If knowledge is a door to information, data is the key. When you’re talking about politics and government, information is extremely important to those who are making decisions on who to vote for and what legislation to get behind or block. Today, a company called ElectNext has raised a seed round of $1.3M led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures along with other strategic investors like Liberty City… → Read More
If there is one prominent U.S. politician who has consistently staked his reputation to the digital revolution, it’s Gavin Newsom, the two-time San Francisco mayor, now Lieutenant Governor of California. This week he is launching a new book Citizenville: How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government, a FarmVille-inspired riff which lays out his agenda for transforming American… → Read More
Thanks to the “genius” of the electoral college, if you live in a sure-fire red or blue state you might feel like your vote doesn’t matter much. You can still have an impact, though, by reminding friends in swing states to vote. But which of your friends live in swing states? Obama’s “Remind Friends To Vote” app and Romney’s “Commit To Mitt” show you who to make sure made it to the polls. → Read More
Some of my friends are idiots. And by idiots, I mean they disagree with me about who should win the upcoming election. What’s worse, is that they continually post these erroneous opinions of theirs to Facebook, and back them up with statements which I can thoroughly debunk via Politifact. C’mon people, fact-check yourself! The thing is, I don’t have time to engage in inane political discussions on… → Read More
For the first time ever, YouTube will offer a live video stream of the U.S. presidential and vice presidential debates this year. To do this, YouTube has partnered with ABC News and the debates will stream on ABC News’ YouTube channel and YouTube’s Election Hub. The four debates, which will start on October 3 at 9pm ET, will be available for YouTube viewers around the world. YouTube’s election… → Read More
Editor’s note: Jon Bischke is a founder of Entelo and is an advisor to several startups. In the interest of full disclosure, the author is a National Co-Chair for Technology for Obama (T4O). You can follow Jon on Twitter here.
It’s election season again and 2012 is likely to be remembered for many things, one of which is the amount of money spent on political advertising. Indeed… → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt today, our own Greg Ferenstein interviewed Mitt Romney’s Digital Director Zac Moffatt. The discussion touched upon a wide variety of issues, ranging from the importance of online ads in political campaigns to the allegations that the Romney campaign bought Twitter followers. As Ferenstein noted at the start of the panel, politics is becoming very important for technology, not… → Read More
Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012 in San Francisco. We all know him as the Mayor who has taken Twitter by storm, and also the fellow who has no problem jumping into burning buildings to save people. I’m not kidding. → Read More
Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and GM Erik Martin are running a $40,000 Indiegogo campaign to fund a bus trip across part of the country (from Kentucky to Denver) in order to talk about the Open Web this political season. The trip aims to “host meetups, highlight candidates who support free and open Internet, get people to sign up to vote, [and] feature local tech jobs.”
The trip is from… → Read More
I usually don’t like to dip my nose into politics on these pages, but this is pretty hot stuff. If you – or someone you love – wants to play this one for the Gipper they can head over to Reagan.com and sign up for their own unscanned, and ad-free email address. Why support those liberals at Google and Microsoft when you can trade in your godless Hotmail address for a firm handshake and a… → Read More
Louise Mensch, the outspoken conservative member of UK parliament who launched topic-focused Twitter rival Menshn in June, this morning announced that she was stepping down from government so that she can relocate to New York to focus more on family life, and possibly to put more effort into her new startup in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential elections.
Update: Mensh co-founder Luke Bozier… → Read More
Twitter just announced the launch of its Twitter Political Index. This index, says Twitter, is “a daily measurement of Twitter users’ feelings towards the candidates as expressed in nearly two million Tweets each week.” Every day, twitter will evaluate and weigh the sentiment of tweets mentioning both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney relative to every other message that passes through Twitter’s… → Read More
Republican Presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, may hold the most unpopular stance in American history: he wants to ban as much porn as he can. A 2007 video (below) of Romney promising to place porn filters on every new computer have resurfaced after his legal adviser “assured” President Reagan’s anti-porn legal crusader that Romney sticks by his pledge to curtail porn and resumes prosecution… → Read More
Democrat-oriented software developer NGP VAN (Voter Activation Network) is launching an updated tool today for the US 2012 election season, that uses Facebook to help stir up voter participation. Called Social Organizing, it lives on a campaign’s website, has users sign in using Facebook Connect, then filters a user’s friends on Facebook to match with their voter registration file. Users… → Read More
“We can draft anything, but will we go to the masses?” said Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), creator of Congress’s little-known online crowdsourcing legislative platform, Project Madison. Today, at the open-government forum, the Personal Democracy Conference, Issa launched a foundation to expand the ability of citizens to suggest changes to all legislation, and to fund more experiments in digital… → Read More
Once something is on the Internet, it’s typically pretty hard to delete it. Unless somebody retweets a posting to Twitter, though, a deleted tweet it is pretty much gone forever. With Politwoops, however, the Sunlight Foundation is now preserving these tweets for posterity. Politwoops follows all the 433 official Twitter accounts for members of Congress, as well as President Obama’s and Mitt… → Read More
The presidential election season in the U.S. is now in full swing and both the Democratic and Republican conventions are just a few months away. Google just announced that it will be the “official social platform and livestream provider” for the Republican convention in Tampa in August. Google promises “a convention without walls” and will use both YouTube and its Google+ social network, to… → Read More
Change.org launched in 2007 as a social networking site for non-profits. Today, the site looks quite a bit different and has morphed into a petition platform that wants to empower activists around the world through what it calls “people-powered campaigns.” While the site only grew rather slowly in its early years, it’s on a tear now. According to Change.org’s own data, the site just passed 10… → Read More
Richard Clarke was a major feature in US security for a decade, serving as a member of the National Security Council and special adviser for cybersecurity to President George W. Bush. He has written a column for the New York Times that details just how serious the threat of cyber attacks is for this country, something increasingly evident in light of things like the creaking infrastructure of… → Read More
Even in an election year where Republicans and Democrats are at each others’ throats even more than usual, there is still one political issue in the United States that both sides have to get behind in order to stay in voters’ good graces: Job creation. And since so many jobs these days are created by startups and small businesses, a number of politicians have started championing initiatives to… → Read More
In interesting but ultimately not very shocking news, Google has signed on as a major sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is more or less what it sounds like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just a little odd seeing Google, which is becoming increasingly political, listed next to such organizations as the Koch Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the… → Read More
According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, Google spent approximately $390,000 (out of $3,760,000.00 total) on SOPA and PIPA lobbying including efforts to educate lawmakers on SOPA and the DMCA. The question, then, is whether the massive search and advertising giant was for or against the bill – and why so much money was spent to argue the case.
The document, available online in… → Read More
Social media analytics firm Socialbakers has tracked more than 10 million Facebook Pages and Places plus billions of individual user interactions in order to determine who the most popular, engaging and influential presidential candidates are on Facebook. Not surprisingly, incumbent Obama has the most Facebook fans, which is one way to measure “popularity.” That’s not necessarily the fairest way… → Read More
I hold the unpopular opinion that technology – more specifically the proliferation of social media – is not intrinsically “good” in any sense. Social media is, however, important, and I propose we raise our glasses of good cheer to what social media and its related technologies have wrought around the world this past year and the good it will, in real terms, do in the future.
The great lie of… → Read More
ElectNext, a graduate from DreamIt Ventures’ Fall 2011 class, is launching out of beta today to match voters with the political candidates that best reflect their values. The site, which likes to describe itself as an “eHarmony for voters,” offers a familiar concept, thanks to the dozens of politically themed quizzes that attempt to suss out what political party best fits your personal interests… → Read More
Facebook has filed to establish FB PAC, a political action committee intended to “give [Facebook's] employees a way to make their voice heard in the political process,” presumably over and above voting and contributing independently to campaigns and other PACs.
The company has spent about a million dollars lobbying over the last three years, according to Senate records and documented by… → Read More
IntercastNetwork is a rich-media interactive platform that allows brands to connect to audiences using a combination of live-streaming video, real-time polling, live chat, Q&A, payment processing and more. The resulting platform works well for live broadcasters, who can track audience engagement levels and feedback during in real-time, and adjust their message accordingly.
Unlike… → Read More
Votizen, a new platform for connecting registered voters with elected officials, is launching the first-ever “virtual” precinct walk today, starting with San Franciscans for Jobs and Good Government, a committee supporting Ed Lee for Mayor of San Francisco. This virtual precinct walk is a modern update on traditional door-to-door campaigning, where previously, a politician’s supporters would… → Read More
I want to talk about American politics. No, wait, don’t go! Don’t worry; it’s OK; I’m Canadian. Your nation’s psychotic death spiral of irrational blood vendettas, vampire-squid kleptocrats, and cargo-cult magical thinking means nothing to me. (Other than its undeniable entertainment value.) Yes, I mean both of your political parties. It’s so bizarre that you only have two that matter. We have … → Read More
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