According to a press release from the Knight Foundation, the funding will help Wikimedia develop "features to improve the mobile experience regardless of how feature-rich the device is—including new ways to access Wikipedia via text; increasing the number of languages that can access Wikipedia on mobile; and improving the way feature phones access the platform."

Wikimedia wasn't the only winner in the contest, which shelled out $2.4 million to reward projects that harness mobile to inform and engage communities, often in developing economies. Three New York-based organizations also shared in the Knight Foundation riches.

The human rights organization WITNESS got $320,000 for an app, called InformaCam, that helps authenticate photo, video and audio files, stamping the work with metadata that make news organizations more likely to use the work of citizen journalists.

Digital Democracy, meanwhile, will get $200,000 to arm indigenous people with tools to report on the oil and mining companies that operate in the Peruvian Amazon.

And TKOH will get $330,000 for its project, Thread, which its easier to record audio- and video-rich oral histories without being hindered by the need for high technical expertise.

Scroll: Making the web look more like print.

Cody Brown and Kate Ray graduated from NYU in 2010, taught themselves to code and built Kommons--a platform for crowdsourcing questions through Twitter and attempting to peer pressure an answer from public personalities. It didn't, as they say, get traction. So they built another thing, "Nerd Collider," a platform for hosting text-centric discussions between experts on the web, sort of like the New York Times's Opinionator blog. Their latest product, Scroll, is a simple single-page HTML editor that allows publishers to lay out a fancy-looking page that mimics the flexibility designers have for formatting on the printed page. Bonus: the web page is automatically-formatted to look as good on the web as it does on the iPad.

Now, the two-person company is announcing some funding scared up over the summer. "We've raised $220,000 in seed funding from The Knight Foundation's Program Related Investment Arm," Mr. Brown told Betabeat. "We're part of Knight’s recent initiative to support for-profit startups that help to promote informed and engaged communities."

Scroll is targeting media companies such as The Wall Street Journal, but anyone who wants to publish on the web can use it. Ms. Ray tests the app by making LOL-cats (unfortunately, it looks like Cheezburger scooped that angle today). The pair estimates the app's "time to LOLcat" is somewhere around two minutes.

The money is being used to pay themselves modest salaries and hunt for a third team member. Mr. Brown heads up design, business development and Twitter relations; Ms. Ray is the engineer on the backend. The pair are roommates and work at standing desks on the mezzanine of their sunny Brooklyn apartment. Music is prohibited; Ms. Ray prefers to work with her headphones plugged in but no music playing, she told Betabeat, in order to feel connected to her computer.

Mr. Brown has been interested in new media since he took a journalism class at NYU (he originally wanted to be a filmmaker) and was inspired to launch the online-only student news blog NYU Local, which is still operating four years later. "I actually still love the taste of ramen," the 23-year-old told Betabeat. "I bought a 20-pack yesterday."

Scroll MKR Demo from Cody Brown on Vimeo.

Mr. Hughes via Crunchbase

The Knight Foundation, which sponsors innovative projects in journalism, just named the "first ever digital appointments" to its board, reports Businessweek.

They include Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, Joichi Ito from MIT's Media Lab (an early investor in Twitter, Flickr and Technorati), as well as John Palfrey, who runs Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and works as an adviser at Highland Capital Partners.

Mr. Hughes told Businessweek, "We need to be approaching these questions and these problems with an attitude more akin to venture capital, than with the attitude of a foundation." That attitude dovetails with the Knight Foundation's own pivot. The agency is switching it's strategy, "from charity to 'social investing' as news and information delivery becomes digital."

Mr. Hughes co-founded both Facebook and Jumo, a social network for activism. According to Crunchbase, Mr. Hughes venture capital experience comes from an entrepreneur-in-residence program at General Catalyst Partners. He has no angel investments listed.

In August, Mr. Hughes arranged for an 'acquisition' of his startup Jumo by friends at GOOD. Although the price was undisclosed, Betabeat reported at the time that no money changed hands.

Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibarguen told Businessweek:

“Traditionally in the nonprofit sector, because an idea is founded on fate so much of the time, or founded on hope, the typical thing would be for someone to continue and continue until they ran out of money,” Ibarguen said. “An entrepreneur would find a creative way to make it work.”