Japan’s early-warning system for earthquakes is the “most advanced in the world,” according to Time magazine, and with the change, iPhones will be able to receive messages broadcast by the service that are pushed to devices by the carriers. Previously, third-party apps provided a similar function, but Apple’s making this a system-level tool will ensure that if users want to receive those notifications, they won’t have to make sure that an app is running in the background or that they have installed a specific app.

The iPhone is far from the first device on the Japanese market to plug into the earthquake-early-warning system. Feature phones in Japan have offered a similar ability for years. But it is a sign that Apple is willing to make modifications to its iOS software that are regionally specific when it comes to safety issues. Other places in the world, including Mexico, also have early-warning systems in place for earthquakes and other natural disasters like tsunamis and tidal waves. California is set to see its own early-detection system up and running sometime around 2013. Emergency notification alerts about things like wildfires that are triggered based on your device’s location might also prove effective in helping people steer clear of danger.

Apple probably can institute similar tools the world over, but whether it will is another question entirely. In Japan, the service is offered on many other devices, so there’s a clear precedent. In other parts of the world, such precedents might not exist, and such a system might even encourage some to sue or seek damages if warnings don’t work properly or fail to prevent injury.

Since people are turning more and more toward smartphones and away from broadcast sources for news and information, I think opt-in OS-level warning and notification systems for things like dangerous weather systems and natural disasters is a great idea. Here’s hoping this addition to iOS 5 is a first sign that Apple agrees.

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Donate Through iTunes

Apple is accepting donations through the iTunes music store on behalf of Japan. Just open up iTunes on your Mac, navigate to the Store in the source menu and click on the “Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Donate Here” button, or simply click this link to be taken to the donation page. You can contribute anywhere from $5 to $200 here, and 100 percent of your money goes directly to the American Red Cross’ disaster relief efforts.

Donate Directly From the iPhone

If you’re using your iPhone or iPad, unfortunately the above link doesn’t work and Apple isn’t offering a donation page on those devices as of yet, but you can text REDCROSS to 90999 from your iPhone to give $10 to the American Red Cross.

Support App Developers Helping Out

Some App Store developers and publishers are donating the entire proceeds of sales of their apps to the Japanese relief efforts for a limited time. Capcom is donating all proceeds from the sale of Super Street Fighter IV for the iPhone, which currently sells for $0.99 in the App Store, from Mar. 15 to Mar. 21. Japanese developer Motion Portrait, which has 12 iPhone apps for sale, has reduced the price of each to $0.99 and is donating 100 percent of the proceeds from all sales to relief efforts between now and Mar. 31. Tunemark Radio for the iPad is also donating all proceeds of the sales of its $0.99 app to the Red Cross and Salvation Army in support of Japan through Mar. 20. Zynga is turning in-app purchases into donation tools, by donating 100 percent of the proceeds from various in-game items in its FarmVille, CityVille and FrontierVille titles to relief efforts.

AppRelief.com operated as a central hub for disaster relief efforts originating from App Store sales last year when Haiti was struck, raising more than $30,000, and the site’s organizers have announced plans to put together a Japan-focused campaign soon, so watch that space for more apps joining in.

Apple itself is helping directly, too, as you can read in this amazing story from an Apple Store employee living in Japan posted on Kevin Rose’s personal blog. If you have any other relief efforts you know of, or just other ways for people to help, let us know in the comments.

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Countless citizens have also documented the event, and clips uploaded to YouTube and other sites show devastation, but also relief as people emerge unhurt from appartements, grocery stores and offices. Just take a look at this clip if you want to get a sense of how strong the earthquake was:

This video was recorded in grocery store during the earthquake:

Other amateur videos recorded after the quake hit show burning buildings and destroyed roads. For more citizen news coverage of the event, check out the following sources:

YouTube’s Citizentube project has been aggregating amateur footage from Japan.

Storyful has continuously updated coverage of citizen media in Japan.

Global Voices is aggregating a mixture of mainstream media reporting and citizen reactions.

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Today is the one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed an estimated 230,000 people and has left millions of others homeless. As in some other recent catastrophes, social media such as Twitter, text messaging, interactive online maps and other tools such as crowdsourcing were used by both victims and rescue workers to co-ordinate relief efforts. But did they help? The Knight Foundation has released a comprehensive study of the use of technology during the aftermath of the quake, and found that while there is still a lot of work to be done, such tools can make rescue efforts and aid far easier and faster.

Haiti quickly became what the report describes as “a living laboratory for new applications such as SMS, interactive online maps and radio-cell phone hybrids.” But while many of the tools were extremely useful in transmitting crucial information, this information often wasn’t used as well as it could have been, for a variety of reasons. The report notes:

As new media activists have pointed out, “Technology is easy, community is hard.” Many of the obstacles to the relief efforts concerned difficulties in dialogue between communities: between international organizations and local Haitian groups, between volunteers and professional humanitarian organizations and between civilians and military.

and

While the democratic approach to information management fuels crowdsourcing, this characteristic can also serve as a limitation in crisis settings. Information may be gathered and assembled in an open, democratic fashion. But often the practical response effort is driven by large organizations that deal with information in a radically different way. Military and international humanitarian organizations manage information within more closed systems.

One of the most powerful new-media and online tools used in the relief efforts, the Knight report says, was Ushahidi — a service that was developed in Kenya in 2007, and can be used to aggregate and process information that comes in from a variety of sources such as SMS, Twitter and radio, and then plot the information on a map. The service “developed an RSS feed for the U.S. Coast Guard to help them retrieve emergency information [and] a team of four to eight Coast Guard responders retrieved the information and disseminated it to forces on the ground.” A group of students at Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science converted the Ushahidi data to Google Earth file formats.

Crowdsourcing also played a large role in the aftermath of the disaster, the report says. Two weeks after the earthquake, the labor-on-demand company CrowdFlower took over management of the workflow of volunteers to “translate, classify and geocode the messages” coming in via the short-code 4636. Later, an outsourcing company called Samasource took over the bulk of the translation and coding work in co-operation with a local Haiti-based group. And accurate maps of the country and the location of survivors and victims were also crowdsourced using the OpenStreetMap standard.

One of the biggest problems of crisis response in developing countries lies in finding locations that do not appear on any maps. In some cases, the maps have never been made; in others, rural populations have crowded into urban areas so quickly that maps soon become outdated. These problems were addressed in Haiti by another notable development in information technology: the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Haiti mapping initiative.

Although social media and other tools were important, the report makes a point of cautioning that the Haiti relief effort shouldn’t be seen as a “new-media success story,” because some of the new approaches used did not work very well, due to a lack of co-ordination — and in many cases a lack of understanding of how to use the tools. For example, U.S. Air Force Col. Lee Harvis, the chief medical officer who landed in Port-au-Prince 36 hours after the earthquake, said he had no knowledge of Ushahidi, and neither did any of the other military doctors operating in the country.

The Knight Foundation report (which was co-produced with Internews) also noted that despite all the new media tools, the single most important tool in Haiti was one that has also been crucial in almost every other major disaster in the past 50 years: namely, traditional radio broadcasting. However, the report’s authors noted that social media and other tools helped spread the information farther than radio would otherwise have been able, and that this was an important aspect of the relief efforts.

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Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

As with the earthquake in Haiti, social-media tools such as Twitter and other web-based resources have been a key source of information about the disaster, helping family members find out about their loved ones as well as letting authorities know where there are problems that need to be dealt with. We’ve collected some of the places you can look for further data and in-person reports, as well as ways of helping Chile recover from the quake. If you have any other resources you think people could use, please post them in the comments or email them to mathew@gigaom.com.

• Twitter List: As it did during the Haiti earthquake, The New York Times has collected some Twitter accounts with information about what is going on in Chile.
• Ben Casnocha: The entrepreneur and author has been tweeting details about the earthquake and its aftermath
• Twitpic: People have been uploading images of the devastation in and around Concepcion, some of which have been collected by The Huffington Post.
• Ushahidi: A site designed to act as a central clearinghouse for information about disasters such as the Chilean earthquake.
• Livestream: A live video feed from Chilean TV via the Livestream service.
• Person Finder: A Chilean version of a tool that Google originally created to help during the Haiti earthquake.
• Map Maker: Google has also opened up the use of its mapping database for use by aid organizations, and people can help via the Chile Update Page. Google has a page set up with other resources, including the ability to click and donate to Unicef and other charities from the page.

Thumbnail photos courtesy of Twitpic, post photo courtesy of Google.

Max Woolley, a father working in the area with a humanitarian aid group prior to the disaster, was buried under rubble for about 60 hours after the earthquake struck. During the quake, Woolley received fairly serious injuries to both his head and his leg. Luckily, he also had an app that dealt specifically with how to treat and respond to such injuries.

The app was Pocket First Aid & CPR, created by the American Heart Association in tandem with Jive Media. It allows users to browse a variety of first aid techniques and practices, provides emergency numbers, stores medical info such as blood type, insurance providers and emergency contacts, and instructs users on what to do in various emergency situations. Techniques are demonstrated using a combination of text instructions and videos of the procedures being done correctly. Probably a better bet than depending on that vaguely-remembered first aid course you took five months ago.

Woolley used the app to look up the correct method of treating his wounds. He learned to bandage his leg with his shirt and then tie-off the wound with his belt to slow the bleeding. For his head injury, the app told him not to fall asleep in case of concussion, so he set his iPhone’s alarm to go off every 20 minutes. Of course, the iPhone’s battery wasn’t up to the challenge of being almost perpetually in use for 60 hours, but Woolley says then when he did have to turn it off to conserve what little battery remained, his body was used to the cycle and wouldn’t drift off to sleep for longer than a few minutes at a time.

The app is a $3.99 purchase, but Woolley clearly thinks the money was well spent. There are other, free first aid applications available, but it was the American Heart Association connection that gave Woolley the confidence to follow the advice contained within to the letter. According to CNN, he said his phone “was like a high-tech version of a Swiss Army knife that enabled me to treat my own injuries, track time, stay awake and stay alive.”

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Corrected Tuesday 4 p.m. PT. A week after a massive earthquake struck Haiti, the country’s terrible devastation continues to captivate and motivate onlookers — and one of the simplest and best-publicized ways to help is to send a $5 or $10 donation through a text message. Combined, the two major mobile giving platforms, mGive and the Mobile Giving Foundation, have raised $42 $27 million via text message commitments from Americans and Canadians. Initially, as we reported, those mobile donations faced 90-day delays to reach Haiti, based on the emergent industry’s practices of billing subscribers via their carriers during their normal payment cycle.

However now the four major American carriers have all committed to making an exception, passing the donations on to Haiti more quickly. Verizon kicked it off with $2.98 million sent to Haiti on Friday (the total of its customers’ mobile giving at that time). Sprint said, also on Friday, it would send 80 percent of the $1.2 million its customers had donated to Haiti immediately, with the rest to follow. T-Mobile said Monday on a customer support forum that it aimed to get funds to Haiti by “this week.” And a spokesperson for AT&T told us via email, “Yes, we will advance payment of verified texted donations to the Red Cross for Haiti relief as soon as possible.” He said AT&T customers had pledged more than $9 million to the Red Cross via text as of Monday afternoon.

Carriers are also waiving text message fees for the Haiti donation process, in which a user texts a keyword like “Haiti” or “quake” to a short code, then receives a response, confirms the donation, and then receives a thank you — for a total of four text messages.

The Mobile Giving Foundation said in a press release that it continues to see the rate of mobile donations rise, with $3.5 million donated on Sunday alone for a total of more than $20 $27 million raised. mGive said separately it is processing more than $10,000 per minute in text donations at peak, and has seen $22 $23 million pledged to the Red Cross (the vast majority of all American mobile donations). The Haiti fundraising effort is easily the largest mobile giving campaign to date.

After the dust settles, the carriers and the mobile giving facilitators will have to establish better processes for mobile fundraising. While it makes complete sense to expedite desperately needed disaster relief funding, there’s a risk of opening the door to money transfer for unverified causes, and pre-authorizing donations on which subscribers then default.

Correction: This article originally treated the amounts raised by the Mobile Giving Foundation and mGive as two separate figures. However, the Mobile Giving Foundation included mGive’s fundraising totals in the numbers it released. We have corrected the story with new numbers, accurate as of Tuesday afternoon.

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The flipside is that it can be hard to know exactly which methods are legit, and in which cases the bulk of your donation actually goes to relief work. Apple and the Red Cross have set up a method for donating money that makes it very simple to make a contribution that will go entirely towards helping Haitians deal with the fallout of this tragic event; you can now donate via iTunes.

At the U.S. and Canadian iTunes stores, and at many European ones, too all you have to do is follow this link and you’ll be taken to a Red Cross donation splash page. You can then choose from six different preset donation amounts, including $5, $10, $25, $50, $100 and $200. Clicking the “Donate” button beneath any amount will then prompt the “Sign in to buy” dialog, where you’ll confirm your iTunes account credentials in order to finalize the donation.

Apple explains where your donation is going and to what end on the donation page:

100% of your donation will go to the American Red Cross (…) Your donation of any size could help save the day by providing food, water, temporary shelter, medical services and emotional support to someone in need.

In the even that the American Red Cross reaches its target for the Haiti Earthquake Appeal, any excess donations will be applied to other American Red Cross efforts. Further information about the American Red Cross and its financial administration can be found at http://www.RedCross.org.

A quick test reveals that the iTunes link to the donation page does not work on the iPhone or iPod touch iTunes store at this time. If you do want to donate from your mobile device, the best way is probably still via text message. Texting “HAITI” to 90999 will donate $10 to the relief efforts on many U.S. carriers, although it won’t work for international donations.

Haiti is nowhere near out of the woods yet, so if you haven’t yet contributed, or if you’d just like to do it again, and donate more than the max $20 or $30 that most carriers allow for the texting method, the iTunes store is a safe and easy way to help out.

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