Microsoft Corp.

The Boeing Co. and Microsoft Corp. announced a joint commitment to support efforts to increase the number of Washington students earning bachelor’s degrees. The state’s two largest private employers are pledging $25 million apiece over the next five years to the new public-private Washington Opportunity Scholarship program and endowment signed into law by Gov. Christine Gregoire. Together with matching state contributions under the new program, this will raise $100 million for scholarships for low- and middle-income students, as a first step toward creating a billion-dollar endowment by the end of this decade.

A new service, GiveBackMail, promises to give 25 percent of its profit to charity if users route their e-mail activities through its website.

Every action users take on the site generates a new ad display and revenue for the company. A dashboard keeps track of how many donations the user generates and, at the end of the month, how much money has been generated, as well as notifications from charities acknowledging donations made by the service.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of America is turning to 21st-century social media, including Twitter, to garner support for its mission. The organization wants to shed its “swim and gym” image and focus on its state-of-the-art technology offerings for students. Its principal supporters are mothers and other women, so it plans to appeal to them by holding its first Twitter party on Tuesday to spread word of its Club Tech centers, which provide computers, software and technology instruction.

Blackbaud announced that the Boy Scouts of America — one of the nation’s largest, most prominent values-based youth development organizations — has chosen Blackbaud CRM software as the platform for its constituent relationship management efforts. Blackbaud CRM software will assist the BSA as it moves to a cutting-edge IT infrastructure offering an improved experience for its members and greater administrative efficiencies.

Based on recent analysis, Forbes has identified what looks like a pretty elite club: 19 people who have already donated at least $1 billion each to charities or foundations. That is five more than Forbes found two years ago. More than two-thirds of these philanthropists (13 to be exact) are from the U.S. and all but one is a self-made entrepreneur.

Topping the list is Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the most generous person on the planet in dollar terms, having gifted $28 billion to his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Sage announced the general availability of the Sage Peachtree 2012 industry-specific products, including Sage Peachtree Premium Accounting for Nonprofits, as well as Sage Peachtree Quantum 2012 and the rest of the core Sage Peachtree 2012 lineup.

Sage Peachtree Premium Accounting for Nonprofits 2012 extends far beyond basic accounting, bringing nonprofits an array of capabilities for more effective organizational management.  Sage Peachtree Premium Accounting for Nonprofits and Sage Peachtree Quantum combine a range of helpful features with the solid accounting and strong organizational reporting features for which Sage Peachtree is known. 

In response to President Obama’s call to action to promote high-growth entrepreneurship across the country, the Startup America Partnership announced a new wave of commitments secured from more than 15 companies and organizations to deliver strategic and substantive resources that accelerate entrepreneurs starting and scaling companies. These new private-sector partnerships deliver more than $400 million in value to U.S. entrepreneurs, building upon 20+ commitments already secured by the Startup America Partnership from companies like Intel and IBM.

Initiatives such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is backed by the Microsoft founder and Warren Buffet, are an effort by some of the richest people in the world to ensure that their wealth is channelled into poverty and disease alleviation, and this gap narrows. And the giving back theme is spreading rapidly across Asia as well, with some of Asia's richest, such as Li Ka-shing, following suit with their own eponymous foundations.

Digital maps assembled by far-flung networks of online volunteers through the process called crowd-sourcing have been powerful tools in humanitarian relief work in the last few years.

In Japan after the earthquake and tsunami, crowd-sourced maps have helped give local relief workers a clearer picture of the situation on the ground as they set priorities for food, shelter and sanitation services. The Web maps are also being used to track the fighting in Libya and the needs of refugees fleeing that conflict.

Bill Gates, the college dropout who started the world's richest charitable fund, said needy people depend on self-made millionaires and billionaires to donate money before passing their wealth on to less-generous heirs.

"Our experience worldwide is that first-generation wealth is actually more generous than dynastic wealth," Gates, the richest American, said Thursday in a news conference in New Delhi. "Both here in India and U.S. and other countries, the biggest givers are those who are receivers of first-generation wealth."