hankyoreh

By Lee Soon-hyuk, staff reporter

The smartphone is the black hole of digital devices. All kinds of gadgets, including cameras, handheld games, GPS trackers, music players, voice recorders, and pedometers are being pushed aside by smartphones. More precisely, these devices are not losing out to smartphones themselves, but rather to the multitude of apps to which smartphones provide access.

While apps may be the implacable enemy of these devices, there are also numerous apps that focus instead on human warmth. There are the “kind apps,” which make it easy to donate to needy people around you. These apps are spreading the culture of giving, which has been evolving along with the smartphone.

This app allows you to give as you walk. After starting the app and turning on the GPS, one won (about a tenth of one US cent) of donation is added for each 100 meters that you walk. When you stop, the money you’ve accumulated is donated. When the money saved up by a number of people reaches a certain level, it goes toward the purchase of custom-made prosthetic legs for children who have trouble walking because of an amputation.

Through the app, you can view information about your donation, including stories about the children you are helping. The app also helps users stay in shape by letting them see how far and how long they have walked, as well as how many calories have been burned, making it even more useful. Fitness and progress information can also be shared on Facebook.

Use your smartphone to talk on the phone with friends, family, or your partner, and you could be donating before you know it. If you turn on the app before talking on the phone, two won will be donated for each minute of your conversation. The donations are used to help children who are suffering from difficult-to-treat diseases. Users also get two won per minute of chatting, which they can use to purchase various items or to make further donations. If you talk on the phone for 250 minutes a month, you are in effect donating 500 won (US$0.47) and getting 500 won in points for yourself.

As part of a campaign run by the Korea University Medical Center and the Hankook Ilbo newspaper, the donations are covered by the mobile carrier, and there are no additional charges for the user. Various free media content can be enjoyed, including music and English conversation practice, and users can also place international phone calls for the price of a local call.

Donation Plus, released by Onse Telecom, allows you to take advantage of those extra minutes provided by your phone contract that are left unused at the end of the month. Instead of going to waste, they can help people around you who are struggling. If you download the app and listen to some of the audio products, including stories and music, you collect donation points commensurate with the number of minutes remaining on your phone. These points are then used to support a charity campaign of your choice.

This is a mobile donation service through which you can apply extra OK Cashbag or Rainbow points to support your preferred charitable organization. Take a look at campaigns that have been registered in six categories (daily life, overseas, education, future, health care, and emergency) and select which campaign you want to help fund. The app shows you how your money is being used, and it even issues a receipt for your charitable donation. The Give U app was developed as part of mobile carrier SK Telecom’s corporate social responsibility program.

Tree Planet is ostensibly a game in which you take care of trees, but in fact the app also helps you plant real trees in Korea and around the world. In the game, you must first select a specific country and then dig a hole for the tree, give it plenty of sunlight, water it, and keep away loggers. If you help the tree grow, a portion of the advertising revenue paid by companies sponsoring the game is sent to UNICEF and other organizations that plant trees.

Technically speaking, the app is not making any donations to people in need. However, in the sense that it allows users to take part in stopping global warming through playing a game, it is regarded as the quintessential “friendly app.”

“Since the app was launched in October 2011 until now, it has been downloaded by around 400,000 people. So far, more than 237,000 trees have been planted in South Sudan, Mongolia, Java in Indonesia, and in Seoul and the DMZ in Korea,” the company said. The company also reports that it is involved in a number of environmental projects, including providing water pumps in Africa and building a “peace forest” in the DMZ.

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