Curious to know whether Nestle is acting as a responsible corporate citizen? One nonprofit startup at the third Netsquared Mashup Conference has built a FireFox extension that gives you instant access to that information alongside every Google searche and they just won $15,000 to build it out even more.
The organization KnowMore.org was founded by musician B. Dolan, currently touring in Europe, as a MediaWiki project to aggregate information about the environmental, business and employee ethics of large multinational corporations.
"The next step is to take the data from our site and bring it out to where people can interact with it on the web," said KnowMore volunteer Tom Weyman who gave a presentation at the Netsquared conference. This Tuesday the project announced the end of a six-week hack-a-thon coordinated by Joe Solomon, 25, and six programmers, that resulted in a new FireFox extension to do just that. The KnowMore Extension is built on a recently minted open API that allows anyone to take the data from KnowMore to their own site and is itself open source under a GPL License Version 3.
An interview with Weyman gives more details about how the Firefox extension works or you can install the download and Google American Apparel to find out for yourself.
Related: Asa Doltzer, Mozilla community guru, supports the cause.
See video with Ask A Lawmaker – also from Netsquared conference.
More video interviews coming all next week.