Google's Contributions to Haiti

One of the coolest trends of our time is the rise of social entrepreneurship. According to Wikipedia, "a social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur assesses success in terms of the impact s/he has on society as well as in profit and return. While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many now are working in the private and governmental sectors and making important impacts on society."

I'm especially intrigued by the social entrepreneurship happening in the private sector. Of course the main job of any business enterprise is to make money, but a lot of companies are interested in simultaneously using their unique capabilities for positive social change. Google is on the front lines of these efforts. They are always coming up with nifty projects, like a global flu tracker that estimates flu activity based on search activity, or software for online, global monitoring of changes in the earth's forests.

Google is providing several services in response to the Haiti earthquake. First, they've worked with the US State Department to create a "People Finder" gadget for providing information on missing persons or searching the database. It's simple, elegant, and pretty amazing--a few days after the earthquake, we have a new piece of software (available in English, French, and Creole--the languages spoken in Haiti) that is based on open standards and is embeddable in any website. Second, Google is providing free Google Voice calls to Haiti for the next two weeks. Third, Google is providing post-earthquake map data for Google Earth, which I'm sure will be critical for many responders. Fourth, Google has donated $1 million to organizations on the ground in Haiti.