Category: Technology

Obama’s Secret Weapons: Internet, Databases and Psychology

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Sarah Lai Stirland:

During a sweltering Friday evening rush hour in early October, Jeanette Scanlon spent two-and-a-half hours with 20 other people waving a homemade Barack Obama sign at the cars flowing through a busy intersection in Plant City, Florida.


“I got shot the bird one time,” laughs the easy-natured Scanlon, a 43-year-old single mother of three and a Tampa psychiatrist’s billing manager. “That wasn’t the thumbs up I was looking for.”


Scanlon is one of an estimated 230,000 volunteers who are powering Obama’s get-out-the-vote campaign in the swing state of Florida. And while sign-waving is a decidedly low-tech appeal to voters’ hearts and minds, make no mistake: The Obama campaign’s technology is represented here. Scanlon organized the gathering — and 24 others since September — through Obama’s social networking site, my.BarackObama.com. Similarly, she used the site’s Neighbor-to-Neighbor tool in September to find registered voters in her own neighborhood, so she could canvass them for Obama. And this weekend, Scanlon and another 75 or so Plant City volunteers will be phoning thousands of Floridians to urge them to vote, using a sophisticated database provided by the Obama campaign to ensure they don’t call McCain supporters by mistake.


The Obama campaign has been building, tweaking and tinkering with its technology and organizational infrastructure since it kicked off in February 2007, and today has most sophisticated organizing apparatus of any presidential campaign in history. Previous political campaigns have tapped the internet in innovative ways — Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential run, and Ron Paul’s bid for this year’s Republican nomination, to name two. But Obama is the first to successfully integrate technology with a revamped model of political organization that stresses volunteer participation and feedback on a massive scale, erecting a vast, intricate machine set to fuel an unprecedented get-out-the-vote drive in the final days before Tuesday’s election.

A friend recently mentioned that one of the canvasers asked if they could leave an orange dot on their mailbox, notifying other workers that they have already voted! I wonder how long it will be until citizens push back on the extensive personal data mining.

An Update on Eclipse Aviation

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James Wallace:

‘As a self-described “aviation nut,” Vern Raburn ? the former software executive and one of the early employees of Microsoft who remains a close friend of Bill Gates ? was well aware of a famous saying in the aviation industry: The way to make a small fortune is to start with a big fortune.
The charismatic, high-tech whiz raised at least a billion dollars from investors, including Gates, who were willing to hitch a ride on his dream that Eclipse Aviation, the company Raburn founded in 1998, could produce light and inexpensive six-seat jets (a pilot and five passengers) that would become an air-taxi service for the masses.
But last week, while Raburn was at the famed Oshkosh air show, where his friend and actor John Travolta was promoting prompting Eclipse Aviation, Raburn was ousted by his board, leaving questions about not only the future of the company but about the legacy of a computer industry pioneer who believed he could draw on software development background to transform general aviation.

TDS Telecom sues Monticello over city’s plan to build its own high-speed network

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Heron Marquez Estrada:

A failure to communicate between Monticello and TDS Telecom, its chief phone and cable provider, is threatening to short-circuit plans to make the city one of the most wired communities in the nation.
Both Monticello and TDS Telecom are constructing multi-million dollar fiber-optic networks that will directly connect to every home, office and business in the city.
When the networks come online in the next year or so, they would be among only about 45 in the country that provide such connectivity.
But Monticello — a city of about 11,000 in northern Wright County — also may be the only locale where the public and private sectors are competing so directly for paying customers.
The acrimony from such direct competition has led to the filing of what may become a precedent-setting lawsuit by TDS questioning whether municipalities can use revenue bonds to create fiber-optic networks.

Fascinating. It’s not like TDS is building fiber to the home here. We’re stuck with (and continue to pay for) nearly century old copper networks. Much like roads, I believe that public fiber networks (open to any player) make sense, particularly when there is no evidence that the incumbent telcos plan to upgrade their infrastructure.

21 Great Technologies That Failed

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Jeremy A. Kaplan and Sascha Segan:

The most innovative tech doesn’t always succeed. Here we present 10 great technologies each from Apple and Microsoft that were simply too far ahead of their time.
Mention technology that failed and people instantly think of Microsoft Bob, the IBM PCjr, and worse. But those weren’t necessarily great products—heck, Bob wasn’t a good idea at all. The ideas and innovations that succeed aren’t necessarily the best either; they just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Flight’s 100 Greatest

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Flight Global:

It is always a slightly nerve-racking moment for an editor to commission a reader’s poll. Quite simply, what happens if so few people participate that the exercise becomes a farce?
It very quickly became apparent that no such ignominy awaited the 100 Greatest exercise marking Flightglobal.com’s print edition, Flight International’s centenary. Votes poured in for your choices in the fields of most influential Civil Aircraft, Military Aircraft, Person, Engine and Moment.
By the time the poll closed on 20 June, no fewer than 18,000 of you had voted – thank you for having taken the trouble to do so and making this a more than worthwhile exercise.
Space is always limited in any publication, so the temptation to write mini-articles on every entry in our list had to be resisted. To those of you whose favourite personality or piece of machinery does not receive the words you feel he, she or it derived, our apologies.
#1: Apollo 11 Moon Landing
#2: Boeing 747
#3: The Wright Brothers

I’ve Seen the Future, and It Has a Kill Switch

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Bruce Schneier:

It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers — and televisions and iPods and everything else — to ensure that you didn’t violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear.
OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment.
Microsoft is doing some of the most creative thinking along these lines, with something it’s calling “Digital Manners Policies.” According to its patent application, DMP-enabled devices would accept broadcast “orders” limiting capabilities. Cellphones could be remotely set to vibrate mode in restaurants and concert halls, and be turned off on airplanes and in hospitals. Cameras could be prohibited from taking pictures in locker rooms and museums, and recording equipment could be disabled in theaters. Professors finally could prevent students from texting one another during class.
The possibilities are endless, and very dangerous. Making this work involves building a nearly flawless hierarchical system of authority. That’s a difficult security problem even in its simplest form. Distributing that system among a variety of different devices — computers, phones, PDAs, cameras, recorders — with different firmware and manufacturers, is even more difficult. Not to mention delegating different levels of authority to various agencies, enterprises, industries and individuals, and then enforcing the necessary safeguards.

Cisco TelePresence Coming to a Living Room Near You

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Jennifer Hagendorf:

co Systems (NSDQ:CSCO) is set to deliver its TelePresence high-definition videoconferencing technology to the home market within the next 12 months, said the company’s top executive this week.
The technology will be available via the channel, including via retailers the likes of Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) and Wal-Mart and service providers such as AT&T (NYSE:T), said Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers at the Cisco Live conference in Orlando, Fla.
“It will probably evolve. At first we’ll do it … where we’re very careful on how the channel sells TelePresence and very careful that the rooms are set up right and the cameras are set up right,” Chambers said. “Having said that, I think that you will see a combination of distribution points.”
Chambers expects pricing of Cisco’s home-use TelePresence units to come in below $10,000 depending on what functionality the user wants.

Promising, particularly as the air travel experience continues to deteriorate.

A Look Back at The Bill Gates’ Era; and a few lessons

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The Economist:

Mr Gates also realised that making hardware and writing software could be stronger as separate businesses. Even as firms like Apple clung on to both the computer operating system and the hardware—just as mainframe companies had—Microsoft and Intel, which designed the PC’s microprocessors, blew computing’s business model apart. Hardware and software companies innovated in an ecosystem that the Wintel duopoly tightly controlled and—in spite of the bugs and crashes—used to reap vast economies of scale and profits. When mighty IBM unwittingly granted Microsoft the right to sell its PC operating system to other hardware firms, it did not see that it was creating legions of rivals for itself. Mr Gates did.
….
And look at what happened when Mr Gates’s pragmatism failed him. Within Microsoft, they feared Bill for his relentless intellect, his grasp of detail and his brutal intolerance of anyone whom he thought “dumb”. But the legal system doesn’t do fear, and in a filmed deposition, when Microsoft was had up for being anti-competitive, the hectoring, irascible Mr Gates, rocking slightly in his chair, came across as spoilt and arrogant. It was a rare public airing of the sense of brainy entitlement that emboldened Mr Gates to get the world to yield to his will. On those rare occasions when Microsoft’s fortunes depended upon Mr Gates yielding to the world instead, the pragmatic circuit-breaker would kick in. In the antitrust case it did not, and, as this newspaper argued at the time, he was lucky that it did not lead to the break-up of his company.

Cities Startup Broadband Efforts

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Christopher Rhoads:

Internet traffic is growing faster than at any time since the boom of the late-1990s. Places like Chattanooga are trying hard not to get stuck in the slow lane.
Some 60 towns and small cities, including Bristol, Va., Barnsville, Minn., and Sallisaw, Okla., have built state-of-the-art fiber networks, capable of speeds many times faster than most existing connections from cable and telecom companies. An additional two dozen municipalities, including Chattanooga, have launched or are considering similar initiatives.
The efforts highlight a battle over Internet policy in the U.S. Once the undisputed leader in the technological revolution, the U.S. now lags a growing number of countries in the speed, cost and availability of high-speed Internet. While cable and telecom companies are spending billions to upgrade their service, they’re focusing their efforts mostly on larger U.S. cities for now.
Smaller ones such as Chattanooga say they need to fill the vacuum themselves or risk falling further behind and losing highly-paid jobs. Chattanooga’s city-owned electric utility began offering ultrafast Internet service to downtown business customers five years ago. Now it plans to roll out a fiber network to deliver TV, high-speed Internet and phone service to some 170,000 customers. The city has no choice but to foot the bill itself for a high-speed network — expected to cost $230 million — if it wants to remain competitive in today’s global economy, says Harold DePriest, the utility’s chief executive officer.

Madison’s pitiful broadband infrastructure could certainly use a shot in the arm.