Silicon Valley, President Obama just can’t quit you. In the Bay Area and free this weekend? Got 35K to toss around? Well if you’ve ever wanted to meet an in-office President now’s your chance to attend an Obama fundraiser dinner, going down at Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s house in Atherton on Sunday the 25th.

This Obama “Victory Fund 2012″ dinner at the 5th most powerful woman in the world’s house comes after the President made appearances at Google exec Marissa Mayer’s Palo Alto house last fall (at a comparable $30K a pop) and attended an exclusive meetup in February at Kleiner Perkins VC John Doerr’s house — Where the guest list included Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Genentech Chairman Art Levinson, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VC Steve Westly Doerr. Obama also hung out at Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s house in April.

So why so much SV love? Obama has positioned himself as technology-sector friendly throughout his campaign efforts and candidacy, recently being interviewed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook HQ, hosting a Twitter town-hall and hiring Threadless’ former CTO as his campaign CTO.

On a budget but still want to rub elbows with the President?  Former Symantec CEO John W. Thompson and his wife Sandra will be hosting an earlier and cheaper reception at $2,500 general admission and $7,500 for a photo (Obama will cut you a deal at $10K if you’re two people).

Via: SFGate

He told them that when it comes to solving the challenges our country faces and to precipitating changes in the rest of the world, they were “at the cutting edge of what’s happening”.

It’s great that Silicon Valley is getting all this love and affection. But could this attention end up killing the golden goose? Think about it: if you are an evil dictator, looking for an excuse to block Facebook and Twitter, what better propaganda weapon than a picture of President Obama getting chummy with Mark Zuckerberg? Yes, I know that the U.S. government didn’t invent Facebook or even figure out how to use it until recently; and that it doesn’t control Facebook’s policies. But don’t those pictures and video clips tell a different story?

While the President was visiting Facebook’s campus I was having lunch with Twitter founder Biz Stone. We discussed the pitfalls of entrepreneurs cozying up to government leaders. Biz clearly understands the good that his technology can do for the world, and the responsibilities that potential brings. He said that Twitter had developed stringent policies about what information they would release to any government or authority; the company keeps a distance. Biz believes that Silicon Valley’s role is to develop world-changing technologies, and to leave it to others to effect such change.

I agree with Biz. Rather than leveraging the PR opportunities that Silicon Valley affords, our government should instead focus on removing barriers to entrepreneurship in the U.S. and encourage entrepreneurship abroad.

As I have written in this piece, if the President really wants Silicon Valley to continue to lead the world, he should unconditionally support the Startup Visa (and clear the skilled-immigrant-visa backlog). Right now, the President is saying all the right things about the need for skilled immigrants, but is bundling this legislation in with other bills that have virtually no chance of passage. And he should fix government procurement systems so they are not rigged in favor of big contractors—who charge as much as a hundred times more to build and maintain computer systems and infrastructure than Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs would.

To encourage the spread of democracy and increase global economic prosperity, the President should apply the principles of Expeditionary Economics—which has been championed by Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation.

In a nutshell, expeditionary economics is about reorienting economic development efforts away from the conventional wisdom, which usually fails on one of two bases. In places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. military has (often out of necessity) taken the lead in trying to stimulate economic activity, the approach is typically to focus on large-scale projects, including infrastructure and the revival of state-owned enterprises.

The “build it and they will come” mantra has failed, though, even in American urban-revival efforts. The second dismal convention of international development has been on painful display in the revelations this past week about Greg Mortenson, adored author of the book Three Cups of Tea and purported savior of a myriad of Afghan and Pakistani villages. It turns out that Mortenson not only fabricated parts of his story but also misappropriated charitable funds. Whatever comes of this, Mortenson’s work and the accolades he received for it typify the expiatory nature of Western development aid: it is a redemption narrative played out across the world, as sainted Westerners bring relief to the benighted hordes.

Lost in both of these dimensions is precisely what drives economic growth in most of the world: entrepreneurship, and the efforts of individuals to take their futures into their own hands and create something new. The emerging field of expeditionary economics seeks to reorient international development toward the promotion and support of entrepreneurship.

We’ve seen how Silicon Valley can help change the world. Facebook and Twitter were the tools used for fomenting revolutions; a prominent Google employee played a large role in organizing demonstrations in Egypt; advanced cell-phone and security technologies are allowing people to overcome government controls.  Let’s create more of these. But let’s do it without government involvement and without the photo ops.

Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Faculty and Advisor, Singularity University, Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @wadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

There’s a good chance that your office or home is more tricked out, tech-wise, than the Oval Office. President Obama complained yesterday, in what the AP calls “off-the-cuff remarks,” that what the Oval Office lacks is a “really cool phone.” Can someone get the president a Droid or something?

We’ve known from some time now that Obama is a bit of a BlackBerry addict, but apparently his technological nous doesn’t transfer to the Oval Office. He expressed remorse at the lack of “fancy buttons and stuff.”

It’s like, come on! I’m the president here!

Even if the president had to endure this technological nightmare—where are the buttons?!—at least he had a working phone, something that couldn’t have been said about the mighty TechCrunch office.

And here’s a free public relations tip: any company out there that makes “cool phones” would be absolutely foolish to not offer President Obama a completely free, tricked out phone. He doesn’t even have to accept it—are you allowed to accept gifts that come about as a result of your office?—but think of the tweets. “lol some-company sent obama its cool phone #awesome #followfriday #realtalk.”

President Obama spoke to Univision yesterday at one of those town hall meetings the TV networks like to organize. What’s pertinent to us here is that our president, the man who’s famous for carrying a BlackBerry wherever he goes, does, in fact, own his own computer.

Ramos asked the president if he owned an iPad and a computer. (How funny is it that we still make the distinction between an “iPad” and a “computer,” as if they’re not the same device, if only in a different form.) President Obama replied in kind, as seen here.

“Jorge, I’m the president of the United States. Do you think I’ve got to go borrow somebody’s computer?”

I’d embed the video here, but it seems embedding has been disabled for some reason. Now you have to open another tab. Sorry.

This council was formerly known as PERAB (the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board). Immelt was a founding member, and takes the chairman reigns from Paul Volcker.

GE is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of clean energy and related technologies. The company makes everything from large wind turbines, to electric vehicle charging stations, to good old lights and appliances.

Could the rising political influence of Jeff Immelt (image, below) be a good thing for green innovators in the U.S.? Could clean tech newcomers, small businesses and competitors suffer from policy endorsed by the CEO of the established giant?

The Christian Science Monitor’s Mark Trumbull reported:

“[Immelt's selection] opens the door to potential conflicts of interest. GE’s future profits are intertwined with government policies in the US and elsewhere. It makes equipment used in energy, infrastructure, health care, and defense. On Wednesday, when Obama sang the praises of export-related contracts that US firms have won in China recently, GE deals figured prominently. [While] economists say growing exports – for GE and other firms – are one vital way for the US to grow jobs…Even in a best-case scenario for exports, America will need lots of other jobs, as well.

Some business leaders worry that an expected move by the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon emissions could impose damaging costs on the economy.”

Noting GE’s plans to develop a net-zero home with solar and wind power, its competition for clean tech startups and inventors, Ecomagination, and its recent efforts to put small wind turbines in homes and businesses, CleanTechnica contributor Tina Casey saw Immelt’s role as a good thing for all that’s green and clean in the U.S. She even defended his company’s earlier habit of outsourcing jobs, copiously:

“The initial reaction to President Obama’s announcement has been mixed, mainly due to GE’s past record of outsourcing jobs. However [since] 2009 you’ll find Immelt admitting that too much outsourcing… hurt the U.S. economy, and calling for a domestic manufacturing revival to get us out of the doldrums. That puts him squarely in line with Obama’s call for an economy ‘fueled by what we invent and what we build…’”

President Obama gushed about Immelt in a weekly address on Saturday:

“…GE’s CEO [is] one of the most imaginative and visionary business leaders in America. [He] has agreed to head up our new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. The purpose of this council is to help us find ways to grow our economy by investing in our businesses here at home. And under Jeff’s leadership, I’m confident that they’ll generate good ideas about how we can spur hiring, educate our workers to compete in the 21st century, and attract the best jobs and businesses to America rather than seeing them spring up overseas.”

Check out the rest of the president’s remarks on Immelt, and let us know if you think he’s the right man for the job(s) and a good thing for green sector innovation.

Images via: Whitehouse.gov

And in the video embedded below, you can see no other than President Obama walking by a couple of made-in-Japan robots. He couldn’t resist and played around with the HRP-4C humanoid, robotic baby seal Paro, and Toyota’s mobility robot i-Real.

Too bad Obama didn’t feel comfortable enough to drive around sitting in the i-Real. Here’s the video:

http://www.necn.com/common/CSN/necn/NECNembedplayer.swf

Via NECN

Our very own White House is going green. Well, going greener. Solar panels will be installed on the roof of the White House by next spring, ending all of our nation’s problems in one fell swoop.

Well, maybe it won’t have that big an effect, but it’s still sorta neat.

The move will be announced later today, perhaps while I’m hopefully playing Sonic 4. (The game comes out next week, mind you.)

The AP kindly reminds us that other presidents have also “tapped the sun.” Jimmy Carter had a solar-powered water-heating system, and George H. W. Bush heated the White House pool using the power of the sun.

Yes: why don’t we try to use that giant sphere of fusion hanging in the sky for some of our energy needs. It certainly can’t be as dangerous as randomly drilling mile-long holes into the crust of the Earth

Consuming more calories than you use makes you fat. That’s a fact, Jack. Figuring out where these calories come from, OK, that’s a noble endeavor, but let’s not pretend there’s anything secret going on here. Like, you see this graphic here? It’s the winner of some Michelle Obama-headed design contest to help folks figure out how to best fight childhood obesity. And you’ll see the PlayStation completely demonized, as if Sony itself is somehow responsible for little kids packing on the pounds.

The chart, part of the Let’s Move program (and you’ll want to see the full-res version), highlights a few bad guys, including the use of high fructose corn syrup in soda, the launch of Super Size-sized foods at McDonalds, the increase in screen-watching hours, and, yes, the launch of the Sony PlayStation.

Surely Nintendo and Microsoft are thrilled with the award-winning chart.

And while it’s easy to say something like, “Well, it’s up to the parents to be parents, and to provide healthy food for their kids, and to make sure their kids aren’t spending every waking hour in front of their Sony PlayStation” how about this: it’s hard!

If Mommy and Daddy are working all day long to pay for a mortgage, they can’t exactly be there to cook a multi-course, healthy dinner for their kids. So, go to Wal-Mart, buy a bunch of microwaveable burgers (which are conveniently like 20 burgers for $10 or something ridiculous like that) and hope to God that the worst thing you have to worry about is their kid playing PlayStation in the evening and not stealing cars or doing drugs while breaking into 7-11s.

The point is, parents have it hard, too.

That may sound like the caffeine-fueled, sleep-deprived rant of a typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Except it’s not— try Todd Park, the buttoned-up CTO of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

He’s talking about his latest project, Healthcare.gov,  a consumer-friendly site that helps users find and compare private and public insurance options and learn about the new health reform law. According to Park, it’s the single largest online repository for public and private insurance information. (See video above.)

As President Obama demonstrates in a video walkthrough (see video below), a consumer can use the site’s finder to get tailored insurance options by answering a few basic questions about their location and status (i.e. age range, needs, etc.). Later this fall, the site will also include pricing information to help users compare plans by cost.

While Healthcare.gov is definitely not the first comprehensive online initiative spearheaded by the government, it does reflect the current administration’s serious commitment to online engagement and how they’re paying attention to  Silicon Valley.

Calling the site an Expedia for health insurance, the White House Director of New Media, Macon Phillips, says they borrowed ideas from other web companies to develop the site:

“It doesn’t look like your normal [government] website because I think the websites that have been coming out particularly during the Obama administration, but even more recently, look towards the private sector— look towards what’s happening everywhere else on the internet.”

Aside from the big fat “.Gov” domain name, the aesthetics of Healthcare.gov seem more akin to a young startup versus something borne out of a provision in the Affordable Care Act. Its clean, simple user interface features a row of big buttons on the top directing users to “find insurance options” or “understand the new law.” Considering how convoluted our health care system system is, Healthcare.gov manages to organize the information in logical buckets and push key concepts to the foreground. Here’s a look at the Healthcare.gov homepage and for comparison, the HHS site (which has more of a standard .gov website feel).

If Healthcare.gov seems like a welcome, fresh perspective, the government has Twitter to thank. The White House and the HHS were not only drawing inspiration from Silicon Valley, they were looking for talent.

Earlier this year, before the passage of the bill, Macon Phillips stumbled upon Edward Mullen on Twitter, who posted a mock web design of what the heavily debated insurance exchange marketplace could look like. Lesson here: the next time you tweet something random on Twitter, the government could be watching with a job offer in hand.

“There was a designer in Jersey City, NJ, who I connected with because he tweeted his design of what he thought the exchange…would look like because he thought it would be really helpful to show the public that this is a visual thing,” Phillips says. “It was one of many suggestions that we got, but I printed it out and I would show it to people and would say look, this is the sort of creativity that is out there…One thing let to another and he left Jersey City to come to DC and.. helped push us through an information architectural process, asking questions like someone out of government who doesn’t understand the acronyms, doesn’t understand the alphabet soup, [but] fully gets what it’s like to be running a small business, what it’s like to look for your own health care insurance, was asking some really great questions and I think had a really positive impact.”

Once the team was in place, it was crunch time, says Park. From the bill’s passage, the HHS had 90 days to get the site live, hence the “maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew and all nighters”— a familiar rite of passage for virtually any tech entrepreneur. The site officially launched on July 1 and a few weeks later President Obama released his video demo. While many blogs pointed out Obama’s Apple endorsement— the poorly hidden MacBook Pro — it was also notable as the first demo a sitting president has ever done for a website.

So how is the website doing? Not so bad. As of this morning, Healthcare.gov has racked up 1,015,148 visits and is fielding thousands of comments each week (there are several yellow buttons across the site where users can give feedback). Phillips says they are indeed listening: each week, the team holds a meeting to specifically discuss the comments of the week. Of course, one million is still far from reaching the 45 million or so who are uninsured, but I’m sure Phillips, Park and his team know there’s a lot more to learn from America’s tech entrepreneurs.

We got a chance to talk to Phillips, Park about the making of the website and President Obama’s reaction via Skype, see video above.

With the funding, Abengoa will build a solar plant in Arizona that can power 70,000 homes. When completed in 2013, the plant will be one of the largest in the world. It will also store part of the energy it produces, becoming the first plant in the U.S. to do so.

Abound will receive $400 million to build two plants, one in Colorado and the other in a former Chrysler factory in Indiana. The funding comes from the Recovery Act, and the plants are expected to create more than 1,500 permanent jobs and at least 2,000 construction jobs.

The loans are part of the President’s policy to use government loans to help jump-start the alternative energy industry.

Part of me wishes President Obama would flip that so-called “Internet kill switch.” Imagine: a world without the Internet! That would be grand, indeed. But let’s not indulge in fantasies: there is no such kill switch. Well, there is, but it’s not as if the president is going to say, “I disagree with Nicholas’ opinion of anti-virus protection, I’m going to shut down CrunchGear.”

The deal is that Sen. Joe Liebermann, of Connecticut, has put forward a bill called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010. You can read the whole thing if you wan, but life is entirely too short for that kind of thing. All you need to knows is that the law would replace a law that dates back to the 1930s. That law already gives the president the ability to kill any form of telecommunication! Granted, it has to be in the interest of national security, so we’d have to be staring down the barrel of a Red Dawn (or its lame re-imagining, Modern Warfare 2) scenario for that to happen.

The new law, as it’s currently written, would actually prevent the president and his peeps from directing much of anything. He (and the director of National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications) would have to work with the owners of critical infrastructure to decide on any plan of action in the event of a national security situation.

So if you want to be mad at anything, be made at an 80-year-old law that was developed decades before the Internet was even around.

In closing, if you’d like to see limits placed upon whoever happens to occupy the Oval Office, then you really should have no problem with Liebermann’s bill.

Or, you can take my attitude: whatever happens, happens. Time to pour a nice glass of lemonade on this warm summer day.

Flickr’d

Apparently there was some sort of media summit in Abu Dhabi recently, and a big topic of discussion was copyright infringement. (I think we need to reserve the word “piracy” for actual, sea-faring piracy, not kids grabbing the random Sublime song off LimeWire.) Rupert Murdoch called on governments to stop copyright infringers, asking them to punish them as they would shoplifters. I guess Murdoch doesn’t understand the different between theft and copyright infringement. And Ari Emmanuel, Rahm Emmanuel‘s brother (and the inspiration for the Entourage character Ari), has been lobbying President Obama to implement some sort of three-strikes policy, like they have in France. France!

A couple things: one, I’m pretty sure President Obama is a little busy trying to get some sort of healthcare law passed; the concerns of Hollywood bigshots aren’t exactly on his radar right now. Two, we’re beginning to enter the next election cycle, so Congress is going to be on its tippy toes trying not to offend anybody or do much of anything. It’s sorta like laying low come 3pm Friday, so your boss doesn’t saddle you with a last-minute assignment that’ll keep you at the office one longer that you need to be. Congress is busy doing nothing, in other words.

As for Murdoch: whatever, dude. I think my government has more important things to do than track down high schoolers who download an episode of 24. At least I hope it does!

Whirled Creative has made a mash-up of yesterday’s iPad announcement and President Obama’s first State of the Union Address from last night. Those who were concerned that the Apple announcement was getting more buzz than the President’s speech can now have the best of both worlds.

Watch below as Obama talks about Apple’s revenues, compares the Zune to a root canal, talks about the “status quo” netbooks, and unveils the mythical iPad to a thunderous applause by the House and Senate. Obama also highlights TechCrunch as one of the “experts” of the system, which we appreciate.

Way to go, President Obama! Thanks to your bold and forward-thinking policies, the Doomsday Clock has been moved back by one minute! That means Planet Earth is “one minute” further away from utter destruction! Well, destruction brought about by man himself; an asteroid can still smash into the planet and we’d all be doomed. Or, as we’ve seen in Haiti this week, some other cataclysm can strike and we’d have zero control over it.

rapidshare downloads

The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947, and was designed to measure how close mankind was to destroying itself. We’ve been five minutes away from midnight (“adios time”) since 2007.

But the clock has been moved back because of the “hopeful state of world affairs,” affairs that have partially materialized because of the policies of President Obama. What policies? For creating “a change in the U.S. government toward international affairs.”

Basically, the U.S. doesn’t throw its weight around anymore and expect people to go with the flow.

I feel safer~!

Right now, if I could play a round of Multiplayer Game 2: The Sequel with anyone in the whole world, it’d probably be either Manuel Zelaya or The Situation from Jersey Shore. Zelaya because I’d could ask, “So what’s it like to be the first South American leader in a really long time to be illegally ousted in a coup?” Then I’d tell The Situation, “Hey, you’re terrific. Let’s do 800 sit-ups then pump our fists in the air to the latest episode of A State of Trance.”

What? Weekly Reader Research just published the results of a survey that found that boys aged 8-17 most want to play video games with President Obama. Second place is Tom Brady, followed by Seth Rogan, Michael Phelps and the Jonas Brothers.

For girls, the ranking is Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, President Obama, Lady Gaga, then Angelina Jolie.

Cough.

Flickr

The market for video and computer games featuring erotic content, the so-called eroge, is huge in Japan. As a lot of smaller and independent software companies are battling it out in a highly competitive field, you often come across a lot of bizarre stuff (I’ve heard). School girl- or tentacle-themed games, for example, are especially popular (although the bulk of the latter are being shipped to a person called Bohn Jiggs who lives in Brooklyn/New York, as my industry contacts told me recently).

Another of those strange erotic games, called “My Boyfriend Is the President”, hit Japanese stores on October 30. The plot: Aliens brainwash the entire human population into thinking their leaders are in fact cute girls. I’m not sure what the developers were smoking, but I’m sure this game will become as big as the next Final Fantasy.

Now some Japanese geek with too much time on his hands took the original theme song of the game and made his own promo trailer for the movie (caps above). Even the pope makes an appearance.

It’s just weird, as you can see here:

And here’s the original game trailer with English voice-over, which is just a little less bizarre:

Japan Probe via Yamatologic

Editor’s note: Below is an open letter to our President from guest author Edo Segal, a concerned web geek who cares about the future of our democracy. It is followed by a proposal and a new website for anyone who thinks they know what #obamashould do (cynics please skip post).

Mr President,

On the night of your acceptance speech, just before you walked on stage, “you” sent out an email saying “i will be in touch soon”—but you disappeared and all we were left with was the strange feeling you get when your older brother ditches you for his cooler friends. Does it take you winning a Nobel prize to get another direct letter from you?

Where’s the attention? The yes-we-can attitude, making us feel we can be good again? It seems that since you made it to the Oval Office you have been too busy at work, and our relationship has really suffered.

I recall that as the election results where announced, there was an epiphany that hit the pundits and us web folks at the same time. “He’s going to govern this way” we all thought. What we meant was that you will continue the evolution of direct democracy beyond using the Internet for fundraising, heralding a new age of direct access to the citizenry. A new age of democracy where the President has your email and can talk to you directly. An age without intermediaries and pollsters—just us and that cool guy who’s running the country.

Regardless of our political views, almost everyone in this country was in awe of how you came to be in office and changed how elections are won forever. But for the readers of Techcrunch, the people who grease the wheels of our progress online, it feels like after the hangovers were over and you moved on to set up your transitional government, from that day, what was a highly effective and motivating direct relationship with your supporters, an emotional relationship that was predicated on a real connection evaporated. And what we were left with was the most effective spam bot in the world (Gmail doesn’t block it) . This is wrong in so many ways, let me count just a few:

1. Stop asking me for money: Why are you still asking me for money? I think I am not alone in being confused with the notion that you are still asking me for money after you were elected President (I know why you need it intellectually but not emotionally). I mean at this point, I feel like you should be paying me back with change and not billing me every week. I pay a big bill every April that should just about cover it.

Using the “Network” purely as a means to raise money without the additional layers of engagement and relationship is offensive. We are the network. By just using email as a system to raise money you loose the soul of the connection you established with millions of people.




2. Your singular focus is distracting: While there has been much discussion about the administrations’ notion of taking on multiple fronts at the same time, the online channel recently has been fully saturated with a singular purpose of supporting the very important policy goal of universal healthcare. But in doing so, you have played into the hands of your opponents. The grind on Capitol Hill and the levels of complexity that are involved in making this happen, and the time it takes are not a recipe for engagement—they are a recipe for disaster. You are losing your audience and failing us on a major promise of direct democracy. 



When I explained my support for you at the very early stages of your campaign to bewildered people who didn’t see how it could be possible for you to win the Presidency, I articulated that regardless of the specific nuance of your policies, the fact you have the power to motivate people in this way is priceless. You demonstrated that you can build on top of the best practices of prior online campaigns (Dean). Delegation to really smart people culminated in the most effective campaign financing system in the history of democracy. But if you don’t keep watering the soil from which your support stems, that direct relationship, you will not be able to make the historic policy changes you seek. Your base is eroding as you focus all of your communication channels on a VERY heavy piece of legislation. Don’t spam us, engage us.

3. The promise: From the perspective of the history of media, the level of engagement you can generate through the Internet has typically been reserved for occasions of war and violence, for times of strife and conflict. Like the days of WWII when people huddled around their radios to hear the comforting voice of their leaders. Imagine applying the same level of engagement that won’t just fuel death destruction and line the pockets of the military industrial complex, but rather will power true change, growth and improve the quality of life for all people. This is within your grasp if you follow through and use the medium appropriately.

Mr. President, beyond the content of your ideas, now is the time to extend the way you govern as we all heard you promise. Make us care again. Online engagement is the key to fostering the support you need to accomplish your policy goals. Engagement is the key to maintaining your base as you mount these vast campaigns. Getting the government to set up a network of Web 1.0 sites is a start, but we need much more. If you continue to spam us and recycle old speeches off a teleprompter into email (like you did with the Nobel eMail) you will lose your base, but if you step up to the challenge and continue to take risks and push the envelope in structural ways that only you can, your greatest legacy could be more than enacting historic legislation or winning a premature prize. It could be the very way our democratic process works and how we view government.

That is my letter to Obama, but it is not enough. The notion that we will evolve the very essence of democracy beyond the already achieved goal of changing campaign financing and moving power away from private interests is profound. I truly believe it may end up being the greatest piece of innovation we are collectively offering the world in the coming decades. But to make additional progress, you and I need to step up. If each of us contribute a bit of creative energy we can accelerate this evolution by a generation

In the past, the main skills that effected political outcomes in the communications realm were polling, copy writing, speech writing, and directing and producing for radio and television. But today and in the future, the most potent creative skill-set is that of creating online connections. Yes, I’m talking about you. Our professional careers depend on our ability to create platforms that engage millions of people and constantly grow that level engagement. The readership of this blog constitutes the highest concentration of such competency on the planet. We spend our lives creating platforms that aim to engage millions of people.

We get it, it’s tough for government to take risks and thus political innovation moves at a glacial pace. Maybe we can give the pols a hand, help speed things up a bit.

Rather than just rely on comments and the ill will of the trolls, I took a little initiative and with the help of the good people at iGeneration who volunteered their time to build Obamashould.org, a site for the community to contribute ideas to the President. Please spend a few minutes there and voice your opinions in a constructive way. Or just tweet your ideas with the hashtag #obamashould. The site will track retweets, and the ideas gathering more support will float to the top automatically. Its like an http://www.ideastorm.com/ meets tweetmeme.com and uservoice for our President. BTW, Mr. President, if you want the source code, it’s yours. If you are a developer and want to contribute to the project please join us. We will take the best ideas that surface to the top from there and get them built by the community. We may even launch some of them here on Techcrunch in a few months.

Let me throw out some #obamashould’s to start the ball rolling. Click the YES re-tweet button if you support it!

Idea 1: What you did to get us, you need to do to keep us. Keep a weekly Youtube post that gets emailed to the base. It feels like you are becoming hostage to the status quo of what presidential communications has always been. For both the Y Generation and many of us older folks, the notion of what constitutes presidential behavior is changing rapidly with your actions serving as the main catalyst. communications is when in fact you are the one that is supposed to re-invent it. It’s not a presidential address in the conventional sense of the word. Give us genuine direct talk over words tested with pollsters any day. A direct candid discussion about a given topic once a week that is not read off a teleprompter is priceless for the continual sense of a direct relationship. Just flick open your laptop in the oval office or in your study at night and talk to us. Have a small panel of trusted advisers review it, and if no serious red flags are raised post it and email it to us. The value of genuine conversation from a man with your insight will way overshadow the shortcomings offered in the prose. You will probably say things you will regret, but the damage done will be dwarfed by having a continued sense of renewed personal relationships with your citizens. If you do this, they will be there when you need them. Retweet to vote up or Comment Here


Idea 2: Engage the people via email and ask them for their opinions, not just their money. Have a weekly poll question that is linked to social media (twitter, facebook), creating a viral engagement engine. In addition to the immediate policy objectives, you need to understand that such engagement is not only a means to an end, but an end in itself. Retweet to vote up or Comment Here


Idea 3: Give $500 of your money to charitywater.com (Video) and send out an invite from their system to everyone on your mailing list to do the same. Tweet it, put it on facebook. Show people how they can use the web to effect positive change in the world and do good again. Why not? That single email will effect millions of lives around the globe. Giving changes people, help them give and start that chain reaction of good will. Use your power to promote things that have to do with generosity of spirit, not just hard core policy. This is a way to lead through example and not just talk in the abstract about the need for volunteerism. Your effect on the world cannot be reduced to a series of policy wins and losses. Different from prior Presidents making public their charity contributions, doing this via a digital medium is like clicking a button that activates a viral system and magnifies your contribution a million-fold over the web. Retweet to vote up or Comment Here

What do you think #obamashould do?

Go to www.obamashould.org and please contribute ideas now. If you want to join a vibrant open source community of people that are passionate about helping evolve democracy online, we need your help. Join us here.

Guest author Edo Segal (@edosegal) has launched and sold several companies. In 2000 he founded eNow, a search engine for the Real-time Internet in an age that predated RSS as a popular medium. As such he has had a decade to think about its implications. He ultimately sold the company (renamed Relegence) to AOL in 2006 and today runs an Incubator/Investment vehicle called Futurity Ventures. He recently launched a new search engine for wisdom.

Photo credit: Flickr/White House.

You guys gotta hear this. There’s a 78-year-old woman who, for whatever reason, hates the president so much that she has decided to sell her two TVs! (What’s more impressive is that the woman even has a working TV post-digital transition.)

Now, why would someone want to sell two perfectly working TVs? Doesn’t she know that’s where they show Idol?

Says the ad:

Obama on every channel and station

My guess is that she doesn’t have cable or satellite, because I can guarantee that you won’t see President Obama on GolTV, the home of Spain’s La Liga here in the U.S.

The TVs in question are a 20-inch Sony and a 13-inch Sony. She may well have the two TVs I used as a youth to play N64 and PlayStation One games.

And this is all well and good, but what I’d like to know is, have any of you done anything similar? Have you hated someone or something so much that you sold a gadget, or, more dramatically, threw it out the window? I know Peter Ha constantly has trouble with his MacBook Pro, but he has yet to heed my advice (“throw it out a window, then walk to Mexico, to freedom”).

I have a similar story I guess. Back when I lived in Queens, my smoke detector would go off like once a day, for no reason. I’m not a smoker, and my diet consisted of sandwiches and fruit smoothies, so there was no reason for the thing to be going off every day.

My solution? I did my best Hideo Nomo impression, and slammed the detector against the wall. Illegal? Maybe. Dangerous? Absolutely.

Flickr

Are you into our President? Prove it by carrying this Obama 2GB flash drive from Active Media Products. You’d be pretty hard-pressed to say that this was anything other than a cynical marketing ploy, but whatevs, it’s the POTUS!

The drive comes with 80MB of data including 35 speeches, ten pics of the Prez and his lady wife, and two hours of speeches. Yes you can also buy the 8GB version for $30. The arc of storage is long and bends towards pricing parity.