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Amazon will donate Kindles to promote digital reading
Amazon aims to promote digital reading around the world and has established a new program called Kindle Reading Fund to achieve that goal. The Fund will be in charge of donating Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets and ebooks to various recipients, such as reading programs in developing nations. To make sure its devices reach the people who need them, the tech titan has joined forces with Worldreader, a non-profit that provides e-books to children and families in the developing world to promote literacy. The two already worked together in previous projects, according to TechCrunch, including bringing digital reading materials to 61 Kenyan libraries.
Oculus is helping students and nonprofits create VR content
There's no doubting the ability of VR to create immersive experiences for gaming and other forms of entertainment. However, Oculus wants to make sure nonprofit organizations and students have the opportunity to tap into those possibilities as well. To lend a hand, the virtual reality company announced a two-fold initiative called "VR for Good." One part of the project will partner up 10 nonprofits with "rising filmmakers" to create 360-degree videos for virtual reality. Organizations will get two days worth of training at Facebook headquarters, Nokia OZO cameras and post-production help. What's more, the collection of videos will debut at Sundance next year.
The 21st-century charity that puts Google and VR to good use
How do you get people to care about the world's problems? More important, how do you get them to care enough to take action? Some nonprofits, like the ASPCA, are fortunate enough to have the perfect mix of cute animals in distress and a sappy Sarah McLachlan song to get the tears running and the donations flowing. But what if your charity lacks the glamour of a pop icon and the heartstrings pull of a wounded puppy? What if your charity's cause is as mundane as bringing clean water to those who don't have it? In a world where we have the luxury of opting for a $3 bottle of Fiji Water over Pellegrino, how do you drive home the point that some people have no other choice but to drink water infested with leeches? For an organization like Charity: Water, the answer to that question was a technological one: Take people to the Third World in a virtual reality documentary and show them how their dollars are being spent with real-time data from a Google-funded water sensor.
In honor of Earth Day, Google expands 'Giving through Glass' program
In honor of Earth Day (today, that is), Google's announcing another wave of its Giving through Glass program for non-profit organizations. The program, originally launched late last year, equips groups including the World Wildlife Fund and Give Directly with Google's wearable computer, with the goal of "bringing more transparency to philanthropy." Now, Mountain View is looking to partner with another five nonprofits -- submissions are open today through May 20th, and the selected organizations will win a $25,000 grant in addition to Google's hardware. Nonprofits can head here to apply, and everyone can head past the break to check out a WWF researcher using Glass while tracking rhinos in Nepal.
Ustream starts a nonprofit program to back citizen journalists
Livestreaming is increasingly crucial to journalism -- in some cases, it's the only way to get around government censorship of TV broadcasts. With that in mind, Ustream is launching Ustream for Change. The nonprofit program helps citizen journalists and educators by supplying no-cost access to ad-free streaming, promotional efforts and tech support. The initiative is already supporting Spilno.tv and UkrStream.tv as they cover anti-government protests in the Ukraine; groups wanting to make an impact through live video can apply to join the program today.
Google Glass project tackles poverty, other real world problems
Image from charity: water taken with Glass It has flown over San Francisco, adorned the faces of runway models and most recently taken a road trip across the US. Now Google's already iconic wearable computer is taking a more altruistic journey with five non-profit organizations. Starting today, a small selection of Google Giving partners will begin using Glass to help them achieve their organizations' missions and "tackle some complex challenges." It's unclear exactly what the groups will do with Glass, but Google says they will use the device in their daily work to "bring more transparency to philanthropy, and close the gap between donors and the people they support." Participating organizations include The World Wildlife Fund; Samasource, which offers enterprise data services to poor women and youth; Give Directly, an organization with a web-based solution for connecting donors to individual households in Kenya; the all-purpose youth-focused Do Something!; and charity: water, which concentrates on clean water initiatives. Still in early development, the device's cost and lack of functionality have proved prohibitive, and a few socially inconsiderate early adopters have inspired the term glasshole. While Glass is hardly in need of a PR facelift, the Giving Through Glass initiative should shed some light on the wearable's more practical applications.
YouTube Campaigns lets nonprofits draw our interest without the telethons
Trying to launch a concerted nonprofit video campaign can feel like tilting at windmills: you might have one moment of undivided attention from viewers before they're off to watch cats and Nigerian pygmy goats. Google wants to make the most of that time through its YouTube Campaigns initiative. The strategy brings on-video overlays and channel sections that show viewers both a progress meter for the campaign as well as a handy links to explore and share what they've found. If all goes well, charities and like-minded organizations get more donations and YouTube views, while we in the general public are reminded that there's more to life than K-pop videos. It certainly beats manning the phones for a celebrity fundraiser.
United Nations launches My Life as a Refugee Android app (video)
As the great Tom Petty once said, you don't have to live like a refugee, but one UN agency is hoping you'll at least download its new app to see what it could be like. My Life as a Refugee is designed to raise awareness about the plight of millions of people living in conflict-ridden places around the globe, and it's available right now for free on Android (coming soon to iOS). We found the app to be only marginally interactive, with users simply encouraged to click through a litany of facts. However, you do get to choose one of two possible options before time runs out as each situation unfolds. You can only "play" a certain amount each day, which means you get some cliffhangers, and of course you can "share your experience" on Facebook right from the app. You can learn more there in the source link.
OLPC to bring Little Pim language teaching videos to XO laptop, underprivileged children
One Laptop Per Child is tag-teaming it up with foreign language learning company Little Pim to teach English to underprivileged children. The initiative could help to blur the line between work and fun and lead to future opportunities for kids in an ever-increasingly global economy where English is the lingua franca of many multinational groups and companies. Getting educational videos onto OLPC's affordable XO laptop is consistent with the new partnerships' philosophy that "learning should be a joyous experience and that children learn best when learning and play are seamless activities." There's no word on when the package deal will be available, but we'll be on the lookout for further info. Full PR after the break.
Khan Academy iPad app screenshots show progress
The Khan Academy is an online non-profit organization whose goal is to provide a "free world-class education to anyone anywhere." Think of it as TED for everyone, except Khan's videos, resources, and lesson plans can actually help you be one of the TED speakers one day. Currently the Khan Academy is only accessible through a browser, but, John Resig, Dean of Open Source and head of JavaScript development at the non-profit, has shown off a few alpha screenshots of the upcoming Khan Academy iPad app, and it looks awesome. Initially the 1.0 version of the iPad app will allow video navigation and viewing, interactive transcripts, and offline support. However, future versions of the iPad app will allow for in-app exercises. No word yet on a release date for the app, but combining the Khan Academy with the iPad could prove to be a truly disruptive combination of technologies for traditional education. And especially with kids coming out of US colleges with upwards of $150,000 in student debt, perhaps our more traditional education models need to be disrupted.
HP donates server to WebOS Internals, makes homebrew its boo
Palm's always been pretty cozy with the homebrew community, and now, with a donation to WebOS Internals, HP's showing that they've got love for hackers, too. Just in time for the lover's holiday, HP announced plans to donate a ProLiant DL385 server to the independent developer's resource -- a gift worth $10,000 and packing 32GB of RAM and 8TB disk space. Considering all the new devices we saw at the webOS event this week, the added capacity comes at just the right time. We always thought diamonds were a nice gesture, but we suppose, in this case anyway, nothing says I love you like an HP ProLiant.
$50 Teachermate PC launched by Chicago nonprofit
As you've probably figured out from all the OLPC XO and Intel Classmate news we've hit, computers aimed at students are a pretty hot topic these days. A Chicago-based nonprofit called Innovations for Learning has joined the fray with a new $50 entry dubbed the Teachermate. The small PCs come equipped with a 2.5-inch LCD display, 512MB of RAM, an SD slot, and built-in microphone and speaker. The systems are being rolled out to a whopping 500 Chicago elementary schools over the next two years, with the aim of having a unit in the hands of every child. The kid-friendly computers will come with a special case that allows charging and data-sync of 30 units at a time, allowing teachers to collect score-data quickly. If you absolutely must have one, it looks like they're going to commercially available on Amazon, so you will be able to add it to your collection.
One Laptop Per Child announces game jam
The non-profit group One Laptop Per Child recently announced a three-day game jam (which has nothing to do with marmalade, jelly, or other spreadable treats) scheduled for June 8-10 in Massachusetts. Hundreds of developers, educators, writers, and artists will collaborate to create open source educational games for new XO laptop. The resulting source code will be released on SourceForge for other programmers to tinker with.The low-powered, inexpensive XO computer has been designed with the goal of providing every child in the world access to modern educational materials. Currently the XO is planned to be distributed in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Libya, Nigeria, and Rwanda, with more countries in the future.
Don't throw that old USB flash drive away, donate it
Whether you call it a thumb drive, memory stick, flash drive, or disgo, by now you've probably got at least one unused USB flash drive lying around the house or office. Instead of chucking that schwag into the digital dump and making Iron Eyes Cody cry, why not donate your 16MB (or greater drive) to Inveneo in their quest to leverage ICT and close the digital divide in developing countries? The flash drives will be provided to students, aid workers, and small business entrepreneurs among others in need of a quick and easy means to store and share information. Come on, everybody's doing it, and besides, mom always said it's better to make tax deductible donations, than to receive. Click the read link below to contribute or read on for more details about Inveneo.[Via boingboing]
