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As a leader in the Pittsburgh investment scene, long-time entrepreneur Mel Pirchesky is now using his experience to coach startups on fundraising and business strategies. According to his company Eagle Ventures, Pirchesky has raised over $45 million in his 35 years of structuring deals. In a recent guest post on the site Pittsburgh Ventures, Pirchesky breaks the art of the elevator pitch - a tool every young entrepreneur needs to learn to use - into an exact science tailored for the best results.

In what has become a Christmas tradition, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales posted a personal appeal for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation earlier this month. On the first day alone, the nonprofit raised $430,000 from 13,000 people. Today, Wales announced that Wikimedia reached its fundraising goals. In total, the foundation managed to raise $7.5 million. Last year, when Wales posted a similar appeal, the Wikimedia Foundation received $6.2 million from 125,000 donors.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the immensely popular Wikipedia online encyclopedia, just announced that it has reached its fundraising goal for 2008, which will allow the foundation to cover its operating expenses for the current fiscal year, ending June 30, 2009. Overall, a total of 125,000 donors gave over $6.2 million during 2008, though in December alone, after a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, 50,000 individuals contributed more than $2 million.

According to a new report just released by Convio, Edge Research, and Sea Change Strategies, an out-dated approach to online fundraising may be costing charities as much as $100 billion. Because few large donations are made via the web, some charities feel that large donors are not active online, but the results of the study, which surveyed 3,000 donors from 23 major non-profit organizations, challenges that notion. The so-called "wired wealthy" are indeed active online, says the report, and very generous.

There's no question this year that Barack Obama and Ron Paul are the kings of US politics on the Internet. They both command the lion's share of their party's attention online and seem to dominate social networking and social media sites. So why is only one of those campaigns actually working? How come only Obama has been able to translate his online success to success at the polls? We thought we'd take a brief look today at the Obama campaign and why it has been successful, while citizens in 24 US states head to the polls as part of "Super Tuesday."

UPDATE: Also check out Keeping Tabs on Super Tuesday, our guide to following Super Tuesday via the Internet.