From aspirations of building a hotel in outer space and early achievements in science and engineering, Jeff Bezos seemed destined to do something great. Raised in a grounded environment to hard-working middle-class parents in Texas, the founder of Amazon (and it's outreach branch, Amazon Smile) spent his childhood summers fixing windmills and vaccinating cattle on his grandfather's ranch.

The Princeton graduate worked briefly on Wall Street. It was on a cross-country trip that he saw the potential of "the future" in the Internet. With his high level of attention to detail in business, he developed a thorough business plan, and the rest - as they say - is history.

All one needs to do is use the Amazon Smile page, rather than the standard Amazon home page, to purchase goods through an Amazon transaction, and designate a participating charity, and they'll receive a donation from every sale - roughly 0.5% of the total.