Microsoft Corp.

The X PRIZE Foundation, an educational non-profit that designs and administers competitions with prizes of up to $30 million, the Government of India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi have formed a partnership to create a global competition to develop and deploy clean and efficient cookstoves. The competition will focus on the development of affordable and clean-burning cookstove technologies (and possibly delivery models) and is a part of the MNRE’s National Biomass Cookstoves Initiative, which was launched in December 2009.

These are still grim times for many nonprofit organizations.

And then there's Goodwill Industries of Greater Detroit, a $22 million "business that happens to be a nonprofit," President Lorna Utley, a former General Motors Co. executive, told me this week. "About half of our revenue is earned. Very little of ours is philanthropic. A lot of our sources (for revenue) are changing."

Because they have to.

Corporate profits are on the rebound, but most big businesses say it will be some time before they can give as much cash as they did before the recession, according to a Chronicle survey of 162 of the country’s largest corporations.

The Giving Pledge, the campaign launched by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to encourage the nation's billionaires to give at least half of their fortunes to charity, has announced that forty families and individuals have signed on to the pledge in its first six weeks.

Billionaire Paul Allen has taken his friend Bill Gates up on his challenge to publicly pledge the majority of his wealth to philanthropy.

Allen, who is 57, said today that he plans to leave the majority of his $13 billion estate to philanthropy to continue the work of his foundation and to fund scientific research. It was also a way of marking the 20th anniversary of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, which he started in 1990 with his sister, Jo Lynn Allen, and has since given 3,000 grants totaling about $400 million.

As a young analyst at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Howard Bornstein witnessed the massive philanthropic impact of the Microsoft founder and his wife. Bornstein realized his best chance to have a remotely similar impact would be to sharpen the philanthropy of others.

The idea of using the Internet to help people not necessarily give more, but give better, was a goal that Bornstein developed at Stanford's Graduate School of Business with a fellow student — now business partner — Deyan Vitanov. Given the roughly $300 billion in annual charitable giving in the U.S., "you'd only have to change 1 percent to replicate, in theory, the impact of the entire Gates foundation," said Bornstein.

The Internet has transformed whole sectors of society, but it has had a more limited impact on the world of philanthropy. A recent survey by the Chronicle of Philanthropy found that among the top 400 U.S. charitable groups in 2009, the median share of giving that came through the Internet was just 1 percent. Now, two Silicon Valley websites, Bornstein's myphilanthropedia.org, and allthis.com, have ambitious plans to change that.

Is Microsoft an incubator for social entrepreneurship?

Over the years, plenty of people have retired from the company to start a second career in philanthropy or to create new enterprises that address social issues.

Microsoft alumni have founded and supported more than 150 non-profit organizations and social ventures working around the world, according to its alumni foundation.

March 31, 2010, Los Angeles Times — A group of businesses and advocacy organizations, including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Tuesday that it is calling for an update to a decades-old privacy law it considers seriously outdated. The law governs how and when law enforcement agencies can access citizens' private electronic communications.

Dubbing itself Digital Due Process, the group said the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) was written in a time before the Web had become a ubiquitous communications medium, where users around the world store huge amounts of personal information for years or even decades at a time.

Prosecutors and law enforcement frequently request e-mails and other online data when performing investigations, but private companies have argued that the guidelines for such requests have become too loose for their comfort.

Palo Alto, Calif., March 1, 2010 — CauseWorld, the mobile application that allows consumers to give to causes just by entering retail stores and restaurants, has added the option to contribute to the Chile earthquake relief effort. The funds sent to Chile through the app will be facilitated by CauseWorld partner GlobalGiving, a nonprofit aid resource for disaster relief and long-term development around the world. 

Los Angeles, CA, November 10, 2009 — Ad.ly is a unique Twitter platform that is connecting Twitter users, also known as publishers, with top-tier advertisers allowing for the publisher to make money from ads sent through their Twitter feed.