The "E-Commerce for Farmers" initiative of local e-marketplace B2Bpricenow.com (http://www.b2bpricenow.com/ ) was chosen as one of the 30 winning entries from the original 2,400 proposals that were submitted to the World Bank's Development Marketplace 2001 competition held Jan. 9-10 in Washington, D.C.

The contest, whose objective is to create a marketplace of ideas that address development challenges, received more than 2,400 innovation proposals – an 85 percent increase from the previous year. Approximately half of all of the proposals come from Africa and Latin America, but submissions have came from Europe and Asia.

This year, the Development Marketplace had a very competitive selection process. Of the initial 2,400 submissions from more than 122 countries, less than 10 percent reached the final round.

Edgardo Herbosa, CEO of B2Bpricenow.com, said his company and its partner Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement (PRRM) will use the endowment to buy high-tech hardware for cooperatives in the country's rural areas.

"A major reason why the judges noted us was because of the project's feature that allows farmers to check out the prices of agricultural products via their cell phones," said Herbosa. Mobile phones are becoming more popular than wireline phones in remote areas, he said.

The ability to send SMS to the trading site and verify true prices, Herbosa said, is important to farmers because it prevents them from being cheated by unscrupulous buyers and middlemen.

"One more thing that made us win was due to the fact that the project is already existing while the rest of the entries were just proposals," Herbosa said. His company has previously contracted the services of the country's largest phone operators, Globe Telecom and Smart Communications, for their site's wireless feature, he said.

Herbosa said it also has already conducted road shows in 14 of the 21 major cities in the Philippines to educate farmers on the benefits of using information technology to monitor prices and buy and sell their produce.

Another Philippine entry that had oil company Shell as a partner, was awarded a grant worth $179,950. It proposed that petroleum in the form of "coco-diesel" can actually be extracted from coconut husks.

As for B2Bpricenow.com's own grant, it is actually split into two - $68,039 for being part of the winning circle and $50,000 for "the InfoDev Award" it received as a special prize for making use of information technology as a tool.

The money will come in batches and will only be released by the World Bank as each phase of the project is finished, Herbosa said.

Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com/

10:35 CST