Mitt Romney | TechPresident

Through Texts and Online Video, Presidential Campaigns Want You To Know -- They're the Job Creators

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, September 17 2012

As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney continued to criticize each other on Monday regarding their respective relationships with China either on the policy or business fronts, both campaigns kept reaching out to voters and ... Read More

Why the iPhone Economy Is Drawing Silicon Valley Deeper Into Washington Politics

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Friday, September 14 2012

An expected 'spectrum crunch' is spurring Silicon Valley companies to look to Washington for answers.

As management of the country's wireless spectrum becomes more important to business, it's becoming more important in policy as well. And it's attracting the interest of the growing political constituency inside Silicon Valley as efforts continue to change the policies that undergird the way we run our wireless networks to accommodate the explosion in wireless traffic.

Mitt Romney's Campaign Takes Tech "Parity" With OfA to a Whole New Level

BY Nick Judd | Monday, September 10 2012

On Aug. 25, Mitt Romney's campaign announced "Victory Wallet," which allows users who opt in to authorize one-click donations to the campaign going forward. As BuzzFeed and Salon also noted, following the klaxon call of progressive digital activists Jessica Morales and Matt Ortega, the Romney campaign was using copy on that page that is identical to the text used by Obama for America for its very same feature. Read More

More Tweets Per Minute For Clinton Than For Romney, But Michelle Obama Still On Top

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, September 5 2012

Former President Bill Clinton's 48-minute long speech at the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night generated more than 22,087 tweets per minute at the peak of conversational activity Twitter reports -- far more ... Read More

Through Email, No Shortage of Romney Campaign Messengers

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, August 30 2012

Watching my email address get passed around from conservative political organization to conservative political organization has been something of a hobby since the Republican primary election ended. List-swapping, in which one campaign lends another the use of their email list, has been a common practice this year. But today it looks as though the Romney campaign is the primary beneficiary: I received the same Romney campaign email twice but from two different lists that aren't Mitt Romney's, and a third email from the campaign itself. Read More

At Republican National Convention, Romney's Digital Director Hints At New App

BY Nick Judd | Thursday, August 30 2012

On a public Google Hangout Thursday afternoon, Mitt Romney's digital director, Zac Moffatt, announced that the campaign will soon roll out an event app that will handle event ticketing and provide a "social" component by pulling in Twitter and Facebook posts during a several-hour period around events. The upcoming app is not the only thing Team Romney has been up to. Over the weekend, the campaign rolled out "Victory Wallets," an analog to the one-click donations feature Barack Obama's campaign and the software firm Blue State Digital released earlier this year. Read More

From Romney and Obama Campaigns, Duelling Ads on the Tampa Bay Times Website

BY Miranda Neubauer | Tuesday, August 28 2012

As the Republican National Convention is now officially going forward in Tampa, both sides are making an effort to reach out to online readers of the local media outlets through ads — in some cases at the same time. The screenshot above of the Tampa Bay Times, also viewable to readers outside the Florida area, features a large, expandable, animated Obama ad at the top. In that ad, Romney's "qualifications" are checked off: "My tax returns: hidden. My companies: outsourced jobs. My state: 47th in job creation."

And on the bottom of the screen is an ad from the Republican National Committee hailing Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as "America's Comeback Team" and promoting the hashtag #GOP2012.

User-Generated Online Video Swamping Official Obama, Romney Content on YouTube

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, August 27 2012

From the beginning of the 2011-2012 U.S. Presidential election campaign in April 2011, there have nearly 2 billion views of videos tagged about Barack Obama or Mitt Romney on YouTube, Ramya Raghavan of YouTube Politics blogged today. The political campaigns are swimming in a sea of user-generated content, even moreso than in 2008. Read More

Mitt Romney's Been Atkined Again

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, August 21 2012

The Australian lawyer and satirist Hugh Atkin's been busy in the past week, releasing a series of parodies of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Here's his latest. Atkin just finished a postgraduate course in law at ... Read More

How a Romney Gaffe that Wasn't Went Viral on the Web

BY Miranda Neubauer | Monday, August 20 2012

"I never tried to pretend that the original 'RMoney' image was real, and acknowledged that it was faked shortly after I posted it," said Dave Allsopp, co-founder of the liberal site Democratic Underground. "But I understand that since then people have been confused as to whether it is real or not. As I said, that's probably the main reason why it has spread so far."

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Honda Campaign Rolls Out Endorsements From Asian American Stars

Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) rolled out several additional endorsements from Asian American leaders and celebrities Tuesday, with one of them vouching for his high-tech bona fides. GO

Here Are The People President Obama Hopes Will Repair American Elections

The Presidential Commission on Election Administration established by President Obama after problematic 2012 elections now has a web presence at SupporttheVoter.gov. Obama established the commission by executive order on March 28 "to identify best practices in election administration and to make recommendations to improve the voting experience." GO

After Oklahoma Disaster, Neighbors Look Online for Ways To Help

In echoes of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast, social media sites and small business websites in and around tornado-wracked Moore, Okla., are full of offers of help, questions about missing pets and loved ones, and evidence that neighbors are willing to reach out to help one another in a disaster. On a single Facebook group, there's a Mexican restaurant in Oklahoma City promising free meals to first responders or people hit by the tornado; a mother a few hours' drive from Moore offering to open her door for children who might need a place to stay; a resident sharing a picture of a found dog and contact information for the owner to get in touch. GO

Change.org Lands $15 Million From Omidyar

Change.org capped an extraordinary few years of growth Tuesday with the announcement that it has landed a $15 million investment led by the Omidyar Network. GO

What German Politicians Think of Google Glass

The German government led by Chancellor Angela Merkel has not had the easiest relationship with Google. The company launched a public campaign against a law backed by her coalition that would require search engines to pay to show news articles in search results, with mixed results. What's more, Google has long had to navigate the privacy waters in Germany and throughout the European Union. But that has not stopped her federal minister for economics and technology, Philipp Rösler, from giving Google Glass an enthusiastic test run as he leads a delegation of German technology companies and politicians on a trip to Silicon Valley this week as part of German Valley Week. GO

Crowdsourcing Waste Management Solutions in Montenegro

For once we aren't talking about the worldwide scarcity of toilets, just good old-fashioned household waste. Montenegro has a garbage problem so bad even the tourists are complaining about it. A new mobile app sponsored by the Agency for Environmental Protection, NGO Ozon and United Nations Development Programme in Montenegro will hopefully get citizens involved in reporting illegal garbage dumps. GO

monday >

Her Majesty's Government Wants to Monetize Open Data

A new paper from the chair of the U.K. government's Open Strategy Board outlines the best practices for the government's open data policies. The government-commissioned Shakespeare Review – after author Stephan Shakespeare – looks into ways to monetize open data, and recommends an all-encompassing National Data Strategy.

Will Silicon Valley "Disrupt" Politics With a Candidate for Congress?

Sean Parker, of Napster fame and now executive general partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund, has invested in political startups before. But last week, he went a step further — co-hosting a fundraising event for a candidate for Congress. Parker and SV Angel co-founder Ron Conway organized a crowd of Internet industry luminaries to support Ro Khanna, a former assistant deputy secretary in Barack Obama's Commerce Department. Khanna is preparing a challenge to Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), whose newly redrawn congressional district encompasses Silicon Valley. GO

Burma's Upcoming Telecom Revolution Will Probably Not Bring Internet Freedom

Burma (Myanmar) is on the threshold of an Internet revolution, but Human Rights Watch has warned companies to proceed with caution or risk trampling Burmese citizens' rights. GO

friday >

Chilean Anti-Corruption Resource: A Crowdsourced Database of Social and Political Connections

In countries where a small minority of social circles have a majority of the political and economic power, personal relationships can affect major decision-making, a serious concern of anti-corruption activists. A new web platform stores personal profiles of key players in Chilean business and politics, complete with biographies and personal and professional connections through family, education, social circles, employers and coworkers, to make tracking social relationships and conflict-of-interest easier. Called Poderopedia (from the Spanish word for power), the project sounds kind of like LinkedIn, but the creation and management of profiles is being crowdsourced out to journalists, activists and concerned citizens.

Middle Eastern Telecom Accused of Working With Saudi Arabia to Spy on Citizens

Mobily, an arm of the state-owned Middle Eastern telecom giant Etihad Etisalat, has been accused of working with Saudi Arabia to develop software that would allow the government to bypass protections for social media users. The exposé comes from Moxie Marlinspike (neé Matthew Rosenfield), an expert in a certain type of malicious Internet attack called MITM (man-in-the-middle), whereby attackers intercept and secretly alter private messages exchanged via email and other social media platforms. GO

Saudi Religious Leader Warns Twitter Users of Consequences in the Afterlife

In late March, Saudi Arabia's top religious cleric said Twitter was for clowns and corrupters. Earlier this week, he said anyone using social media, in particular Twitter, “has lost this world and the afterlife.” His comments might be laughable, if they did not come at a time when the Saudi government is looking into monitoring or blocking social media sites and eliminating user anonymity.

thursday >

What The Other Silicon Valley Immigration Group Is Doing This Month

A bipartisan coalition of political advocacy, business and tech groups are moving ahead to launch a social media blitz next week designed to persuade members of the Senate to vote in favor of immigration reform legislation supported in Silicon Valley. "We're going to create a virtual digital storm," said Jeremy Robbins in a Wednesday ... GO

The New Yorker Hopes "Strongbox" Is a Wiretap-Proof Sieve for Leaks

The New Yorker yesterday became the first outlet to implement DeadDrop, a new system for sources to submit information to journalists online in a more secure and anonymous way than, for example, email. GO

Female Organizer of Pakistan's First Hackathon Stresses Collaboration Over Competition

After Pakistan banned Valentine's Day this year, Sabeen Mahmud started an online protest in which people uploaded photos to mock the government ban. In the weeks following she received death threats and menacing phone calls, and early on she had to stay home from work. That did nothing, however, to keep her from further organizing. Last month, the café she started in Karachi hosted Pakistan's first ever hackathon, which tackled problems including sanitation, crime, disaster management, and education. She even invited a government representative to observe the initial conversations, tackling sensitive areas like government inefficiency and elections.

wednesday >

White House Innovation Fellows Project Spins Off Into A Business

Clay Johnson and Adam Becker joined the Presidential Innovation Fellows program to help the White House fix the way government does business. Now they're turning that mission into a business themselves. GO

Fighting Fires With Data, New York City Launches New Safety Inspection System

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that New York City has implemented city-wide a new risk based inspection system focused on fire safety that is driven by analytics from multiple city agencies. GO

Chinese Netizens Use Digital Initiative to Gain Media Attention for Unsolved Poisoning Case

Last month a medical science student at a Shanghai university died from poisoning, allegedly murdered by his roommate. The specifics of the crime echoed a case from the mid-1990s, in which a 19-year-old student was poisoned with thallium. That case has once again been thrown into the media spotlight, but after 18 years the media has changed and the spotlight means a trending hashtag on Sina Weibo or an online petition to the U.S. President.

PDF France 2013: “Au Code, Citoyens!”

This year PDF France will take place in Paris on June 13, with the theme "Au Code, Citoyens!" ("To Code, Citizens!") The speakers' lineup includes some of the continent's leaders in the digital revolution. GO

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