Not-Only-for-Profit iPhone Apps

As you might expect, there’s a mushrooming number of iPhone apps from not-only-for-profits and nonprofits. Here are a few I know about, but I’d love to hear from anyone else involved in other efforts:

3rdWhale. This one helps you find local green businesses. For now, it’s pretty limited, only covering its home base of Vancouver, as well as Portland, San Jose, San Francisco and Seattle. It also is fairly limited in the number of all businesses it covers. But, it’s early days and I figure there’s a lot of room to grow.

Most exciting, I think, is the long-term potential for this type of app. Here’s something about it, from Triple Pundit : “Businesses will only go green if it makes economic sense or because their customers demand it. Allowing consumers to easily favor green businesses as they go around town could create the tipping point”

Carbon (CO2) Tracker, from Clear Standards in Sterling, Va., allows you to measure your carbon footprint. Using iPhone’s GPS feature, it tracks each trip—commuting, vacations, business trips– you take and estimates the amount of C02 emissions you generated. You can set maximum emission goals and monitor your progress. I think it’s likely we’ll see a lot more of such carbon measurement apps as time goes by.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has an app that’s an iPhone version of its regional seafood guides, with fish to avoid, healthy choices that are caught or farmed in environmentally friendly ways, seafood to eat only in small quantities due to high mercury content and so on. (If you’re curious, best choices for northeasterners include artic char and squid; for central U.S., try trout and perch.)