As we hurtle toward the end of 2013, it’s time for an update of nonprofit technology trends and news!

This time I’ll review the Nominet Trust 100 nominations for the very best technologies for social good, the big TechSoup/Guardian Technology for Good Report, The soft launch of Hacker Helper, a new free service that sends money over email, the world’s most popular websites, and two new Netflix style subscription services for eBooks. All that and Ginny Mies's pick for the mobile app of the month. 

If you’re a nonprofit news junkie, have a look at all our Nonprofit Technology News pieces from this past year.

TechSoup Technologies for Good

Hacker Helper

Hacker Helper is a free online tool that will allow volunteer developers to prepare for hackathons. The project is soft launching this month, and going public in March 2014. The tool will allow hackers and coders to get up to speed before the hackathon by reading problem statements written from the perspective of the people who are working to solve social problems on the ground: NGOs and activists. It provides the developers with links to the relevant data sets, APIs, and code bases that can be used to streamline the hackathon experience. It also lists and maps hackathons worldwide. Basically, Hacker Helper ensures that developers come to the hackathons prepared to code instead of wasting the first day doing research. They can go straight to work to create useful apps and other tools for solving social problems. The project was originally funded by Microsoft for the Transforming Communities of Practice grant.

The idea for Hacker Helper was born through collaboration with partners, such as Random Hacks of Kindness who are trying to improve the hackathon process and improve results from the events. Hackathons are most often fast projects that last one to three days. Hacker Helper is all about not reinventing the technology wheel. 

The Hacker Helper project is closely aligned with our NetSquared vision of bringing communities together to solve social problems – including nonprofits, beneficiaries, activists, technologists, concerned citizens. Hacker Helper is currently in beta. We are testing it out at hackathons this month in San Francisco and also in Sarajevo in Bosnia. We will be launching the full version of the site in March at NTC, at a hackathon we are co-producing with Code for America. After that we hope lots of people will contribute content to it. It is essentially a wiki where you will be able to upload a problem statement and links to related data sets etc. Find out more about Hacker Helper via our Sheetal Singh's Community Boost_r piece, Calling all hackers (for social good)!

Technology for Good Report

TechSoup has partnered with the British newspaper, The Guardian, to co-publish an in-depth Technology for Good report showcasing innovative uses of technology for social good. The report is by our Rebecca Chao. It is a new type of content for us that will hopefully inspire you to think beyond the day-to-day use of technology to the ways that technology can transform our approach to solving big social problems. The report covers new technologies like drone technology, and new uses for old technologies like radio. The report also has a mix of tools that are in use to directly to improve lives, and also tools that increase efficiency within organizations that will trickle down to its beneficiaries. There’s a lot in there. It covers 10 topics including humanitarian uses of drones:

• Mobile and cell phones                           • New uses for TV and radio

• Tracking technology (like GPS)              • Translation tools

• Mapping                                                      • Cloud computing

• Social media and crowdsourcing         • Portable Networks

• Data management                                   • Drones

Sending Money By Email

Back in my May Nonprofit Technology News edition, I covered the emerging field of digital wallets. I admit to being a bit envious of the Safaricom M-PESA mobile payment system in Kenya that allows people there to text each other money. No more. The venerable Walt Mossberg of AllThingsD reports that a new free service called Square Cash lets you email cash to anyone with an email address. The service is by the credit card reader company, Square. Did I say that their new Square Cash email service is free of charge? It subtracts money from your debit card and it doesn’t require that the recipient use your same bank. The service requires no login or password and no special software or hardware, just use email from any type device. This actually sounds too good to be true.

Square Cash allows you to send up to $2,500 each week in several transactions or all at once. Currently it is available only in the U.S., and works with debit cards carrying either the Visa or MasterCard logo. It isn’t meant for buying things from merchants, but rather for person-to-person payments.

The catch? You have to trust Square. If fraud is suspected, the company will reverse the fund transfer. After you email money each time, the service notifies you via email or text that it appears you have sent money. You can then have the opportunity to cancel a transaction that didn’t come from you or was a mistake. Why don’t you try it and let me know.

The Best Technologies For Social Good

Charity Digital News, Wired, and several other UK tech publications recently reported on Nominet Trust 100, or NT100, which is a new comprehensive global list of promising applications of digital technology for social good. Nominet Trust is a leading social technology funder in the UK. The NT100 will form the basis for a growing online resource for social enterprises called “The Social Tech Guide." It is intended to be a dynamic public database of tech innovators for good around the world.

Examples of NT100 projects include:

• Witness, the Peter Gabriel-founded watchdog charity which uses online videos call attention to human rights abuses.
• Mozilla’s Firefox, the nonprofit driven free and open source web browser;
• Creative Commons, the project set up to provide a straightforward licensing framework for online creators.
• Cell Slider, which is a crowdsourced online tool for cancer research that challenges the ponderous cancer research establishment. This is an astonishing technology for good in which large numbers of ordinary people analyze photos of cells cultures to identify irregular shaped cancer cell cores. This project aims to speed up cancer research.

Have a look at the Nominet Trust 100 list of nominations from all over the world.

The World's Most Popular Websites

Speaking of maps, the Oxford Internet Institute has used Internet traffic data from Alexa to figure each country’s most popular websites. Around 2.4 billiion of us use the Internet nowadays. Google dominates most of North America, Europe, south Asia and the south Pacific. Facebook is the most popular site in the Spanish-speaking parts of the America, also the Middle East, and North Africa. Other important websites in the world include the Yandex search engine in Russia, Yahoo in Japan and Taiwan, and Baidu in China. See the map here.

Netflix for E-books 

All Things D also reports some news that effect libraries. There are two new e-book subscription services. One is called Oyster and the other is Scribd. These services use a Netflix business model that allow subscribers to read as many books as you want for a monthly fee. Oyster costs $9.95 per month, and Scribd is $8.99 per month. Each has a somewhat different roster of publishers lists. It’s still not as good a deal as your trusty local library. 

The YouTube of Data

I forgot to say something about this in my recent big data piece, “What Does Big Data Have to Do With Me and My Organization?” The World Bank blog reports that it has launched an open data website. It is a free online tool to provide nontechnical users with tools that allows them to present World Bank international development data on your own website in simple way or share it through social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. I know this sounds a bit abstract, so it’s probably best to view the World Bank video that shows what this new free service can do.

Ginny’s Pick for App of the Month

The Sunrise (Free on iOS) app breathes new life into the stale concept of a mobile calendar. Compatible with Google Calendar and iCloud, the Sunrise app syncs your calendars with Facebook events so you’ll never miss an important meeting or social gathering. What I like best about Sunrise is that you can actually do things directly from the app like add more people to meetings, find a location in Google Maps, or check the weather for the day. This alone makes it a standout from the sea of other calendar apps out there.

 Images: TechSoup Global and Nominet Trust