Ushahidi for redefining the ability of people to quickly communicate vital information for action;
Freewheelin for demonstrating that the internet is not just something on your screen and challenging the fundamental assumption that health insurance is only for after-the-fact care by stepping into preventative and holistic health;
ZeFrank, essential contemporary culture, proves that a new type and scale of engagement and entertainment is possible;
Yugo Nakamura, designer of Design and the Elastic Mind, for exploring non-traditional forms of storytelling through interactive systems in digital and networked environments;
David Plouffe, for the mobilisation of millions with a methodical media campaign that utilised the internet, cell phones and personal communication devices as never before.

SocialVibe received the Community Award for unleashing the power of distributed advertising on personal media.

An international panel of pioneers from media, technology, business, social activism and blogging judged nominees for the awards, and the We Media Community award, for Socialvibe, was selected by the public through online voting.

The awards highlight achievements through exceptional story-telling, novel business models, significant social impact, innovative design and powerful visions of media for the connected culture.

The awards are organised and administered by iFOCOS, the media think tank and futures lab that organises the We Media conferences and global membership community.

The We Media conference also features a media venture startup gallery and an early stage media venture startup competition with up to $50,000 in seed capital awarded to winners.