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As you probably know, Haiti was struck by a devastating earthquake last night. According to the latest estimates, over 100,000 people may have died and large parts of the island's infrastructure have been destroyed.

Here is a short list of things you can do right now to get help to Haiti. Just watch out for unsolicited emails. Quite a few scammers and spammers are trying to profit from this catastrophe and have set up fake donation sites and are running phishing scams.

Another popular service has made its way from the Apple App Store to the Android Market.

GOGII's textPlus allows for unlimited and multiplayer chat and SMS features. TextPlus allows for ad-supported free and unlimited messaging for Android users. Users can hold instant group text conversations with friends on almost all U.S. carriers, even without a text messaging plan.

Apartment-dwellers, rejoice. Seattle-based startup Buzzeromatic is letting you take control of your own front door in a way that's smart and flexible.

The premise is simple: Using Twilio's VoIP API, Buzzeromatic allows subscribers to grant access to visitors, allow delivery folks to leave voice messages,and create passwords for frequent guests, all from a web interface with SMS commands for when users are on the go. And yes, there's an app for that: The team told us their fully functional iPhone application is in the hopper.

Starting today, Google Voice users can route around yet another feature their cell phone carriers would like them to pay for: text messages. Google Voice now allows users to receive and reply to text messages by email without incurring any charges from their cell phone carriers. By default, Google Voice still forwards SMS messages to the cell phone a user has on record with Google Voice. Now, however, this new feature allows users to simply forward these text messages to any email address. Responding to these messages is as easy as replying to the email.

According to a report today from the BBC, Iranians are able to text message one another for the first time since the day before the presidential elections.

SMS service, which political dissidents had used to spread messages and organize protests, has been restricted since June 11, causing many Iranians to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites to broadcast and communicate.

Google today announced a number of SMS-based services for the African market. Google SMS provides access to information by SMS (news, local weather, sports, agriculture tips, etc.), while Google Trader is an SMS-based marketplace where buyers and sellers can connect. Google SMS Tips is a query-and-answer service that can take any free-form text query, find the keywords, and then identify and return a relevant answer from a large database.

A new SMS and email notification service is helping local government agencies reach citizens when and where it will do the most good: As soon as possible, and wherever that citizen happens to be.

Depending on whether agencies in a selected location are participating (currently, nearly 1,000 agencies have signed on since the company's launch in March), users can sign up at the Nixle website to subscribe to emails, web alerts, and text messages about community issues from tornado watches and traffic accidents to local robberies and fugitives on the loose. Nixle moreover provides a painless way for local agencies to transition into modern times and notify community members of critical details in ways that will have an immediate impact.

ReadyPing is a new mobile solution for restaurant owners which lets a host or hostess alert customers when their table is ready via a mobile notification. The system, a vast improvement over the restaurant pagers currently in use today, lets diners wander beyond the restaurant's immediate vicinity - something that would be especially handy for those one hour waits. The only question we have about ReadyPing is this: why didn't someone think of this sooner?

In August 2008, Twitter killed SMS updates for everybody outside of the U.S., Canada, and India. Users in the U.K. can now only send messages from their phones, but can't receive them anymore. The developers of Twe2 got frustrated by this and decided to take matters into their own hands. Thanks to Twe2's free service, you can now receive Twitter messages on your mobile phone close to anywhere in the world.

As the mobile handset continues to move from being one of our many computing platforms to becoming our primary platform, we want to be able to do more and more with it. We want to send messages with it, carry music on it, record video with it, and use it as a remote control for our lives. It's all about immediate gratification and the power to get things done wherever and whenever you have the ability to do so.

Kwiry - an SMS-based service designed to simplify mobile tasks - has just announced a feature that plays right into that mindset: allowing you to control your TiVo remotely via SMS.

If you're a big SMS user, you've no doubt encountered this situation: you're sitting at your desk in front of your computer, you get an SMS message, you pick up your phone and respond. The conversation continues as you hack away on your handset keyboard, making typos and resorting to l33t speak to convey your message. All the while, a full-size keyboard - and possibly far fewer typos - sits inches away.

Now, you may have the option to rectify that situation with a new Gmail Labs feature that adds SMS messaging to Gmail chat.

Officials at Boston College have made what may be a momentous decision: they've stopped doling out new email accounts to incoming students. The officials realized that the students already had established digital identities by the time they entered college, so the new email addresses were just not being utilized. The college will offer forwarding services instead.

Can mobile phones be an effective tool in the fight against AIDS? A new group of organizations believe they can.

Last week, in conjunction with the PopTech! conference, the Praekelt Foundation and partner organizations announced a new effort that will use the power of mobile messaging to help fight HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis in South Africa. Project Masiluleke will utilize the power of the mobile phones as a low-cost way to deliver health-related information and prompt call-ins to call centers for those affected by these health care crises.

This post is the second in a two-part series based on: 1) the African mobile marketplace and how Africans utilize their mobile phones; and 2) how organizations are using social marketing to reach this highly mobile population for social change.

The series is based on a conversation I had with Gustav Praekelt, a mobile entrepreneur located in South Africa. In this post we explore how mobile technology is being used for social good in Africa. See also Part 1 here.

After the DEMO presentations yesterday, a lot of people were discussing favorites sites and services from the day's sessions. Based on buzz alone, one of the more popular applications appears to be the new service Alerts.com. With this service, instead of visiting multiple sites to stay up-to-date with the latest news and and information, you can have the news come to you. You can configure alerts that are relevant to your interests and then have them arrive in the method you choose: SMS, voice, email, IM, or on your desktop via an Adobe Air app.

While SMS has already become one of the most important forms of communication in many parts of the world, the U.S. is only catching up to this trend slowly. Part of the reason for this is the high cost of using SMS, not just for users, but also for developers who want to use SMS for their applications. In contrast to other SMS service providers, Zeep Mobile offers developers a free SMS API without volume restrictions, though in order to monetize the service, it will insert ads into the SMS messages.

When Twitter announced they were killing SMS for anyone located outside the U.S., Canada, or India for financial reasons, many Twitter SMS users were upset as they had come to rely on that aspect of the service to send and receive tweets. However, in only a matter of days, numerous services sprung up to fill the void, including sites like TweetSMS, TwitSMS, and ZygoTweet. Today, you can add one more to that list: 3jam.

You know it's a new era when a US Presidential candidate plans to make a major announcement using a new technology. The campaign of Barack Obama has announced on the blog for its social network that it will be announcing Obama's Vice Presidential running mate first by mobile text message and email. John McCain doesn't even know how to use a computer.

There are several different social media message-sending apps out there, but arguably, HelloTxt is one of the most well-known and most often utilized thanks to its support for a wide array of the most popular social sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, bebo, Pownce, Jaiku, Brightkite, and Plurk. They even support sending updates via SMS and email. However, one area where HelloTxt falls short is message scheduling. This is where services like Tweetlater help fill the void. But now there's a new app that lets you schedule social media messages, and not just tweets: Sendible.