In an all-hands memo first published by MacRumors, CEO Tim Cook announced a new program under which Apple will match the charitable contributions of employees up to $10,000 per year.

“I am very happy to announce that we are kicking off a matching gift program for charitable donations,” Cook said in the memo, whose authenticity we have confirmed. “We are all really inspired by the generosity of our co-workers who give back to the community and this program is going to help that individual giving go even farther.”

As of September 2010, Apple had 46,600 employees worldwide, so this is potentially quite a bit of money.

Initially available to full-time employees in the U.S., the program will be extended to other countries in time.

Below, Cook’s memo in full.

Team:

I am very happy to announce that we are kicking off a matching gift program for charitable donations. We are all really inspired by the generosity of our co-workers who give back to the community and this program is going to help that individual giving go even farther.

Starting September 15, when you give money to a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, Apple will match your gift dollar-for-dollar, up to $10,000 annually. This program will be for full-time employees in the US at first, and we’ll expand it to other parts of the world over time.

Thank you all for working so hard to make a difference, both here at Apple and in the lives of others. I am incredibly proud to be part of this team.

If you’d like more information on the program, you can get it on HRWeb, which can be easily accessed through AppleWeb.

Tim

Today, the formal program at the famous TED conference begins, with the theme title: “The Rediscovery of Wonder.”

BoomTown will be flying down to Long Beach, where the event is now held and runs through Friday (and where I will be sadly missing the Apple iPad 2 launch in San Francisco on Wednesday).

As usual, it’s a highly diverse and unusual speaker schedule, full of artists, scientists, educators and architects.

Among the most interesting to me are speakers such as: Data artist Aaron Koblin, who is now creative director of the Data Arts team in Google’s Creative Lab; Wrongologist Kathryn Schulz, who writes a Slate series featuring interviews with high-profile people about how they think and feel about being wrong; and roboticist Dennis Hong.

And, of course, I will be paying mind to whatever Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates has to say about his latest philanthropy efforts.

There is a lot more you can read about here in TED’s schedule.

What I like a lot about the TED event is that what’s onstage in terrific videos soon appears on its very robust Web site.

I will be taking my own videos, of course, so get ready.

Those efforts range from attempting to massage the script, according to one of the film’s producers, to promoting an alternative corporate history.

The movie, “The Social Network,” depicts Mr. Zuckerberg as a socially awkward egomaniac who may have stolen the idea for his company from fellow students while he was an undergraduate at Harvard University.

The film—which premieres Friday night and will be widely released Oct. 1 by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Sony Pictures—takes as its narrative framework two lawsuits over the company’s origins. Facebook later settled the cases.

On Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg will announce on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” that he is donating $100 million to the public schools in Newark, N.J.— his first major act of philanthropy.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Facebook didn’t time Mr. Zuckerberg’s gift for the film’s premiere.
Mr. Zuckerberg, through a company spokesman, declined to be interviewed for this article.

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The question is: Which movie was Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinking about when he decided recently to fork over $100 million to public schools in Newark, New Jersey?

Was it a bid to spiff up his image–with a splashy announcement on Oprah Winfrey’s popular television talk show tomorrow?

That would be the very same day of the New York premiere of “The Social Network,” a movie that rakes the now-26-year-old Silicon Valley wunderkind over some very hot coals in the sordid tale of how he founded the powerful social networking site while at Harvard University.

Or was it actually the impact of another film, “Waiting for Superman,” a just-released gripping documentary about the crisis in public education?

It’s become a topic that has apparently become of great interest to Zuckerberg, as he has been considering his approach to big-time philanthropy in anticipation of huge wealth after Facebook eventually has its long-anticipated IPO.

In fact, said sources, the timing of the donation was hotly debated within the company, with worries that it would look like Zuckerberg was trying to counter the flood of negative press from “The Social Network.”

And for good reason.

After seeing a screening of the movie recently, MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka noted that “the film portrays him as an insecure jerk who screws over people and becomes a much-richer insecure jerk…He’s the bad guy in his own creation myth.”

In fact, said sources, Zuckerberg actually has been cooking up the deal since he and high-profile Newark Mayor Cory Booker started kibitzing over the idea while both attended the Allen & Co. conference in July.

From there, Zuckerberg decided it was best to flood the zone–in this case, the deeply troubled Newark school system, which had previously been taken over by the state.

Now, it will instead get a big dose of friending–um, funding–from a foundation that Zuckerberg is funding with $100 million worth of Facebook stock, which will be sold off in secondary markets as needed.

Sources said his interest in the area was apparently sparked by watching the up-and-down experience of his longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, whose first job out of college was as a teacher. She is now a medical student.

It’s all an unusual bipartisan effort, with Zuckerberg working with the Democratic Booker and also New Jersey’s new Republican Governor Chris Christie.

The pair of politicians, who will formulate a plan, pushed for the announcement this particular week on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in order to give the topic national attention.

Winfrey has been focusing on education reform this week on her show, and the Obama administration is reportedly going to do the same in the weeks ahead.

Thus, Zuckerberg himself decided to move forward now, sources said, apparently concluding that even if a prominent movie was portraying him as the villain, he did not have to act like one in real life.

Here Mr. Benioff outlines his decision behind the shift:

Announcing UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital

In business, we say that people overestimate what you can do in a year and underestimate what you can do in a decade. This is true in philanthropy as well.

It’s this idea–one that we’ve seen proven at salesforce.com–that has inspired Lynne and me to transform how we approach our personal philanthropic giving. For the last two decades, we’ve been privileged to be involved in philanthropy, both personally and through the Salesforce.com Foundation. We’ve enjoyed the rewards of giving to a wide variety of causes around the world.

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But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety over the next weeks in this column.

Here’s Part 4 of 4 of an interview Walt Mossberg did with the Gates Foundation’s Melinda Gates.

(I posted one video part of the discussion with Melinda Gates every day this week, starting Monday and concluding today.)

As you will see, Melinda Gates is articulate in ways that are critical to the task that she and her husband–that would be Microsoft (MSFT) Founder Bill Gates–have put before themselves: Big league philanthropy with deeply effective results, specifically in health and learning.

In this video, Melinda Gates answers questions from the audience about the time frame for the foundation, models of philanthropy, how businesses can become more philanthropic, how to improve troubled schools by eliminating “facelessness,” entrepreneurs and how to get better teachers.