Google launched a new Android app – One Today – in beta today. The app features a new charity or non-profit everyday in which people can choose to donate a dollar to. The app is designed to increase the discoverability of lesser known charities by letting them tap into the millions of Android users around the world.

The charities and non-profits currently featured in One Today include Ahsoka, an organization dedicated to teaching children empathy; Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, an organization dedicated to protecting rhinos; Trees for the Future, an organization dedicated to growing trees in Kenya; and more. Each organization requires a certain amount of money to reach their goal with each dollar donated going towards that goal so Google encourages donators to challenge their friends to donate as well to help the non-profits reach their goals.

What’s interesting is that Google will be applying an algorithm to all of this. As you give to non-profits and charities, Google will curate a list just for you that includes charities that it thinks you’ll be interested in based upon your past history.

One Today is a great example of harnessing the spending power of mobile users for good. Heavy mobile users spend at least a dollar every day on games, in-game add-ons and other apps. Tapping into those heavy spenders to give just one dollar a day can make a huge difference.

This all sounds good, but you can’t just start giving money to charities just yet. One Today is available through a limited pilot in the U.S. for now so interested parties must request an invite to get the app. You can download it from the Play Store if you want, but it will be useless without the invite. The app will be available at a later date on iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry so generous minded folks without an Android device will still be able to give in the future.

[h/t: Droid Life]

For one, it is providing $3.1 million to the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) to help get local network engineering expertise to universities and national research & education networks in Sub-Saharan Africa.

“Through labs and a train-the-trainers program, NSRC will provide hands-on training on campus network planning, deployment, and management for over 600 university and NREN staff,” explains Google.org principal Jennifer Haroon. “Their work will bring the Internet to students and staff at over 50 institutions and increase network engineering know-how in Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Additionally, Google.org is providing $1.3 million to the Internet Society (ISOC) to improve and create Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in emerging markets.

“IXPs play a big role in core Internet infrastructure, allowing Internet Service Providers to peer locally (and cheaply), which can lower end user costs, promote competition, and improve user experience,” says Haroon. “ISOC will create a toolkit for those who want to create and improve IXPs and build an industry portal to share IXP information and data.”

According to Google, five billion people are currently without access to the Internet.

Image: NSRC

Specifically, the grant will focus on electricity rates, access to electricity markets, and open data policies. The aim is for consumers to make more efficient use of their electricity, by shifting their use to times when its cheaper and producing their own on-site energy. They also want to see access for consumers and businesses so they can be compensated for cutting energy use at key times. Finally, with policy reforms, they want to see consumers given access to their own energy data for their own use and sharing with third parties of their choosing.

“These policy reforms, coupled with the new technologies now being deployed on a large scale, can empower consumers to make smarter energy choices, improve real-time management of the electricity grid, and help facilitate more renewable energy all while lowering overall costs,” said Michael Terrell, Senior Policy Counsel, Engergy & Sustainability on the Google.org blog.

“We hope this grant will help catalyze change and look forward to seeing progress in the years to come,” he adds.

Last week, Google announced a $200 million investment into a wind farm in Texas, which the company says generates enough energy to power over 60,000 average U.S. homes.

Google Maps .8 minutes ago

New Google Crisis Response site for the Philippines features Google Person Finder, emergency contact information, a map of shelter locations and more. 

View the site here:
http://www.google.org/crisisresponse/2012-08-philippines-flood.html 

#phalerts   #philippines  #phfloods 

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Though Google is often accused of being “evil,” by those who question certain business practices related to its search engine (mostly because of the company’s famous “do no evil” mantra), I don’t think many would disagree that this is a decidedly un-evil action from the company’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.

In fact, Google has offered similar resources for a number of natural disasters.

On Google’s Lat Long Blog, Pete Giencke of the Google Crisis Response Team writes:

Emerging as one of the worst flooding events along the U.S. waterway in the past century, the Mississippi River floods of April and May 2011 have caused widespread destruction along the 2,300 mile river system. Historically high water levels from heavy rains and springtime snowmelt have provided no shortage of dramatic scenes — levees breached, downtown areas completely submerged, spillways opened, and more.

The Google Crisis Response team has assembled a collection of flood data including satellite imagery for impacted cities along the river from GeoEye, flood extent and crest data forecasts from the US Army Corps of Engineers (kml) and NOAA’s National Weather Service (kml), and shelter locations from the American Red Cross (kml).

The image at the top is Morganza, Louisiana on May 15. The following image is from Cairo, Illinois on May 8.

Google Crisis Response is a project of Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm. Its stated goal is to make critical info more accessible around natural disasters and humanitarian crises. Just this year it has provided data and resources for the earthquake/tsunami in Japan, the Christchurch earthquake, the Brazil floods and landslides, and Australian floods.

Last year, it provided resources for the Pakistan floods, gulf oil spill, Qinghai earthquake, Chile earthquake, and Haiti earthquake. In 2009 it provided resources for Typhoon Morakot, the Lockheed Wildfire in Santa Cruz, the L’Aquila Earthquake, and Red River Floods.

To see all available data for the Mississippi floods, simply search for “Mississippi flooding” on Google Maps. The data is also accessible in Google Earth via the “places” layer.

Neither organization is wasting time on paperwork or small-scale tests.  A post on the Official Google.org Blog explained, "Current Cost will now offer devices that are compatible with Google PowerMeter.  They will also offer upgrades to existing customers so that they too can monitor their energy consumption anywhere online with our software."

The post then continued, "Devices that integrate with Google PowerMeter will first be available in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand."  Plus, "E.ON, one of the UK’s largest utilities, has also teamed up with Current Cost to offer its customers a Google PowerMeter compatible energy monitor as part of its free ‘Energy Fit Starter Pack.’"

These developments should put Google’s name in front of a lot more people on a regular basis, acting as free advertising.  They constitute fantastic PR, too, considering that Google PowerMeter promises to help folks both go green and save money.

It’ll be very interesting to see what sort of adoption rate the PowerMeter/Current Cost technology achieves in the weeks and months ahead.

"I think this is the highest contribution that I can make both to Google.org and to fighting the urgent threats of our day: from climate change to emerging infectious diseases, to issues of poverty and health care," says Brilliant. "By focusing my energy outwards I hope to be able to spend more time motivating policy makers, encouraging public and private partnerships, and generally advocating for the changes that we must make as a global society to solve these problems."

Megan Smith will be taking over as General Manager at Google.org. Brilliant also says Google will be putting more engineers and technical talent to work on issues. Could the move really be a way to both consolidate operations and look good doing it? This is the thinking of some bloggers, anyway.

"I wonder if this closer alignment between business aims and philanthropic ones couldn’t also be seen as an anti-recessionary measure," says Anya Kamenetz at Fast Company. "Profits fell for the first time last quarter and the Goog has gone through quiet cutbacks in perks and personnel."

Not a bad point.

"By putting the wildly popular Brilliant out on the road more as a brand evangelist, adding to Smith’s job description, and tapping more Googlers’ 20% time for do-gooder projects, Google gets to shine its image and build its business at the same time for less cash. Good thinking!" says Kamenetz.

Doing more good for less money can’t be a bad thing. Interesting projects Google.org has been involved with include Flu Trends, RechargeIT, Clean Engery 2030, and PowerMeter.

The Final Inch, a 38-minute film about people trying to eradicate polio, is up against just three other movies in the "Documentary Short" category.  It was directed and produced by Irene Taylor Brodsky, and filmed mostly in Afghanistan and India.

As for what The Final Inch got from Google, Google.org began funding the project back in 2007.  The film received a plug on the Official Google Blog in November, and was mentioned on the Official Google.org Blog about a month ago. 

So now it’s showtime.  The 81st Annual Academy Awards will be held this weekend, and Verne Kopytoff writes, "Several Googlers plan to attend, including Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google.org, and Greg Miller, senior adviser and chief of investments.  They plan to wear tuxedos rather than going Silicon Valley casual, no doubt to avoid the stinging fashion critics on Inside Edition the next day."

Other things worth keeping an eye on during the ceremony will be the performances of The Wrestler and The Dark Knight.  Next year, maybe Watchmen and Love Naturally.

The film’s director Irene Brodsky talks about the project:

The film has an official site, which contains a number of other clips from the film, and some screenshots such as these:

The film will air in the U.S. on HBO in 2009. It was shot in hi-def cinematic style. In other recent Google.org news, the organization has put together a tool to track flu trends around the United States. More on that here. For more on the Final Inch, go to the official site here.

So before the speculation and criticism spirals too far out of control, Google decided to nip it in the bud, and address these things right away. A post at the Official Google Blog says:

Because we’re committed to protecting your privacy, we made sure that the searches that we analyze for Google Flu Trends are not drawn from personally-identifiable search histories but rather from an aggregated set of hundreds of billions of searches.

In order to provide a rough geographic breakdown of potential flu outbreaks, we use IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originate. To protect your privacy, we anonymize those IP addresses at nine months. And we don’t provide this aggregated, anonymized data to third parties. For more information about the privacy protections for Flu Trends check out our FAQs and privacy policy.

I think what Google is doing with this tool is a genuinely good agenda. The medical field seems to agree. "The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place," said Dr. Lyn Finelli of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to The New York Times. "[T]his could prevent cases of influenza."

Hopefully,Google has put some minds at ease. For more on the tool, and Google.org’s Predict and Prevent initiative (including a video), check out our coverage from yesterday.