Karaoke Winner Wins One Million Dumplings - Boston News, Weather, Sports | FOX 25 | MyFoxBoston

Edward Pimentel won the World Karaoke Championship in Moscow - his prize? A million Russian dumplings. That's enough dumplings to last him 27 years, if he eats 100 a day.

The contest involved amateur singers from 16 countries who competed over three days, reported The Telegraph.

No word on whether Pimentel, a phone company technician from Albuquerque, N.M, who won the crown on Saturday, even likes dumplings. But at least he can claim bragging rights for his performance of Usher's "There Goes My Baby."

One million dumplings may not be the worst prize ever won, or the most extreme.

Belgian beer company Vedett once offered a cement truck shaped like a beer bottle to the person who could guess how many miles the truck would travel around Belgium, reported Competition Grape Vine.

And Charles Lindbergh flew his risky flight across the Atlantic in 1927 to win a $25,00 prize.

There are plenty more examples of prizes, as cited on a blog by journalist Marc Gunther:

* Everyone has opened a box of Cracker Jacks and reached in for the prize, a practice that dates back to 1912.
* A multi-national team of engineers won a $1 million Netflix prize that was designed to improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to enjoy a movie based on their movie preferences.
* A competition to develop an autonomous ground vehicle for the military resulted in the award of a $2 million prize for Tartan Racing, a collaboration among students at Carnegie Mellon and General Motors.
* The X Prize Foundation has offered prizes of at least $10 million each for safely landing a robot on the moon (sponsored by Google), for building a super-efficient car (sponsored by Progressive Automotive) and for breakthroughs in genomics.

So, why are prizes even necessary?

"Prizes can play a role when entrenched industries are either holding back innovation - because their business model depends on selling the stuff they already make - or are stuck in their ways," Gunther, a contributing editor at FORTUNE magazine, wrote on his blog. "Prizes also tap into our emotions in a way the monetary rewards do not."