Election Government
By Gilad Lotan | November 7, 2012, 6:42 PM
Tuesday was not only a big win for the Democratic party but also for social media. From campaign organization to mobilization of people to polling stations, Twitter and Facebook drew massive amounts of participation around yesterday's election. Facebook recorded over 9.6 million users who specified that they voted on election day. Of these users, 65% were female voters, and 31% were between the ages of 25 and 34. Meanwhile Twitter witnessed the highest spreading piece of content to ever be recorded on the network. A Tweet that included a photo of the Obama's hugging became the most viral Tweet we've ever seen, gaining over 300,000 retweets within an hour, surpassing @longcat111's long-lasting rule as the most RT'd tweet by a longshot. More
Election Government Life Science
By Meredith Salisbury | November 2, 2012, 11:43 AM
We have heard debates, convention speeches, and campaign events with lots of talk about jobs and foreign oil and national security. But what about where the candidates stand on another matter critical to innovation in our country and the future of healthcare: life sciences? More
Business Election Government
By Adam Ludwig | October 19, 2012, 3:00 PM
This election season has predictably amplified the argument that taxation and regulation suffocate growth and innovation. But Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston argues an opposing theory: that "corporate socialism" stifles innovation, and that the subversion of competitive markets is responsible for depressed domestic wages. As Exhibit A, he asserts that near-monopolies in the cable, Internet, and phone markets mean that in many areas of the U.S. connectivity speeds are both slow and expensive by world standards. More
(Via SmartPlanet)
Election Government Manufacturing
By Sarah Evelyn Harvey | October 17, 2012, 5:04 PM
Near the end of last night’s presidential debate, moderator Candy Crowley asked President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney a common question: How do you convince companies like Apple to bring manufacturing back to America? Unfortunately, both candidates flubbed their answers, AllThingsD’s Arik Hesseldahl argues. Romney simply talked about Chinese currency manipulation and intellectual property [...] More
(Via AllThingsD)
Digital Election
By Adam Ludwig | October 12, 2012, 11:47 AM
In an interview with WNYC's Jeremy Hobson, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo elaborates on the heightened role that Twitter now plays in society—particularly relevant given the explosion of tweets surrounding the presidential and vice-presidential debates. "We used to have a filtered, one-way view of events in the world from the media," says Costolo. "America's perspective of it, or the world's perspective of that event, would be seen through the lens of the way that the media described it to them." More
(Via WNYC)
Business Digital Election
By Sarah Evelyn Harvey | October 8, 2012, 3:37 PM
This presidential campaign has taken social media to a new level, expanding beyond Facebook and Twitter and into the world of Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, and Spotify. Both camps are reaching out to young voters by employing online tactics, from GIFs to pics. But is Ann Romney’s patriotic cake recipe on Pinterest or the Obama-Biden Spotify playlist enough to woo important swing votes? Both campaigns seem to believe that the more online action, the better. More
(Via New York Times)
Digital Election
By Adam Ludwig | October 2, 2012, 3:50 PM
The 2012 Techonomy conference will be held Nov. 11-12, so the results of the presidential election are certain to loom large. One aspect of electoral politics that's been transformed by the influence of tech and the Internet is polling—and its amplified impact on the national discourse. More
(Via New York Magazine)
Election Government Security & Privacy
By Adam Ludwig | September 17, 2012, 1:41 PM
As reported by Richard McGregor in the Financial Times, one voter whose name, age, and address were published in the "Obama for America" app, which helps canvassers target doors to knock on, was decidedly nonplussed about having his personal information downloadable by anyone with a smartphone. "Everything is an invasion of privacy these days," he said. "If I got excited about it, I would have had a coronary by now." Others are less sanguine about the ways the Obama campaign is using technology, and data culled from social media, to micro-target voters. But both campaigns have tools that tell them a lot more about voters than their ages and addresses, and they're using them to "slice and dice" the voting population in a way Barack Obama could have never envisioned when he gave his seminal 2004 convention speech. More
(Via Financial Times)
