Lunascape to Donate to Japan For Every Free Download

A number of organization is either donating to the Japan crisis or organizing donation camps. Microsoft donated $100K towards Japanese relief efforts, and Google $250K. Zynga has offered to donate 100% of the money raised through the purchase of virtual goods in Facebook games such as CityVille and FarmVille. The goal is to raise $2 million. LivingSocial, Groupon’s most prominent competitor, has also promised to donate an equal amount for every donation received from the users.

Lunascape, a hardly known browser which we have wrote about before, has offered to donate 50 yen ($0.63), up to 5 million yen or approximately $63K for every free download of the Lunascape browser for iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad.

Lunascape is a web browser and the first one to use three different rendering engines – Trident (used by Internet Explorer), Gecko (used by Firefox) and Webkit (used by Google Chrome and Safari).

This approach at marketing has been tried by various organizations in the past – wooing users to use their products by appealing to people’s good will. Microsoft tried this bait by offering to donate up to $100,000 for earthquake victims if people spread the message via Twitter, which would result in Microsoft increasing its donations by one dollar per retweet. Unfortunately for Microsoft, this resulted in a backlash where some called it a marketing attempt in poor taste. Microsoft soon withdrew the deal, offering instead to simply donate the $100K.

Such a reaction is unlikely to happen against Lunascape, simply because the company is too small for anybody to notice and not worth the hullabaloo. Lunascape’s efforts is commendable, nonetheless, and $63K is still a substantial amount.

If you want to donate to the earthquake victim out of your own pocket, checkout the different ways at TechCrunch.