Ang Peregrino Recommends 75: Do Good Iphone App

Do Good
URL: http://​itunes​.apple​.com/​W​e​b​O​b​j​e​c​t​s​/​M​Z​S​t​o​r​e​.​w​o​a​/​w​a​/​v​i​e​w​S​o​f​t​w​a​r​e​?​i​d​=​3​1​8​2​4​2​3​2​0​&​a​m​p​;​m​t=8

In a world in dire need of good deeds, this may be one of the best ideas mar­ry­ing age old val­ues and mod­ern tech­nol­ogy. DoGood is a free appli­ca­tion you can down­load from the ITunes Store.

DoGood lever­ages mil­lions of Iphone/Ipod users to unite indi­vid­ual acts of kind­ness into a sig­nif­i­cant move­ment. Every­day. Across the world.

This is an arti­cle from Forbes​.Com on the DoGood app.

How To Do A Mil­lion Good Deeds
Emily Cohn, 07.03.09, 03:00 AM EDT

Three stu­dent entre­pre­neurs at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan think they can use their phones to make the world a bet­ter place, one down­load at a time.

Three weeks since its launch at Apple’s ( AAPL — news — peo­ple ) World­wide Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence, the appli­ca­tion, DoGood, has recruited more than 15,000 indi­vid­u­als to be part of a grow­ing net­work of users who want to change the world, at least a lit­tle. The appli­ca­tion began as a hobby for three stu­dents who run a fledg­ling Inter­net out­fit, Mobil33t, (pro­nounced “Mobileet”) in Ann Arbor, Mich. But accord­ing to Mobil33t’s co-founder and engi­neer Jason Born­horst, who is in his fourth year as an under­grad­u­ate at Michi­gan, keep­ing up with the application’s suc­cess is becom­ing a full-time job.

Sub­scribers to the free appli­ca­tion are prompted daily with a “DoGood”–a sim­ple task from con­serv­ing water, to turn­ing out a light, to beau­ti­fy­ing the world. When they’ve accom­plished their good deed for the day, they click the application’s “done” button.

The pro­gram tal­lies how many users are ful­fill­ing that day’s deed, and users can share what they have done on Face­book and Twit­ter. So far, it’s up to 209,214 good deeds.

“[I] con­tacted my estranged brother … after more than 2 years of silence. Used LinkedIn! I guess we truly are a tech­nol­ogy dri­ven soci­ety ;)” one user com­mented in response to a DoGood that prompted users to con­nect with a fam­ily member.

Another DoGooder wrote, “Left a post-it note on my work bath­room mir­ror: You are awe­some,” when the day’s good deed was to leave an inspi­ra­tional mes­sage in a pub­lic space.

Born­horst says the goal behind DoGood wasn’t just to do good works but to exper­i­ment with “leverag[ing] the net­work effects of 40 mil­lion mobile devices.” Even bet­ter: Born­horst says that DoGood draws users back. “We’re see­ing peo­ple com­ing back every­day, doing deeds, leav­ing sto­ries and mak­ing fans out of it,” he says.

Mobil33t is tiny, just two engi­neers and a designer and no mar­ket­ing arm or adver­tis­ing cam­paign behind DoGood. Word got out via Twit­ter, a site Born­horst admit­ted he loathed just a mere three weeks ago.

“We quickly saw it begin to prop­a­gate,” Born­horst says of DoGood’s pres­ence on Twit­ter. “Now, every 10 min­utes there is a tweet about the com­pany.” (You can fol­low DoGood on Twit­ter at #dogood.) DoGood’s Web site, Born­horst says, has between 1,500 and 2,000 unique vis­i­tors on a good day.

The team of three cur­rently oper­ates out of the base­ment of a park­ing garage in Ann Arbor, which has been con­verted into TechArb, a stu­dent busi­ness incu­ba­tor that is inde­pen­dent of the uni­ver­sity. The space houses 11 ven­tures, pro­vid­ing stu­dent entre­pre­neurs with a bare-bones col­lab­o­ra­tive envi­ron­ment that includes wire­less Inter­net access, a phone line and some desks and chairs.

Born­horst and co-developer Kunal Jham were both enrolled in a course called Mobile Devel­op­ment for the iPhone and Android when the idea for DoGood began to take shape. The course, which dis­cussed devel­op­ments in the mobile com­put­ing indus­try, really had no cur­ricu­lum but instead “encour­aged stu­dents to do what they already want to do,” says its pro­fes­sor, Elliot Soloway.

Soloway believes that it is the self-reflective nature of the app that has allowed DoGood to take off.

“It makes peo­ple think,” he says. “Peo­ple need an oppor­tu­nity to reflect on their own lives. It’s a very crys­talline, pris­tine state­ment. It makes you reflect on who you are and what you’re doing.”

Born­horst has no spe­cific plans to mon­e­tize DoGood any­time soon. The appli­ca­tion, he says, has vir­tu­ally no oper­at­ing costs.

“Good prod­ucts mar­ket them­selves,” Born­horst says, adding that the team’s goal has always been to “let [DoGood] grow as organ­i­cally as possible.”

Soloway agrees that the Mobil33t team will not see any profit from the app, but says that the expo­sure from DoGood will “do good” for the start-up in the future.

“My hope is that Oprah will find it inter­est­ing,” Born­horst says.