Chinese Companies, Bloggers Release Earthquake-Related Services

More on the efforts being made to help the earthquake victims in Sichuan.

First on the tech front, Baidu, Tencent, and China Mobile have released a series of earthquake-related services. Pacific Epoch offers the hard facts:

Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU) changed its homepage logo on May 13 in honor of earthquake survivors. The gray logo is centered on a red cross and the date of the disaster. Clicking on the logo takes users to earthquake information on Baidu's finance channel. Baidu has donated RMB 2 million to the relief effort. According to a dzwww.com report, the word "earthquake" was searched 27.1 million times on Baidu by May 13, while "Wenchuan" was searched 4.95 million times and "Sichuan Earthquake" was searched 3.82 million times.

Tencent (0700.HK) released a special version of its instant messaging (IM) software QQ2008 Beta1 on Wednesday to allow QQ users to pay tribute to those affected by the Wenchuan County earthquake. The new version adds functions for yellow memorial ribbon and lit candle icons to be inserted in QQ signature blocks.

China Mobile (NYSE: CHL, 941.HK) partnered with the Red Cross Society of China to release an SMS donation platform on Tuesday, reports Sohu. Using the platform, China Mobile subscribers can send donations in increments of RMB 1-2 to earthquake victims. The donations will be deducted from users' mobile fee accounts.

But how do you actually going about making a donation via SMS? China Mobile's website says

China Mobile customers can make donations by sending SMSs with the numbers "1" or "2" in the body of the message to 1069999301; you can contribute 1 or 2RMB to the disaster-hit areas and make repeated donations.

The donation service is legitimate and I'd strongly encourage making a contribution. A little goes a long way. The money is deducted from your mobile bill.

There are also other domestic companies pitching in. Again from Pacific Epoch:

Alibaba's consumer-to-consumer (C2C) site Taobao.com opened an online store to donate product proceeds to earthquake victims on May 14, reports Hexun. Approximately 3,000 Taobao sellers with 30,000 goods have signed up on the platform to donate 50 percent of their sales to the rescue effort, according to the report. More than 2,300 of the goods are already sold out, said the report.

Alibaba's online advertising exchange platform Alimama has purchased 400,000 advertisement spaces across 100,000 websites to place public service announcements for Sichuan earthquake donations, reports Hexun. Alimama is also asking its ad sellers to donate one day of advertising revenue to earthquake victims. By Wednesday afternoon, Internet users had used Alibaba-owned platforms to donate RMB 4 million to the cause.

Alibaba provides a page in English here.

In the blogsphere, Ryan from Lost Laowai has developed an icon that links to the Red Cross Society of China's donation site. Zhongnanhai will feature the badge. Please post it on your blog. Or better yet: click on the link and donate to the Red Cross.

For more information, click on the donation badge below.