The House passed two small business bills by voice vote Wednesday that may spur technological innovation. The first, H.R. 3738, would create a new early-stage investment program and authorize equity investment financing for small businesses. The bill calls for participating financiers to invest at least half of the funds in early-stage small firms. "This proposal is very well targeted toward companies that drive American innovation and are working to help solve some of our nation's greatest challenges," said TechAmerica President Phil Bond. The second small business bill, H.R. 3014, would authorize $10 billion in loans to be guaranteed to small healthcare practices for access to health IT.
Intel and Newsweek released a joint survey Monday that examined public attitudes toward technology's role in the world's economy and found that many, including those polled in the United States, believe technological innovation is key to economic prosperity. The survey, conducted online between Sept. 28-Oct. 13, of 4,800 adults in Britain, China, Germany and the United States found that many doubt the United States can maintain its current technological leadership. In fact, 63 percent of Chinese believe China will overtake the U.S. lead in technology in the next three decades. At the same time, three out of four Americans surveyed agreed that technological innovation will be more important in the next 30 years but many doubt that Americans can maintain its technological edge. The survey found that 82 percent said the United States is lagging behind other countries in the quality of K-12 math and science education.
When asked how U.S. policymakers should translate these concerns into action, Intel Vice President of Global Public Policy Peter Cleveland said in an interview that "I think were trying to make a case for innovation." Among the policies that can help the United States maintain its innovation edge include permanently extending and increasing the research and development tax credit, he said. "We've fallen behind other countries," Cleveland said. "If the tax laws are not as beneficial here than that R and D will go elsewhere." In addition, he cited the need for increased investment in science, technology, engineering and math education, also known as STEM, and immigration laws that allow talented foreign nationals who graduate from U.S. universities to stay here. Many of these issues will be discussed at an innovation economy conference Intel is hosting in Washington Nov. 30-Dec. 1 featuring key Obama administration and congressional officials as well as business representatives.
Google launched an application Thursday that allows users to see what data is stored in their accounts, but at least one group says the effort doesn't go far enough. The Google Dashboard is "designed to be simple and useful" and summarizes data for a range of products from e-mail and calendar applications to social networking and video sharing platforms. Consumer Watchdog, a group that has repeatedly thrashed Google for its advertising and privacy protection practices, said the Internet giant should let users opt out of tracking and delete information associated with their computer's IP address from Google's servers.
"If Google really wanted to give users control over their privacy it would give consumers the ability to be anonymous from the company and its advertisers in crucial areas such as search data and online behavior," Consumer Watchdog's John Simpson said in a press release. "The Dashboard gives the appearance of control without the actual ability to prevent Google from tracking you and delivering you to its marketers." That function is Google's "black box and data mine," he said.
Consumer Watchdog said Google should offer a simple "make-me-anonymous" or "don't track" button or icon on its home page, or at the very least in its dashboard, that would prevent search information from being logged at the choice of the user. The group also said that the dashboard, though useful, is not easy to find. Read more about dashboard here.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced Wednesday that they are launching a campaign to evaluate technologies that may help curb the dangerous epidemic of distracted driving. Their news came at a joint hearing of two House Energy and Commerce Committee panels where both Obama administration officials testified.
The DOT-FCC partnership will also include outreach efforts to educate the public about the dangers of texting and taking on cell phones while driving and other behavior that can lead to accidents, according to a press release. LaHood told lawmakers distracted driving "is costing lives and inflicting injuries across the nation's roads and railways. Genachowski said combining the resources of both agencies "can have a major impact on this problem."
Other witnesses included CTIA - The Wireless Association President Steve Largent; David Teater of Transportation Strategic Initiatives; Center for Auto Safety Executive Director Clarence Ditlow; Robert Strassburger of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers; Tom Dingus of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute; and Anne McCartt of the Insurance Institute for Highway and Auto Safety.
Craiglist.org founder Craig Newmark has agreed to serve on a Veterans Affairs Department panel that will review ideas to improve disability claims processing times and provide greater transparency to vets, the agency announced Wednesday. Newmark told a high-tech conference in June that he was contemplating whether to "dedicate a big chunk of my life" to those who are driving change in Washington. He also said he wanted to spend more time practicing his own brand of public service.
"Transforming VA into an organization that is veteran-centric, results-oriented and forward-looking is my top priority," Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki said in a press release. "Leveraging the talent, innovation and creativity of stakeholders, like Craig Newmark, is just one of the many ways VA can think outside of the box to help deliver tangible results to our nation's veterans."
VA officials from each of the agency's 57 regional offices across the country have submitted more than 3,000 ideas, which will be reviewed by Newmark and other panel members. Newmark said he looked forward to working with VA's leadership team to "bring tangible results" to veterans. He added that he is encouraged by the fact that VA is "embracing new ways to look at old problems."
House Republicans have launched an online offensive geared to take down the Democratic healthcare reform package. Minority Leader John Boehner announced the Web crusade Tuesday morning, which employs Amplify.com to start a section-by-section dialogue with the American public. As members review the 1,990 page bill and uncover what they believe are harmful provisions, Amplify allows them to clip specific portions and explain what they mean in plain English, according to Nick Schaper, Boehner's new media director.
Additionally, when visitors arrive at healthcaretruth.amplify.com they will be able to easily leave their own comments on any portion, or share the content using Twitter, Facebook, Digg and other popular social tools.
CongressDaily's David Hatch visited India recently where he spoke to Google about its "magic bus." "In teeming cities and dusty towns, Brahmans and peasants alike are lining up by the hundreds, even thousands," to experience the Internet, Google style, Hatch writes in the latest issue of National Journal magazine. "When you can't put a permanent Internet cafe in place, then you put a mobile one in," says Vint Cerf, Google's vice president and "chief Internet evangelist." Read more here (subscription required).
High-tech group Arts+Labs and George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy & The Internet are hosting a network and technology policy forum on Thursday morning. The event, moderated by former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley, is being webcast live here. Here's the rundown:
Panel #1 - Networks for the Future (9:30-10:30)
Bret Swanson (Entropy Economics, WSJ Contributor)
S. Derek Turner (Research Director, Free Press)
Robert Curtis (FCC Director, Network Deployment)
Christopher Yoo (University of Pennsylvania Law School)
Panel #2 - Network Management and Delivering for the Consumer (10:45-11:45)
Richard Bennett (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation)
Robb Topolski (New America Foundation)
Dave Farber (Carnegie Mellon University)
Harold Feld (Legal Director of Public Knowledge)
GOP candidates for the 2010 gubernatorial race in California are making a modern campaign move on Wednesday, TechRepublican.com reports. State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner and former Rep. Thomas Campbell will be participating in what is believed to be the first ever candidate debate on the micro-blogging site Twitter. Poizner issued a statement saying: "There is no doubt that we need to grow the Republican party and engaging new and young voters through social media outlets like Twitter is an excellent start."
During the debate at Brandman University, both GOP candidates will respond to questions submitted via Twitter as well as questions from Sacramento Bee reporter Dan Walters and other panelists. Poizner urged California voters to watch the debate live on television or online and share their thoughts throughout the night on Twitter. "We need to make California the innovation capital of the world again," he said. The debate can be viewed online here. Follow on Twitter @StevePoizner and @TeamPoizner.
On the eve of a Capitol Hill high-tech showcase, Intel Executive Vice President Sean Maloney and Vice President of Legal and Corporate Affairs Peter Cleveland sat down for an Oktoberfest themed dinner at Chinatown's PS7 with a handful of Washington tech reporters. The conversation, fueled by creative beer-inspired dishes, covered a range of topics from broadband deployment and network neutrality to patent reform and competition. Here are some highlights (from Maloney unless otherwise noted)
• Economic stimulus money for health IT, broadband and other tech related priorities is going out as quickly as one should expect. Intel is not applying for any stimulus funds directly but is working with groups that are trying to get money for rural broadband.
• Intel has taken a "nuanced stance" on net neutrality and supports pipeline providers "intelligently managing traffic." Grossly exaggerated worst case scenarios on either side of the debate have not helped. "This isn't impossible as long as we listen to each other."
• The two most insular places in America are Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., which makes bridging the gap between the two locales difficult. Silicon Valley ought to be more involved in policy and politics.
Defense Department Deputy Chief Information Officer David Wennergren on Tuesday issued the Pentagon's much-anticipated memorandum clarifying the use and development of open source software. The memo dated Oct. 16 notes that there are many open source programs in operational use by the department today, in both classified and unclassified environments, but there have been misconceptions and misinterpretations of the existing laws, policies and regulations that deal with the technology. Read the memo here (PDF).
There has been significant recent momentum for the increased adoption of open source solutions in the federal government, and the memo from DoD represents "a major tipping point," said David Thomas, principal at Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti and spokesman for Open Source for America. He said his group hopes Wennergren's action will help break down roadblocks for open source adoption in defense agencies and increase the DoD's contribution back to the open source community.
OSA's members include a range of interests including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google, Mozilla Foundation, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and others. The group is dedicated to highlighting the many advantages open source -- particularly for government -- including security, lower total cost of ownership, rapid innovation, faster deployment and lack of vendor lock-in. In related news, the White House Web site recently switched to an open source code.
From the White House on Friday:
During his speech in Cairo on June 4, the President announced that the United States would "launch a new fund to support technological development in Muslim-majority countries." As the latest step in delivering on this commitment, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation announced this week a call for proposals for a Global Technology and Innovation Fund. This fund will help catalyze and facilitate private sector investments that promote access to and growth of technology in OPIC-eligible countries throughout Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. OPIC will provide financing ranging between $25 million and $150 million in total capital for each selected fund.
The Global Technology and Innovation Fund is part of an on-going U.S. government effort to expand partnerships that advance economic opportunity and job creation - including in Muslim-majority countries. Specifically, the sectors of interest for prospective funds may address issues that can have a transformational impact in these regions such as technology, education, telecom, media, business services and financial technology and clean-tech.
More information is available here.
Thursday's witness list for the House Energy and Commerce Communications Subcommittee hearing on video competition is pretty standard fare -- Benjamin Pyne of Disney Media Networks (big content); Verizon Vice President Terrence Denson (big telecom); Sunflower Broadband Chief Operating Officer Patrick Knorr (little cable/Internet); Cablevision Chief Operating Officer Thomas Rutledege (big cable/Internet); and Progress & Freedom Foundation President Adam Thierer (think tanker). The wild card, however, is "Battlestar Galactica" executive producer and Peabody Award winner Ronald Moore.
Moore, who is also known for his work on several iterations of "Star Trek," will most likely be at the table because of his prominent role during the massive Writers Guild of America strike, which began in November 2007 and lasted 14 weeks. His show and other popular series made available for download on iTunes were flashpoints during the feud between writers and Hollywood studios over compensation for online content.
Moore might be on hand to advocate for the revival of so-called "Fin-Syn" regulation. The FCC put the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules on the books in the 1970s to restrict formal relationships between TV networks and those who produced programming for the networks. The purpose was to encourage a vibrant market for independently produced programming. The regulations were repealed in the early 1990s after court challenges but some want them back, arguing that a structural separation between content production and distribution would be good for business. "This is a huge fracture line in the Hollywood community," one observer said.
The House late Tuesday unanimously approved a resolution introduced by House Science Committee member Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich., designating the week of Dec. 7 as National Computer Science Education Week. The resolution also honors the birthday of Grace Murray Hopper, one of the first female computer scientists. Ehlers has spent much of his career on Capitol Hill fighting for improved research and education, particularly education in the areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM.
"I believe these subjects hold special promise for the future of our nation and its workforce, and it is very critical that all of our nation's students receive a foundation in STEM," Ehlers said in a statement. "This prepares students to become the innovators of tomorrow. Without innovation, our nation and its economy will be on a declining path." Introducing students to computer science at an early age and providing them with learning experiences at all educational levels can help stem the tide of declining enrollments in computer science training, he said.
The Association for Computing Machinery and others from the computing community cheered the resolution's passage. National Computer Science Education Week will help draw attention to the need for an educational system that values computer science as a discipline and provides students with critical thinking skills and career opportunities, said Bobby Schnabel, chair of ACM's Education Policy Committee and dean of Indiana University's School of Informatics.
Want to find a congressional office phone number or a Hill aide's e-mail address? Review a bill or peek at a member's Twitter feed? There's an app for that. Several, actually. One of the most popular appears to be "Congress in Your Pocket," which ranges from 99 cents to $99.99 depending on the version, National Journal magazine reports. The software, which has more than 20,000 iPhone and BlackBerry users, will soon feature note-taking and sharing capabilities, as well as Cook Political Report rankings, according to its creators at the Cohen Research Group. Fox News Channel has also hinted at a partnership for the 2010 midterm elections. "It's quick, easy, and essential," says Morgan Reed, a lobbyist for the high-tech sector. He says he loves the app for what it's not: "another spiral-bound facebook to be lost, stolen, or obsoleted every time a member or staff person leaves."
House Oversight and Government Reform ranking member Darrell Issa has given the committee's minority Web site an overhaul. The enhanced site is designed to create a user-friendly hub for information about the panel's work and Republicans' oversight of federal programs. Features include an interactive calendar; custom-built pages for each GOP committee member; a rotating front page video module, allowing users to simultaneously watch live hearings and explore documents; and a Twitter feed, displaying minority committee member's tweets in real time.
"Our expanded online presence highlights important investigations and efforts to achieve real accountability and transparency in government," Issa said in a statement. "Our watchdog Web site is a straight-forward platform from which we will call out Washington's fiscal irresponsibility, engage all Americans in the daily fight for effective governance and transport users into the trenches of federal oversight."
With less than four weeks to go in Virginia's gubernatorial race, supporters for Democratic candidate Creigh Deeds have turned the Internet into a digital battlefield. On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee's Organizing for America effort e-mailed hundreds of thousands of voters in the Commonwealth to lay out the differences between the Deeds and Republican Bob McDonnell. The DNC also unveiled a same-day advertisement on popular social network Facebook that draws attention to McDonnell's "far right wing social views... including that women should not work outside the home."
The ad will appear on Facebook accounts in Virginia wherever McDonnell's name appears and will link to a site called BobMcDonnellBluePrint.com. The DNC said this is the first in a series of planned ads that will target women, young people and other voters. Last month McDonnell rallied prominent female backers to help mend his image after the publication of his 1989 master's thesis. In it, he wrote that working women and feminists had been "detrimental" to the traditional family and slammed federal child care tax credits because they encouraged women to be employed outside the home.
On the heels of the Sunlight Foundation's "Apps For America" and the Washington, D.C. government's "Apps For Democracy" contests, the Consumer Electronics Association on Wednesday unveiled its own challenge for Web heads called "Apps For Innovation." Submissions to the high-tech trade group's competition will be judged by a panel of experts (Center for Democracy and Technology's Leslie Harris, pollster John Zogby and others). The grand prize winner will receive $10,000 and a free trip to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jan. 7-10.
The apps contest is part of the group's broader grassroots movement to mobilize Americans in support of public policies such as broadband, alternative energies and international trade, will encourage software developers to deploy apps that illuminate how innovation and entrepreneurial activity are at work across America. One example is an app that uses publicly available FCC broadband data and Internet mapping tools to show the need for high-speed Internet access in rural areas, CEA said. The contest is open to apps for any type of device or any type of Web platform.
For more information about the CEA contest, click here.
In a big win for companies like Skype, AT&T announced Tuesday that it has taken the steps necessary so that Apple can enable voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) applications on iPhone to run on AT&T's wireless network. Previously, VoIP applications on iPhone were enabled only for Wi-Fi connectivity but AT&T has offered a variety of other devices that allow VoIP applications on 3G, 2G and Wi-Fi networks. AT&T Mobility & Consumer Markets President Ralph de la Vega said the decision was made after evaluating customers' expectations and use of the iPhone compared to dozens of other products offered to subscribers.
Telecom analysts Rebecca Arbogast and David Kaut said the announcement was not only good for Skype but also for AT&T's "political and rhetorical position as the FCC attempts to write network neutrality rules, including for wireless broadband providers." The AT&T move is noteworthy, but not a surprise, in light of the AT&T August response to FCC questions about Apple's decision not to allow Google Voice to be carried on the iPhone through the App Store, the wrote. The announcement does not change Apple's position on Google Voice -- a situation the company said it was still "pondering."
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski issued a statement late in the day commending AT&T for its action. "Opening wireless services to greater consumer choice will drive investment and innovation in the mobile marketplace," he said.
Days after an agreement was reached aimed at ensuring a permanent relationship between the U.S. government and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, experts from civil society, government, industry and academia will gather to discuss their hopes and fears about the future of the Internet. Topics at the Friday summit, being held at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, include cybersecurity, freedom of information in a Web 2.0 world, and privacy. Earlier this week, ICANN pledged to establish a review processes to help assess and improve its mission and operations. Read more in CongressDaily here (subscription required).
Speakers at the Internet Governance Forum-USA include Markus Kummer of the UN Secretariat for the global IGF; National Telecommunications and Information Administration chief Larry Strickling; and Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Other participants include Electronic Privacy Information Center Executive Director Marc Rotenberg; and TechAmerica President Phil Bond. The closing plenary, which will feature Ambassador Phil Verveer and Richard Beaird of the State Department, will cover upcoming deliberations over the global IGF - a process now in its fourth year. Read more about the event here.
A Congressional Research Service report circulated this week on the increasing use of micro-blogging site Twitter on Capitol Hill shows the following:
• 158 members of the House and Senate are registered with Twitter and issued about 1,187 tweets during the two one-week periods in July and August analyzed for the report.
• Approximately 29 percent of House members and 31 percent of senators are registered with Twitter. Members sent an average of 85 tweets per day collectively.
• House Republicans sent the most tweets (54 percent), followed by House Democrats (27 percent), Senate Republicans (10 percent) and Senate Democrats (9 percent).
• More tweets were sent on Thursday than any other day of the week.
• Members' use of Twitter can be divided into six categories: position taking, press or Web links, district or state activities, official congressional action, personal, and replies.
• The most frequent type of tweets were press and Web link tweets, which comprised 43 percent of in-session and 46 percent of recess tweets.
• Official congressional action tweets during session (33 percent) and position-taking tweets during recess (14 percent)
(Hat tip, TweetCongress)
Major software and hardware executives will be in Washington on Tuesday to meet with senior Obama administration officials, members of Congress and other policymakers. They are slated to visit Commerce Secretary Gary Locke; Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra; Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra; and high-level officials at the General Services Administration and Department of Homeland Security, according to the Business Software Alliance, the trade group that organized the trip.
On Capitol Hill, the group of CTOs will spend time with House Republican Leader John Boehner; Minority Whip Eric Cantor; House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking member Darrell Issa; and Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., according to a BSA press release. During their meetings, executives from Adobe, Microsoft, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and others will present a set of principles for government acquisition of technology to maximize choice, competition, and innovation.
"Good technology-neutral policies drive the economy, make businesses more competitive, and help address social concerns such as health care, the environment, education, and security by ensuring an environment in which IT can continue to develop innovative solutions to these issues," BSA President Robert Holleyman said.
Senate Republican High Tech Task Force Chairman Orrin Hatch on Monday slammed President Obama's same-day speech about innovation, arguing that his words did not match his policy proposals and in several instances "go in exactly the opposite direction." Obama's address at Hudson Valley Community College in Troy, N.Y., was hailed by a range of technology industry stakeholders as a bold step toward achieving economic recovery and maintaining American competitiveness.
Obama articulated his support for making permanent a research and development tax credit, which is proposed in his FY10 budget request, by noting that it would help companies afford the high cost of developing new ideas, technologies and products. "What he failed to say, though, is that he and congressional leaders squandered the best chance in a generation to do this by not including a permanent extension in this year's stimulus bill," Hatch said. "Instead they opted to expand government social programs."
Also among Obama's talking points was the importance of a lower tax rate on capital gains to spur investments in start-up businesses. He said zeroing out the tax for investments in certain businesses is essential because they are engines of innovation and produce 13 times more patents per employee than large companies. Hatch countered that the FY10 budget "calls for a devastating tidal wave in the form of a capital gains rate increase that will totally swamp the small island of tax relief that he has proposed."
Tuesday is One Web Day, an annual event intended to encourage Internet users to show how the medium impacts their lives. The annual celebration -- launched in 2006 by Susan Crawford (President Obama's special assistant for science, technology, and innovation policy) -- has attracted a global network of partner organizations and individual activists. Last year, One Web Day organizers documented volunteer-driven events 34 cities around the world. Here are a few events taking place in the nation's capital:
Bold Ideas for the Future of the Internet
Rayburn House Office Building Room 2203, 11 a.m.
Speakers include:
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting Senior Vice President Joaquín Alvarado
• Kenneth Boley, District of Columbia Office of the Chief Technology Officer
• Amalia Deloney, Media Action Grassroots Network
• Byte Back Inc. Executive Director Kelley Ellsworth
• Amina Fazlullah, U.S. Public Interest Research Group
• Susannah Fox, Pew Internet and American Life Project
• Verizon Assistant Vice President Link Hoewing
• Joanne Hovis, National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors
• OneWebDay Executive Director Nathaniel James
• FCC Broadband Initiative Director Blair Levin
• John Wonderlich, Sunlight Foundation
One Web Day Happy Hour
Science Club, 1136 19th Street, NW, 6 p.m.
OneWebDay Yoga Class for Internet Users
Malcolm X-Meridian Hill Park, 16th St., and Florida Ave., NW, 7:15 a.m.
For more details on these and other events around the world, click here. For more of this week's tech-related event listings, visit CongressDaily's TechCentral page here.
3121, the first professional networking tool designed exclusively for congressional members and staff launches Thursday after several months of beta testing. National Journal Group's walled-off Web site offers a secure directory of contacts, communications tools and customizable news feeds so users can find and collaborate with colleagues and create personalized news filters. 3121 has been pre-populated with 9,500 user profiles, with about 56 percent belonging to Democrats and 44 percent to Republicans. Individuals with House and Senate e-mail addresses can log-on to claim and modify their listings. Learn more about 3121 here. FYI: "3121" is the extension for the Capitol Hill switchboard.
Balancing national security with military personnel's use of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is one of the Pentagon's biggest technology challenges, Army Chief Information Officer Jeffrey Sorenson told reporters at a high-tech conference Thursday. Appearing at the Gov 2.0 summit, he characterized the issue as "a point of friction" within the Defense Department -- and a problem that Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and Deputy CIO Dave Wennergren is trying to fix.
Wennergren is working on a policy paper to inform agency leadership on how and whether those Web sites, which let those deployed overseas stay in touch with family and friends, should be accessed on the Pentagon's unclassified computer network. His review comes on the heels of an August ban on Facebook and MySpace by the Marines. "It gets down to management of polarities," Sorensen said, noting the open question is how the military can balance operational capabilities and security.
Social networking sites aside, troops on the ground are leading the Pentagon's efforts to embrace super-secure collaborative technologies that give them a tactical edge while enterprise-level offices are trailing behind, Sorenson said. For its part, the Army has "grown up with a very specific ways of conducting operations" but is increasingly aware that publishing pamphlets makes no sense in the digital age where guidance and training documents can be updated and disseminated in real-time, he said.
Contrary to published reports, Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application for inclusion in its App Store and continues to study it, the computer and software company told the FCC in a Friday filing (see earlier Tech Daily Dose post). "The application has not been approved because, as submitted for review, it appears to alter the iPhone's distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone's core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail," Apple wrote to FCC Wireless Bureau Acting Chief James Schlichting. "Apple spent a lot of time and effort developing this distinct and innovative way to seamlessly deliver core functionality of the iPhone."
The company further noted that Apple has acted alone and has not consulted with AT&T, its exclusive wireless carrier for iPhone, about whether or not to approve the Google Voice application. "Apple alone makes the final decisions to approve or not approve iPhone applications. There is a provision in Apple's agreement with AT&T that obligates Apple not to include functionality in any Apple phone that enables a customer to use AT&T's cellular network service to originate or terminate a VoIP session without obtaining AT&T's permission," the firm told Schlichting. From time to time, AT&T has expressed concerns regarding network efficiency and potential congestion associated with certain app and such concerns are taken into consideration, Apple said.
Apple also provided the FCC with a list of apps that have been rejected as originally submitted and their current status. The company said more than 40 full-time trained reviewers examine would-be iPhone applications and an executive review board determines procedures and sets policy for the review process. In little more than a year, Apple have reviewed more than 200,000 apps and updates. Apple said 95 percent of apps are approved within 14 days of being submitted. About 8,500 new applications and updates are filed weekly and roughly 20 percent are not approved as originally submitted. Read the Apple's full response here.
AT&T on Friday insisted that it had no role in any decision by Apple to not accept the Google Voice application for inclusion in company's iPhone App Store. The wireless company, which is the exclusive iPhone service provider, was not asked about the matter by Apple nor did AT&T offer any view one way or the other, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President Jim Cicconi said. His statement came as the telecom giant -- along with Apple and Google -- were set to respond to a July request for information by FCC Wireless Bureau Acting Chief James Schlichting.
Schlichting wanted details about reports that the Google Voice app had been blocked and previously approved third-party applications were removed from the iPhone App Store. In light of pending FCC proceedings regarding wireless open access and handset exclusivity, the Commission wanted a more complete understanding of this situation, he wrote, setting an Aug. 21 deadline for responses. Cicconi added that any AT&T customer could access Google Voice on any Web-enabled device operating on AT&T's network, including the iPhone, by launching the app through a Web browser without the need to use the App Store.
Google provided a redacted version of its letter to Schlichting, which leaves unanswered the question of what explanation (if any) was given for Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application. Google Telecom and Media Counsel Richard Whitt wrote that Apple has approved Google Earth and Google Mobile apps for iPhone and that Google does not have any other proposed applications pending with Apple. Apple's letter to the FCC was not immediately available and multiple e-mails to Apple officials were not returned. Tech Daily Dose will update this post as more details emerge.
The FCC ventured into new tech territory on Tuesday by launching a blog called "Blogband" that is intended to stimulate public dialogue over the development of a national broadband plan. "Blogband will keep people up-to-date about the work the FCC is doing and the progress we're making. But we want it to be a two-way conversation. The feedback, ideas, and discussions generated on this blog will be critical in developing the best possible national broadband plan," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski wrote in his first post. The Commission also started a Twitter feed for agency news and updates on the broadband plan.
Blair Levin, who is coordinating the plan for the agency, posted his own item on the blog explaining the challenges he confronts as his the Commission works to meet Congress's Feb. 17, 2010 deadline "to reboot broadband deployment and usage in the U.S." "Our broadband team is leading an assault of sustained thinking by the entire FCC on the stubborn problem of bringing broadband to unserved and underserved areas, increasing the number of Americans using broadband, and maximizing how broadband can be used to help address significant national issues," he wrote. "Expect the unexpected."
Read related coverage about the FCC's broadband plan in CongressDaily's PM Edition on Tuesday here (subscription required).
C-SPAN asks the mainstream media: "Do you tweet?" (hat tip, Micah Sifry)
President Obama on Wednesday traveled to Elkhart, Ind., to unveil $2.4 billion in competitive grants to spur manufacturing and deployment of next-generation batteries and electric vehicles. During his remarks, he emphasized the historic commitment to innovation made as part of the $787 billion stimulus package. He said the stimulus creates jobs by "doubling [the nation's] capacity to generate renewable energy; building a new smart grid that carry electricity from coast to coast; laying down broadband lines and high-speed rail lines; and providing the largest boost in basic research in history."
His goal is to ensure the continuation of America's leadership position in the breakthrough discoveries of the 21st century. "That's what we do best in America -- we turn ideas into inventions, and inventions into industries," Obama said. The United States led the world in the 20th century because of its innovation leadership, he said. "Today, the competition is keener; the challenge is tougher; and that's why innovation is more important than ever." Obama added that the United States has lagged behind China and Japan for too long in the production of next generation of clean-energy vehicles.
FCC Wireless Bureau Acting Chief James Schlichting wrote to Apple, AT&T and Google on Friday inquiring about recent reports that Apple won't approve the Google Voice application for the iPhone and has removed related (and previously approved) third-party applications from the iPhone App Store. In light of pending FCC proceedings regarding wireless open access and handset exclusivity, the Commission wants a more complete understanding of this situation, he wrote.
Some questions posed in the letters with answers due Aug. 21:
• Why did Apple rejected Google Voice and remove the third party software?
• What related apps were removed or have been rejected?
• Did Apple act alone, or in consultation with AT&T, in rejecting Google Voice?
• Does AT&T have any role in the approval of iPhone applications?
• What other apps have been rejected for iPhone and for what reasons?
• Is there a list of prohibited applications or of categories of applications?
The Smithsonian has posted a preliminary version of its Web and new media strategy that details ways in which the institution wants to overhaul its digital experience and promote a new learning model that helps people along their "lifelong learning journeys." The blueprint was born from workshops, a Smithsonian 2.0 conference, Twitter, YouTube and ongoing collaborations on its wiki.
Three main themes emerged during the strategy-creation process:
• Update the Smithsonian Digital Experience: Build on excellence and the potential for excellence throughout the Institution by focusing on Web-publishing fundamentals and improving access to collections, community, and content across all platforms.
• Update the Smithsonian Learning Model: Support new kinds of learning, innovation, and knowledge creation inside and outside the Institution.
• Balance Autonomy and Control within the Smithsonian: Balance the benefits and risks of central control and creative autonomy while binding oversight and operations to a shared vision for the future.
To make the themes actionable, the strategy describes eight goals, each of which has its own set of policy, program, and tactical recommendations...
In the five months since passage of the stimulus package, thousands of research-related awards have been made, supporting scientific efforts in every state and the District of Columbia, according to an analysis released Thursday by the Association of American Universities, Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and the Science Coalition. The measure delivered the largest increase in basic research funding in American history -- $21.5 billion. The bulk of the money is for scientific research and education projects, while $3.5 billion is allocated for research facilities and equipment.
• Some 3,000 students and teachers are participating in a stimulus-funded summer jobs program through the National Institutes of Health.
• The National Science Foundation has expanded its teacher scholarship program through stimulus funds. To date, $59.1 million of the $60 million allocated has been obligated to more than 60 U.S. colleges and universities.
• The Energy Department Office of Science is using stimulus money to support the creation of 16 university research centers to help build a new 21st-century energy economy.
• The National Institutes of Standards and Technology announced more than $55.5 million to support the construction of new scientific research facilities at four universities.
Click here to read more details about how R&D funds have been spent across the country.
The White House on Monday made a push to reach the one million follower mark on the micro-blogging Web site Twitter (see above). At 11:30 p.m., it had 795,343. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., President Obama's challenger on the campaign trail in 2008, hit the one million milestone earlier this month (and released an official statement about it too). FYI: Obama's personal Twitter page has attracted more than 1.8 million followers.
Google should commit to a strong privacy regime as part of its effort to digitize mass quantities of books before a fairness hearing this fall on a $125 million settlement the company reached with publishers, the Center for Democracy and Technology said in a Monday report. The paper asks the court to approve the Google Book Search settlement but to retain oversight in order to monitor implementation of a privacy plan. U.S. District Judge Denny Chin has scheduled a hearing for Oct. 7 and the Justice Department formally acknowledged an investigation into Google's settlement earlier this month.
"The new service will considerably increase public access to millions of books containing much of the world's written knowledge and ideas and will transform how the public conducts research, interacts with written text and shares information and ideas with others," CDT President Leslie Harris said in a press release. Libraries have a long history of protecting reader privacy and safeguarding the right to read anonymously; the report highlights how Google -- which helps fund CDT's work -- can best adapt to its new role as traditional library functions are centralized and moved online, the analysis stated. Read the report here (PDF).
White House Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren and other key administration officials and staff will participate in discussions about their work and careers prior to a National Design Awards luncheon on Friday. The awards were launched at the White House in 2000 to celebrate design in various disciplines from architecture to product design. First Lady Michelle Obama will host the annual gathering.
• Chopra will discuss the future of interaction design with Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel Inc. and Andrew Blauvelt of Walker Art Center. This program is free to the public and no advanced registration is required. Hirshhorn Museum, Auditorium (Independence Avenue at Seventh Street S.W.)
• Holdren will discuss the future of technology and sustainability with Amory Lovins and Bill Moggridge. This program is free to the public and no advanced registration is required. National Museum of the American Indian (Fourth Street and Independence Avenue S.W.)
• Other participating Obama officials include White House Acting Communications Director Anita Dunn, who will discuss the relationship between current events and the design process; White House Deputy Social Secretary Ebs Burnough; and Neill McG. Coleman, general deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Some exciting news so please forgive the shameless self promotion... National Journal Group, the parent company of Tech Daily Dose, will soon unveil 3121, a new feature on NationalJournal.com that will become available exclusively to Capitol Hill staffers in September. 3121, now in beta, will be the first professional networking tool designed exclusively for congressional members and staff. The site will offer an online directory of contacts, communications tools and customizable news feeds and users will be able to find and collaborate with colleagues and create personalized news filters. Hill staffers can visit 3121launch.nationaljournal.com to request to participate in the beta and read the latest updates about the project from the 3121 development team, which has collaborated with New Media Strategies, Jive and JESS3 on the project. *FYI* "3121" is the extension for the Capitol Hill switchboard.
Follow the jump for screenshots of 3121...
Telecommunications analysts at Stifel Nicolaus on Friday said an advertising and search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo would get a close look from the Justice Department and probably the European Union's antitrust authorities. Sources at the two high-tech companies said an agreement in imminent and could be announced as soon as next week. The All Things Digital blog reported that top Microsoft executives traveled Thursday to Silicon Valley to smooth out technical issues and said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is reportedly deeply involved with the talks.
"We have always viewed a Yahoo deal with Microsoft as less risky, from the standpoint of antitrust review, than a deal with Google," Stifel Nicolaus analysts said in an e-mail. Google last year eventually backed off its efforts to do a search transaction with Yahoo in the face of resistance from the DOJ and criticism from Capitol Hill. There are several elements of a Yahoo-Microsoft deal that pose risk, the analysts said. The antitrust review would depend on the precise terms of the deal, which could take the form of a Microsoft acquisition of all of Yahoo, or, more likely, could be another run at some type partnership, they said.
Tech watchdog Jeff Chester warned the companies would not get a free pass from privacy and consumer groups even if the pairing would provide much needed competition to Google. Microsoft and Yahoo have created elaborate data collection services across platforms and applications and they have competing ad targeting businesses in search, display and mobile, he said. "Microsoft and Yahoo should expect privacy and consumer groups to vigorously press regulators to closely and skeptically examine the deal -- and at the very least impose a series of tough conditions on data collection practices," he said.
Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, who helped launch companies like Amazon.com, Symantec and Google, told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Thursday that the United States has led the world in high-tech innovation but distantly trails China on clean energy because existing policies "haven't given us any clear, long term market solutions." The key is cap-and-trade, he said. He urged senators to send a long-term signal that low carbon energy is valuable. "We must put a price on carbon and a cap on carbon emissions. No long-term signal means no serious innovation at scale, which means fewer new American success stories," he said in testimony.
The hearing came on the heels of House passage last month of cap-and-trade legislation sponsored by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman and Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee Chairman Edward Markey. Senate Environment Republicans panned that bill, saying it would cost the country jobs and won't bring down costs for consumers. Senate Energy ranking member James Inhofe called the Waxman-Markey bill a "1,000 page contradiction." He argued it would cause a net reduction of up to 2.7 million jobs, citing an analysis by the National Black Chamber of Commerce, whose president also testified.
Senate Environment Chairwoman Barbara Boxer pledged to do even more than the House to protect consumers and ensure that traditional power companies and innovative new technologies are kept on a level playing field as it crafts its cap-and-trade bill. She added that she is "carefully reviewing" Waxman-Markey language that would assist industries that are energy intensive and that are subject to international competition. Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., noted the country faces huge energy challenges and lawmakers have the potential to "find a pony in that pile of manure." Read more about the hearing here.
President Obama's Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra unveiled a new blog on Monday that will facilitate a discussion about an Internet-based dashboard he unveiled last month that makes available in a single location details about every major IT project of the federal government. The interactive Web site lets the public see each initiative's goals, schedule, cost outlays, key personnel, contractors used, and where the effort stands in real time. Since its June 30 launch, the IT dashboard has received more than 20 million hits and the White House has gotten an "encouraging response" from members of Congress and the public," Kundra wrote.
"We want to hear from you about what works and what doesn't with the site. Is there a more innovative approach that an investment should consider? Does the contract data look incorrect to you? Is there an application that we should add? This is a site to serve you, and to do that, we need to hear from you," he said. Answering that call, the Sunlight Foundation has already offered a detailed critique of the IT dashboard here.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., appears to have come along way with his technology literacy since the 2008 presidential campaign. On Monday, his account on the micro-blogging Web site Twitter topped one million followers. "I'm both honored and humbled that over one million people follow me on Twitter. It has been one of the most enjoyable experiences in my long political career - not too bad for an old guy," McCain said in a statement. Flashback to July 2008: McCain told the New York Times in an interview that he was learning how to use a computer but isn't an e-mail enthusiast.
"I don't e-mail, I've never felt the particular need to e-mail," he said. "I don't expect to be a great communicator. I don't expect to set up my own blog." At the time, McCain said he was "becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need including going to my daughter's blog." Meghan McCain wrote McCainBlogette.com during the campaign. He also told the newspaper that his staff surfs the Web on his behalf.
A few recent McCain tweets:
# Live interview with Russ Clark, KBLU-AM 560 in Yuma, AZ @ 10:45 am ET to chat about my upcoming trip to Yuma on Friday.about 1 hour ago
# Wow, I just went over 1 million followers - thanks everyone!!about 19 hours ago
# Interview with Voice of America on upcoming Afghanistan elections.
# Fighting the good fight on Senate floor 2 strike F-22 funding from DoD bill -saving the taxpayer $1.75 b - Need Joint Strike Fighter insteadabout 23 hours ago
And here are a few folks McCain is following on Twitter: CNN's Larry King; comedian Rainn Wilson ("The Office"); House Minority Whip Eric Cantor; Gov. Bobby Jindal, R-La.; Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.; basketball star Shaquille O'Neal; Gov. Tim Pawlenty, R-Minn.; ABC's George Stephanopoulos; NBC's David Gregory; and McCain's daughter, Meghan. (Psst, President Obama has 1.7 million Twitter followers -- and McCain isn't one of them).
The Senate late Monday unanimously passed legislation to reauthorize two federal programs intended to increase research and development funding for small businesses, which are slated to expire July 31 absent congressional action. The House passed its version of the bill to prolong the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs last Wednesday. Recipients of SBIR and STTR awards have produced more than 85,000 patents and have generated millions of well-paying jobs across all 50 states, Senate Small Business Chairwoman Mary Landrieu said in a press release that commended her colleagues for moving forward with the measure. She pledged to work with the House to get a bill to President Obama before the end of the month.
"Reauthorizing the SBIR and STTR programs will unleash the ground-breaking innovation potential of our nation's small businesses, particularly given that these critical initiatives direct more than $2 billion in federal research and development funding annually to small-tech firms across the nation," ranking member Olympia Snowe said. "At a time when the nation is struggling to dig out of the deepest recession since the Great Depression, we must ensure that our country once again brings to bear the kind of ingenuity, creativity, and innovation that made America and our free-market economy the greatest and most powerful on earth."
The Senate bill, which differs from the House version, provides for an increase to the SBIR program allocation, raising it to 3.5 percent, spread out over 11 years. The SBIR allocation increase includes all agencies, including the National Institutes of Health. The bill also increases the STTR program allocation from 0.3 percent to 0.6 percent over six years. Additionally, the Senate bill would amend eligibility requirements to allow businesses owned and controlled by multiple venture capital firms to compete for a percentage of SBIR projects. To improve the diversity of the programs, the measure also reauthorizes the Federal and State Technology program and Rural Outreach Program.
Read CongressDaily's coverage of House action here (subscription required).
NextGov.com's Aliya Sternstein reports...
The General Services Administration will release by early next week a redacted version of the potential $18 million contract to upgrade Recovery.gov, GSA officials said on Monday. Government transparency advocates had been calling on GSA and the board overseeing stimulus spending to publish the agreement that will cost taxpayers $9.5 million through January 2010 and up to $18 million if all options are exercised. Officials on Wednesday announced that GSA, on behalf of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, had negotiated the contract with Hollywood, Md.-based Web services developer Smartronix, but provided few other details about the deal.
The board late Friday posted an update that included a link to a June 15 request for proposals, which states the vendor must "move with speed" to provide a system that is expandable, secure and able to extract information from a separate data collection portal, feed that information to various third-parties and assess data quality. The new version of Recovery.gov is slated to launch Aug. 27. The solicitation also requires a back-up system and maintenance services. SRA International and Accenture, both technology services providers, also bid on the contract, GSA spokesman Robert Lesino said on Monday.
Meanwhile, the government's chief overseer of economic stimulus spending is defending last week's award to Smartronix. Earl Devaney said Friday in an interview with National Journal Group that critics of the contract's cost have oversimplified the task of rebuilding "the government's largest Web site" in a matter of months, as well as the challenge of putting in place security controls and interconnectivity with a reporting system designed to handle an ocean of data. Read more about Devaney's comments in Monday's CongressDaily PM Edition here (subscription required).
A Web-based governmental social networking project aimed at improving patent quality by connecting the Patent and Trademark Office with outside scientific and technical experts has effectively shut down after a two year test run and accolades from the White House. The Peer-to-Patent project, a joint effort between the PTO and New York Law School's Center for Patent Innovation has stopped accepting new applications but will continue processing those already in the system. The PTO elected to close Peer-to-Patent to new applications "until it can complete a full evaluation of the impact the project has had on the patent examination process," according to a NYLS press release.
There remain more than 70 applications on the Peer-to-Patent site awaiting review and interest in the program remains high as evidenced by the continued interest of applicants, the federal government, educational institutions, and international patent offices, officials said. Major companies such as General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft all submitted patent applications to the Peer-to-Patent process. Other patent applications were submitted by Cisco Systems, Disney Enterprises, eBay, Novel, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, Xerox, and Yahoo, as well as smaller firms.
Peer-to-Patent was launched in June 2007 by Beth Noveck, a professor at the law school who now serves as President Obama's deputy chief technology officer and head of the White House's open government project. The project is featured in the White House Open Government Innovations Gallery, an online resource that "celebrates the innovators and innovations who are championing the President's vision of more effective and open government." IBM executive David Kappos, Obama's pick for PTO director, was one of the early proponents of Peer-to-Patent and directed IBM in providing both financial and technical assistance for the effort.
The Government Accountability Office is the latest federal agency to embrace video sharing community YouTube and micro-blogging platform Twitter with the goal of helping users of such Web sites stay informed about the work of the investigative arm of Congress. "GAO is always exploring ways to use innovative practices and emerging technologies to carry out its mission," Acting Comptroller General Gene Dodaro said in a press release. "While we've made extensive use of the Internet for some time, posting material on YouTube and Twitter offers new possibilities to inform people about our efforts to promote accountability and transparency in federal programs and operations."
The GAO has posted many of its videos, including those from its economic stimulus and presidential transition Web pages on its YouTube channel. The main featured video is "More Than Numbers," a recruitment reel based on news coverage of GAO's work. The office is also providing links back to underlying reports or testimony to assist viewers interested in reading more about the agency's findings, conclusions, and recommendations. Through the Twitter account, individuals will be alerted when a GAO product is issued. The agency has created two Twitter feeds, one for reports and testimony and another for legal products. More than 50 federal agencies and a growing number of lawmakers now use Twitter to send and read each others' updates.
The Library of Congress, which preserves and makes available to the public more than 138 million books, photographs, maps, sound recordings, films, and other material in 470 languages, is undergoing a massive transformation thanks to the digital revolution -- and that point is not lost on lawmakers. The Senate on Monday approved a FY 2010 spending bill that would provide the institution with $8.5 million to update its information technology infrastructure. The library's overall budget under the legislative branch appropriations package would be $638.5 million, which is $31.5 million higher than 2009 and $19.8 million below President Obama's request. The House passed its own version of the bill last month, which provided $7.3 million for "digital collections and educational curricula."
"While less than the full request, the amount recommended is sufficient for LOC to embark on upgrades to its content delivery, content management and core technology," a Senate Appropriations Committee report from last month stated. The panel said it expects the library to update its digital strategy to ensure IT investments are targeted appropriately. The report pointed out that while a preliminary digital strategy has been developed, it does not represent an integrated, library-wide plan for digitization. Appropriators called on the institution to "incorporate key stakeholder views on the extent to which the library should make its collections available digitally."
Innovation and job creation will be the topic du jour at the White House on Thursday afternoon when President Obama meets with business leaders from small and large companies. The conversation, which will include several high-tech executives, will focus on potential ways of developing long-term solution to strengthen the U.S. economy. CEOs participating in the dialogue will talk about what steps they have taken to increase productivity in their industry during a recession through innovation and technology, according to a White House e-mail.
Amit Chatterjee, CEO of and founder of Hara Software, is among the participants. Prior to founding Hara he led SAP's fast-growing governance, risk and compliance unit and before that, worked with clients like Cisco Systems and Oracle at McKinsey & Co. Hara builds software that lets companies track their use of natural resources and carbon emissions. Applied Materials CEO Michael Splinter will also attend the meeting. Splinter is a 30-year veteran of the semiconductor industry and has led Applied Materials to record revenue and profits during his tenure.
Other attendees include Standard Renewable Energy CEO John Berger, Dow Corning CEO Stephanie Burns, Positive Edge President Alex Laskey, FPL Group President Jim Robo, Hycrete CEO David Rosenberg and Chuck Swoboda, CEO of Cree Lighting.
The White House will bring back its popular online town hall concept on Wednesday with an event streamed live on the Internet that will focus on healthcare reform. President Obama will answer questions from an on-site audience at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Va., as well as queries from the Internet. His senior advisor Valerie Jarrett will moderate the event. Unlike Obama's March town hall, which pulled questions about job creation and the economy from a user-generated list on the White House Web site, this time the administration has reached out to social networking site Facebook, video sharing site YouTube and micro-blogging platform Twitter.
On Saturday, Obama posted a video asking for questions on healthcare reform and in just a few days, the Web team received hundreds of submissions. "The questions spanned the ideological spectrum, and ranged from heart-breaking and personal to almost wonkishly policy-focused," White House Online Programs Director Jesse Lee wrote in a blog post. Citizens can watch, discuss, and engage at 1:15 p.m. EDT through a Facebook live-stream chat application and viewers can send comments at WhiteHouse.gov/live or take part in a conversation on Twitter using hashtag #WHHCQ.
The House Armed Services Committee last week offered its support to the Army's controversial high-tech effort to increase awareness and knowledge of the military among recruitment-age youth. In a report accompanying the fiscal year 2010 defense authorization bill, which passed the House last Thursday, the panel commended the Army Experience Center in Philadelphia and its transportable counterpart, the Virtual Army Experience. The initiatives are examples of projects "that hold great potential to reshape recruiting techniques and conduct recruiting operations on a more cost effective basis," the report said. Critics argue the 14,500 square-foot center encourages youth to play violent videogames and in May, several groups including Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace held a protest outside the facility.
"The committee believes this type of investment is essential if the Army intends to keep pace with societal changes regarding the subjects that capture the attention of young people and methods young people use to gather information and socially interact," the House Armed Services report stated. "The committee understands that during periods when recruiting is relatively easy, investment in experimental programs draws increased scrutiny." The document urged the Army to invest in the projects to maximize their immediate value and learn more about how the military can further adapt technology to harness the power of the information age to support its recruiting mission. At the May protest, Iraq veteran Jesse Hamilton called the center "an abomination" that targets impressionable minors and glorifies war.
Four congressional leaders on competitiveness Monday asked the National Academies to form a panel to examine the standing of the nation's research universities amid growing concerns that U.S. schools could be outpaced by foreign institutions. The group would answer the following question: "What are the top 10 actions that Congress, state governments, research universities, and others could take to assure the ability of the American research university to maintain the excellence in research and doctoral education needed to help the United States compete, prosper, and achieve national goals for health, energy, the environment, and security in the global community of the 21st century?" The request is similar to one in 2005 that led to an Academies report that became the basis for competitiveness legislation that passed the 110th Congress.
Members who signed the letter to the Academies were Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and Science Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, D-Md.; Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a former education secretary and chairman of the Senate Republican Conference; House Science and Technology Committee Chairman Bart Gordon and ranking member Ralph Hall. "America's research universities are powerhouses of innovation, incubators for the ideas and breakthroughs that have made America an economic superpower," Mikulski said in a press release. "We need the best minds working on what steps we can take today to keep our nation innovating tomorrow and every day after that." Alexander called U.S. research universities "our secret weapon for creating jobs" but warned that other nations are catching up.
High-tech efforts to publicize President Obama's June 4 speech in Egypt aimed at forging a new relationship with the Muslim world exceeded organizers' expectations so the administration is planning a similar outreach attempt next month, a State Department official said Monday. Obama will give a speech while in Ghana July 10 and 11, which will be his first visit to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office. Victor Riche, who heads State's IT office, said the White House will again transmit the talk via text message in multiple languages. "I'm sure we'll double, triple, or quadruple the text messaging," he said of the Ghana event. The Cairo speech was translated into 14 languages on America.gov and spurred a flood of activity on the micro-blogging site Twitter.
Riche told a Homeland Security Department privacy and technology workshop that the State Department has been a leader in embracing the Internet to broadcast the country's diplomatic message and engage in an international dialogue. Following on an array of webcasts, digital video presentations, social networking and forays into the virtual world Second Life, the agency is planning even more tech-savvy projects under the leadership of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale. Some staffers were plucked from Riche's office last week and placed in a new unit where they will focus on social media, he said. "The department is moving forward in a big way in this area," he said, noting that technology is "the perfect complement to public diplomacy."
Riche, who spoke on a panel with representatives from DHS, the Defense Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Academy of Public Administration, said he is working with McHale and others on formulating formal rules for social media use at the State Department. That guidance should be finalized next month, he said. Look for more coverage from the DHS summit in CongressDaily's PM Edition.
"Technology is the future of education," House Committee on Education and Labor Chairman George Miller said Tuesday while playing with a computer simulation of a dissected frog during a showcase of up-and-coming education technologies. "Now the frogs don't have to die," he joked. Earlier in the day, Miller presided over a hearing on how technology is transforming the public school system. President Obama's recently confirmed Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra testified. "We need to harness the power and potential of technology and innovation to revamp our educational system," Chopra said.
At the post-hearing demonstration sponsored by the State Educational Technology Directors Association and the Software & Information Industry Association, Miller was joined by educators and other lawmakers, including Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who is also a member of the Education and Labor Committee. The gadgets ran the gamut from data management software to interactive whiteboards that have touch-screen capabilities. "The goal is to show, not just tell, what's possible using technology in education," said Mary Ann Wolf, a former teacher who now serves as SETDA's executive director. SETDA, the principle association representing state directors for education technology, organizes several meetings a year including a leadership summit and an educational forum. -- Eliza Krigman
More than 40 percent of Internet users now utilize social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, up from 27 percent a year ago, according to a new report from the Conference Board and TNS. More than half of social networkers log on at least once a day, and the majority log on several times a day, the report found. The majority of users log on at home, although a quarter of social networkers log on at work, and 10 percent connect through their phone, officials said, citing the Consumer Internet Barometer, a quarterly study that surveys 10,000 households across the country. Among those surveyed, the most popular site was Facebook (used by 78 percent), followed by MySpace (42 percent), LinkedIn (17 percent) and Twitter (10 percent).
Social networking spans all generations, polling showed. About 19 percent of those age 55 and over visit these sites, up from just 6 percent a year ago. Women are more likely than men to use social networking sites (48 percent vs. 38 percent), but usage has increased dramatically among both groups in just a year. "Online social networks are more than just a fad among the younger generation. They've become an integral part of our personal and professional lives," the Conference Board's Lynn Franco said in a press release. "They're powerful communication tools, and are becoming an essential part of successful marketing strategies." Read more about the report here.
An innovative Google advertising tactic helped Virginia state legislator Creigh Deeds clinch Tuesday night's Democratic gubernatorial primary victory. Starting Monday afternoon, the Deeds campaign launched a Google network blast (sometimes called a Google "surge") to capitalize on his weekend gains in the polls and get out the vote for Election Day, according to an email from a Google spokeswoman. His display ads, which encouraged Virginians to "vote today" and referenced a Washington Post endorsement, reached over 80 percent of people online in Northern Virginia on top sites like WashingtonPost.com and WSJ.com.
The ads were geo-targeted, which means they were only visible to people in Northern Virginia or Washington, DC proper (to capture people that work in the District but live in Virginia). Deeds also recently pulled ahead of his rivals in terms of volume of searches on Google. Searches for his name first surpassed former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and state legislator Brian Moran on May 29 and, as of June 5, searches for Deeds were up more than 25 percent compared to McAuliffe, Google said. Deeds will face Republican Bob McDonnell in November.
463 Communications, the Washington PR firm that represents Cisco Systems, VeriSign, the Consumer Electronics Association and other technology clients has formally joined with polling firm Zogby International to form Zogby463 -- an initiative that will track public opinions on a variety of topics pertaining to technology and the economy. The companies have been collaborating since 2005 on a range of strategic communications and opinion research projects for clients including the Tech CEO Council, Symantec, Skype, Dell, and IBM. "At the heart of every successful strategy is insightful data," 463 CEO Tom Galvin said. The joint venture will offer what Galvin called "evidence-based communications" that guide strategy decisions and drive and define policy debates.
To launch their partnership, 463 and Zogby hosted a Monday luncheon with remarks about U.S. innovation by former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie, longtime tech lobbyist Chris Caine, and Democratic campaign veteran turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur Donnie Fowler. Caine, who recently started his own consulting firm after working for IBM, warned there is a "deep under-appreciation" in the United States about how extensively and rapidly the world is changing. "I don't think we've focused enough in the executive branch and legislative branch in being the most welcoming environment" for a new generation of global citizens, he said. Fowler noted the majority of venture capitalist money still comes from the United States and this country continues to offer the best universities and graduate programs in the world.
Senate Rules Chairman Charles Schumer and ranking member Robert Bennett offered colleagues some tips this week on how to use Internet-based new media since September 2008 changes allowing senators to move beyond their official Senate.gov sites to take advantage of innovations like the micro-blogging service Twitter and video sharing site YouTube. At that time, offices were instructed that "care needs to be taken not to violate Senate rules, regulations, standing orders and statutes governing Senate operations, including the prohibition on using Senate Internet resources for personal, promotional, commercial, or partisan political/campaign purposes."
Their Wednesday letter points out:
• Senate business must be separate from political/commercial/promotional activities.
• No official resources (office funds, staff time, equipment, space) may be used for the creation or maintenance of political, commercial, or promotional material on these sites.
• Members maintaining sites outside Senate.gov domain should ensure that public commentary, if permitted, is clearly distinguished from official content.
• Certain Web sites may collect data from users and members are cautioned against having an official presence on sites that may use such data for political or commercial activities.
• Sites with official Senate content may not require a fee or service charge for viewing.
• Certain sites, especially those that are not official sanctioned by the Senate Rules Committee, may place advertising on pages containing official member content. This can pose risks to members who may have no control over the content.
• At this time the only third-party Web site that has formally entered into an agreement to keep all promotional, commercial, or partisan advertising and commentary from member sponsored pages is YouTube.
• The Rules Committee is actively working with other sites to include them on the list of sites that agree to the Senate Internet regulation requirements.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Tuesday that the administration will go to great lengths -- and employ various Internet technologies -- to ensure that President Obama's speech in Cairo, Egypt on Thursday is distributed as far and wide as possible. The speech is expected to open up a new dialogue with the Muslim world and could provide the most significant guidance from Obama yet about advancing the Middle East peace process. "I think there will be a great effort on our part to distribute this through different means, social networking sites, in order to get this in front of as many eyes throughout the world as we can," Gibbs said.
But when pressed on the tech-related specifics of the plan, Gibbs was unsure of what platforms will carry Obama's message:
Q: Robert, just a quick procedural question. You said that you guys are going to distribute the Cairo speech on social networks. Are you guys going to be Twittering it?
GIBBS: No -- that'd be awkward, wouldn't it? We can't even get that on the computers here. No, I think what I mean by that -- and we'll have some more in-depth on this, but obviously our goal is to ensure that the greatest number of people with an interest to see this -- not just through newspapers and television, but can see this through Web sites, I think it will be broadcast -- I'm pretty sure it will be broadcast on our Web site and the Internet team here is working with a host of others to get this information to as many platforms as humanly possible so that people will get a chance all over the world to see what the president has to say.
The Seattle-based start-up that helped fuel President Obama's Web-based transition team donor disclosure effort has changed its name, hired a Washington, D.C. public relations firm and on Tuesday launched a social network that aggregates public data from around the world in a single destination. Socrata, formerly known as Blist, is piggybacking on the administration's zeal for open government by offering a Web site intended to increase agencies' transparency; promote civic participation and community collaboration; and improve policymaking. Building on more than a year of beta test feedback from more than 40,000 public and private sector customers, Socrata.com initially is providing free access to more than 200 public datasets. The Obama administration recently unveiled Data.gov, a Web destination for citizens to gain access to agencies' raw data feeds. Socrata offers a wide range of feeds on everything from government agencies to those bilked by financier Bernard Madoff to seafood and chicken recipes.
"Much has been discussed in recent months about government transparency and citizen participation. Socrata truly allows government transparency to come to life," Socrata CEO Kevin Merritt said in a press release circulated by tech PR firm 463 Communications. "We are providing publicly available data in an interactive, social format that enables citizens, for the first time, to discover, read, manipulate and share publicly available data with a tool we all have -- a Web browser." Until now, sites focused on public datasets have been hard to navigate and often required tedious downloading of raw file-types to proprietary applications for offline use by IT experts, Socrata said. Plus, most of those sites were not engineered for Web 2.0. The firm is backed by Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures and raised more than $6 million in its first round of funding.
In related news, the Sunlight Foundation recently launched a contest for to Web engineers to use Data.gov information in creative and helpful ways. First prize is $10,000 and the winner will be announced later this summer. Read more about that effort here.
Craig Newmark, the founder of popular online community Craigslist.org, said Tuesday he is considering whether to "dedicate a big chunk of my life" to those who are driving change in Washington and wants to spend more time practicing his own brand of public service. Was his comment during a keynote at the annual Computers Freedom & Privacy conference a hint he is considering joining President Obama's stable of tech-savvy advisers or running for Congress? Probably not (although he was involved in Obama's campaign). But the Web freedom advocate is eager to get more engaged in the policy debate in the nation's capital. As the government tries to figure out how to effectively use consumer products like micro-blogging site Twitter and photo-sharing site Flickr, Newmark wants to weigh in. "Things are changing in ways we've never seen before in human history," Newmark said, noting that agency Web managers and IT experts may feel "as if the darkness suddenly lifted."
The Internet entrepreneur said he wants to "find the people who are doing the real work" and act as their cheerleader and champion. "As a nerd and former engineer I'm used to being the person who does stuff. Now they tell me my great value is primarily being a person who talks about the good work other people do," Newmark said. He lauded the Obama administration's recently launched open government initiative and Data.gov, a site intended to "democratize data" by offering raw feeds of government information, but warned their ambitious efforts will take time. "When you have a large organization... you have a lot of people with a lot of entrenched power and lot of stakeholders whose buy-in you need," Newmark said. At the same time, the administration will have to routinely analyze the effects of its tech-related projects.
The State Department on Wednesday afternoon will host the first ever U.S. government-sponsored Technology, Entertainment, Design, or TED, event. Speakers include social-media analyst Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody; philanthropist Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of the Acumen Fund; futurist Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Catalog; economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion; and data visionary Hans Rosling, Karolinska Institutet Professor of International Health. Ambassador Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, State's Special Representative for Global Partnerships, will introduce the speakers, and Chris Anderson, curator of TED, will moderate a question-and-answer session. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton launched the Global Partnership Initiative on April 22, which seeks to establish public-private partnerships with foundations, businesses, non-governmental organizations, universities, and faith communities. TED is an annual invitation-only event in Long Beach, Calif., that began in 1984 where the world's leading thinkers and doers are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). First Lady Michelle Obama and former Vice President Al Gore have both given recent TED talks. Video from the State Department event will be posted on the TED Web site, www.TED.com.
Even though the Obama administration has made important, early strides in its first 133 days as part of its technology policy agenda, a key adviser to the president on Tuesday said the White House has a long way to go. "We need your criticism, your engagement, your involvement, and your help," Susan Crawford, special assistant to the president for science, technology and innovation policy, told the Computers Freedom & Privacy conference. After "timely, targeted and tapered" economic stimulus package implementation, the administration's focus will turn to job creation -- and that weighs heavily on high-tech investment, said Crawford who is also a member of the National Economic Council. Innovation is tied to a range of priorities from diminishing the country's carbon footprint and creating clean energy jobs to reducing the cost of healthcare and educating the next generation.
Crawford also spoke about the need to bolster broadband deployment and bridge the gaps between urban and rural areas and rich and poor Americans. She said the United States is "definitively behind" its international counterparts and Obama cares deeply about the issue. "This is not about national pride. This is about restoring American competitiveness for the future," Crawford stressed. Addressing the problem will require "civility, thoughtfulness and attention" and that work has begun at the FCC and elsewhere in the administration, she added. On the international front, Crawford pointed out that the State Department is using technology to expand its traditional government-to-government outreach to incorporate citizen-centered approaches to advancing U.S. diplomatic and developmental goals. "A networked public can meaningfully shape international politics," Crawford said. Also from CFP: White House Aide Warns Online Advertisers To Be Monitored (Dow Jones).
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has spruced up its Internet presence with the launch of a Web site that has a fresh look and a focus on providing more information to the public about the Obama administration's trade policy initiatives. The site features a blog and an interactive map that will track USTR Ron Kirk's global travel as well as pages on geographical areas, trade agreements, and key trade issues with interactive tools to allow for easier public participation. Americans will also have the opportunity to submit their trade questions and trade stories to Kirk through an "Ask the Ambassador" initiative. A social networking component is forthcoming, officials said in a press release. Kirk issued a statement saying one of his goals as USTR is to use technology to connect directly with citizens and the agency's site will help accomplish that while fulfilling the president's commitment to create a transparent, participatory and collaborative government.
President Obama isn't the only federal government official taking advantage of YouTube these days, the video sharing site's news and politics guru Steve Grove pointed out in a Friday blog post. Dozens of official federal YouTube channels exist where Internet users can access footage from NASA, the State Department, the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and more. "It's all part of making Washington, D.C., more transparent and accessible than ever before -- and helping you easily navigate government information that's relevant to your life," Grove wrote. There's more to come in the months ahead. For now, go to the U.S. government's hub on YouTube and see what it has to offer.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy wants the public to weigh in by June 19 on how the U.S. government can embrace 21st century tools to increase openness and transparency and facilitate better communication with citizens. OSTP is expected to run a notice in the Federal Register on Thursday, which stems from President Obama's Jan. 21 memorandum on a proposed open government directive. The inquiry will ask questions like:
• What information should be more readily available online or more easily searched?
• How might the operations of government be made more transparent and accountable?
• How might federal advisory committees, rulemaking, or electronic rulemaking be better used to improve decision making?
• What alternative models exist to improve the quality of decision making and increase opportunities for citizen participation?
• What are the limitations to transparency?
• What strategies might be employed to adopt greater use of Web 2.0 in agencies?
• What policy impediments to innovation in government currently exist?
• What changes in training or hiring of personnel would enhance innovation?
• What performance measures are necessary to determine the effectiveness of open government policies?
Comments can be submitted by one of the following methods:
• http://www.whitehouse.gov/open (which will go live Thursday)
• E-mail: opengov@ostp.gov
• Mail: Office of Science and Technology Policy, Attn: Open Government
Recommendations, 725 17th Street, Washington, DC 20502
During his Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, federal chief technology officer-designate Aneesh Chopra gave a shout-out to his wife and daughters; his parents; and a woman named Linda Bruschi. He explained that shortly after President Obama announced his nomination, Bruschi -- Chopra's third grade teacher -- "friended" her former student on Facebook. "Because of her efforts, she helped me see the future and opened up a door for an exciting new world of opportunity," Chopra said in his testimony. "In the way she opened a door for me, I want to open a door for others. It's this wondrous idea of extending personal opportunity, fueled by new technologies, which especially excites me."
Tech Daily Dose reached out to Bruschi (on Facebook) to ask a few questions about what she remembers of little Aneesh Chopra. Here are some of her responses:
Q: Did Aneesh have an early interest in technology? If so, what specifically do you remember?
A: When Aneesh was in second grade, we were only beginning to hear about computers being used in elementary schools. It wasn't until a few years later that the school system provided computers for all the classrooms.
Q: What were the subjects in which he excelled and which were the subjects that challenged him most?
A: Aneesh excelled in all areas, but in particular, in math. I needed to provide him with more advanced math work to challenge him and develop higher levels of thinking. I was not surprised to learn that he was invited into the district's math gifted and talented program when he moved to grades 4 to 6.
The United States is deploying new high-tech tools to meet challenges associated with the humanitarian crisis that is affecting Pakistan, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced during a Tuesday briefing with the White House press corps. She said in addition to providing $100 million in aid, the State Department is working to support the Pakistani government in launching a text-messaging system that will alert local communities to assistance efforts and will help family members keep in touch. The initiative is part of a broader effort to help those who have fled their homes in Swat Valley, where troops are engaged in a battle with Taliban militants.
"We have been hard at work in this area for a number of weeks, looking for ways that we can get communications directly to people on the ground," Clinton said. "We know that a lot of the Pakistanis who are being displaced by the conflict have cell phones. So we're going to try to reach directly to them, not only to give them information that will be of assistance to them, but also to provide a way of connecting them up with other people, with the military, with the governing authorities." She said Americans can also help by texting the word "swat" to the number 20222 to make a $5 contribution for tents, clothing, food, and medicine to hundreds of thousands of affected people.
For about 10 seconds I felt really special to have an e-mail from President Obama in my inbox. But then I clicked open the message titled "Health care news worth sharing" and realized the e-mail alerts I signed up for when the administration unveiled the new, improved WhiteHouse.gov had begun. Wednesday's email blast was in fact the first time Team Obama has utilized the Web tool to reach out to constituents, a spokesman told Tech Daily Dose. This message came after Obama and Vice President Biden met with House leaders and received their commitment to pass a comprehensive healthcare reform bill by July 31. In the email, Obama urged readers to get involved in the debate and visit HealthReform.gov for more in-depth information. While officials would not say how many people had signed up for the White House e-mail alerts or how frequently the list would be used, the spokesman did note that future messages will come from Obama and other top officials. So, if you get an e-mail from Timothy Geithner or Larry Summers, you'll know what's up.
A pair of high-tech watchdog groups on Wednesday offered a series of privacy safeguards and conditions they believe should be met in order to allow federal agencies to implement the use of analytics tools on their Web sites. The paper co-authored by experts at the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation also calls on providers of analytics technology to build their products to higher privacy standards than are currently found in commercial products. Because agency Web sites will play a role in President Obama's plan for participatory government, special attention must be paid to protecting citizen privacy, they wrote.
Recommendations for agencies include crafting robust policies to ensure that data collected for measurement purposes is adequately protected and updating current federal policy on persistent tracking technologies, such as cookies. Current federal policy requires, among other things, that the agency head authorize each use of these technologies, CDT and EFF said. The result has been a near prohibition of persistent tracking technologies. While the policy should remain extremely protective of privacy, it should also allow federal agencies to take advantage of advances in Web technology, the groups said. Read the report here.
From the May 9 issue of National Journal magazine...
Google is rising fast. It has a near-monopoly on Internet searches, holds a commanding share of the growing online advertising market, and is expanding into myriad online services now dominated by its politically wired corporate rivals. That trajectory matches Microsoft's, but with a major difference. Microsoft spurned Washington and was subsequently humbled by a 1998 antitrust lawsuit backed by its rivals. Google has carefully cultivated friends and political clout in Washington, particularly on the Democratic side of the aisle, to help it withstand the inevitable pushback from aggrieved competitors.
Google's influence is illustrated by reaction to the book deal that it signed with publishers and authors last year. The agreement gives Google 37 percent of any revenue derived from the company's digitizing of an estimated 7 million "orphan" books whose copyright owners can't be found and makes it difficult for other companies to get any revenue from those works. "Google is the huge, 2-ton gorilla, with resources from here to kingdom come," said former Rep. Pat Schroeder, D-Colo., the former president of the Association of American Publishers. Executives in publishing and other media industries are nervous about the Google's expansion, she said, but "mainly feel [that the company's executives] have contributed a tremendous amount to the culture by this tremendous search engine, and everybody is using it. That builds goodwill."
Read the full story in National Journal magazine here (subscription required).
Senate Rules Committee Chairman Charles Schumer and ranking member Bob Bennett took a large but simple step this week toward modernizing the way the chamber provides information about roll call votes by instructing the Secretary of the Senate to embrace XML format. The change will allow the public to use computers to search, sort, and visualize Senate voting records in new ways and the costs associated with the transition are minor, said Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., who has championed the effort. By moving forward on XML, Schumer and Bennett are helping to increase Senate transparency and accountability, DeMint said in a statement. In a letter last week to the Rules Committee leaders, DeMint pointed out the existing policy was implemented because "senators want to provide their voting records to their constituents themselves." "The idea that the Senate would intentionally hamstring the distribution of roll call votes so Senators could put a better spin on them is concerning," he wrote. "The public is capable of interpreting our votes on its own." For a number of years, the House has provided roll call votes to the public in a format that allows them to be easily read, processed, and shared.
Social networking site MySpace unveiled a new White House community Friday that will allow users to connect directly with the Obama administration and stay informed about the priorities and activities of the U.S. government. The platform also lets members voice their thoughts and concerns directly to the White House by leaving comments and participating in discussion forums. The White House will be uploading new blog posts and videos regularly to populate its profile. Hundreds joined as "friends" of the White House within an hour of the announcement and the page was slow to load, potentially due to high traffic.
President Obama is the first president on MySpace and he has more than a million friends on his individual page. He also has almost 60 other official profiles -- one for each state and many constituencies, according to a MySpace press release. The Web site has been active in the political and policy sphere, most recently with a project that let citizens define potential issues for Obama's agenda before he took office. MySpace engaged in a number of campaign season activities including a content partnership with NBC News; a voter registration drive; and a series of events with MTV featuring presidential candidates. MySpace was also the official online partner for the Commission on Presidential Debates.
Update: Lest you think Obama is showing support for one platform over another, a White House blog post points out that his Web team has joined Facebook and Twitter too. And don't forget about Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube and iTunes. "Technology has profoundly impacted how - and where - we all consume information and communicate with one another. WhiteHouse.gov is an important part of the Administration's effort to use the internet to reach the public quickly and effectively - but it isn't the only place," the blog stated.
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., is circulating a draft letter that asks Senate Rules Chairman Charles Schumer and ranking member Bob Bennett to modernize the way the chamber provides information about roll call votes, thus increasing Senate transparency. For a number of years, the House has provided roll call votes to the public in a format that allows them to be easily read, processed, and shared but the Senate continues to make available its votes in what government watchdogs have complained is an antiquated fashion that prevents easy analysis and dissemination.
Utilizing an XML format would allow the public to use computers to search, sort, and visualize voting records in new ways, the letter states, noting that the costs associated with the transition would be negligible but the impact would be profound. "As Americans increasingly turn to Internet to stay informed, the Senate as a body has a duty to promote timely and accurate reporting of our actions through the most current and effective technologies," DeMint wrote. He noted that the Secretary of the Senate and Sergeant at Arms have already made high-tech strides with the development of the Senate Web site and the lobbying disclosure database but it's time to go a step further.
In the letter, DeMint states the policy was initially implemented because "senators want to provide their voting records to their constituents themselves." "The idea that the Senate would intentionally hamstring the distribution of roll call votes so Senators could put a better spin on them is concerning," he wrote. "The public is capable of interpreting our votes on its own." Across Capitol Hill, Rep. Melissa Bean, D-Ill., introduced a resolution last month directing the Clerk of the House to create an online record -- organized by member name -- of recorded votes taken in the House and to direct each member to link to the registry on their Web sites.
The Library of Congress has made "tremendous progress" with its information technology infrastructure but in order to remain current and competitive, the facility needs to take several significant steps to evolve, Library Inspector General Karl Schornagel told the House Administration Committee on Wednesday. He recently published a 60-page report that concluded strategic IT planning is not a "unifying force" at the Library nor is it linked to the investment process. The disconnect results in duplicated efforts and acquisitions. In addition to costs incurred for unfunded mandates, he found numerous areas where there were overlaps in support services and systems.
Schornagel also found that the Library's organizational structure of the Library's IT office does not foster strategic planning and good governance; the Library is missing an enterprise architecture program; and its customer service needs improvement. At the hearing, he suggested that the Library migrate to a more cohesive IT strategy, like comparable federal agencies, and recommended that the facility's IT security group be given the ability to implement higher security standards. Chairman Robert Brady cited the increasingly vital role technology plays in Library operations and ranking member Dan Lungren emphasized the criticality of cybersecurity.
From CongressDaily's PM Edition...
Government-wide guidance for how agencies can more fully utilize social media applications like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are forthcoming, President Obama's federal chief information officer said today. Vivek Kundra, who also serves as OMB's e-government and information technology administrator, told a conference for agency Web managers that the Federal CIO Council and the General Services Administration are working on the rules but did not give a timeframe for their release.
The GSA took an initial step last month by signing agreements with four video-sharing and social networks to provide services that comply with federal terms and conditions. Kundra said the guidance could "take some time" to align with statutes like the Presidential Records Act and the Privacy Act, which were enacted in the 1970s, and seven-year-old Federal Information Security Management Act. In the meantime, he urged attendees to work within their agencies to adopt pre-approved technologies.
A State Department-led delegation of U.S. high-tech executives visiting Baghdad this week met with President Jalal Talibani and Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih as well as the Iraqi minister for science and technology, technology executives, and university students. The trip by officials from Google, YouTube, AT&T, Twitter and others, was a fact-finding mission with the goal of listening and lending expertise -- not securing lucrative contracts, officials said Wednesday. The delegation reported during a conference call that the Iraqi government seemed open to new technology. For example, Salih has an iPhone, Gmail and promised to start a Twitter page. He said his daughter, who attends Princeton University, wants him to sign up for a profile on social networking site Facebook.
While the issue of government censorship of the Internet is a hot-button issue in many countries, YouTube's Hunter Walk said he and his colleagues heard just the opposite. "There was a lot of hope for a more transparent government process," he said on the conference call. Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman added that there is "a real commitment to building a real society." "I think the world looks to President Obama on how to self organize," he said. When asked whether the pace of technology was moving faster than the basic infrastructure in Iraq, State Department official Jared Cohen commented: "It's a good thing that they become more aware of what they don't have." Google's Ahmad Hamzawi pointed out that fiber is being laid throughout the country.
On the call, executives emphasized that the culture is changing steadily but challenges remain. "Too many people are dependent on the government. These are people who lived under dictatorship for years," Blue State Digital's David Nassar said. Google's Kannan Pashupathy added: "The young people have the spirit but not yet the decentralized psyche." Heiferman commented: "It's a fascinating moment in history where they are realizing their own power." For more about the trip, read this post on Tech Daily Dose.
House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson is slated to introduce the Community College Technology Access Act on Thursday, which will provide free computer training through the nation's community colleges so that workers can improve their IT skills and become more competitive during tough economic times. The Connecticut lawmaker's bill would give the Secretary of Education the authority to distribute grants to eligible community colleges that have computer labs and commit to opening their labs for 30 hours each week on weeknights and weekends, according to a summary of the legislation. It would also require that an instructor is present to provide training during those hours and that lab instruction is free and open to the public.
About $125 million would be authorized annually with grant amounts to be determined by the secretary. Each recipient school would have to report on the costs, hours of operation and number of individuals utilizing the service. Larson's legislation is based on a proposal developed by Dr. Rob Shapiro, chair of the New Democrat Network's Globalization Initiative, to use community colleges as technology hubs and efficient, cost-effective training grounds for the U.S. workforce. In July 2007, NDN and Shapiro released a major report, "Tapping the Resources of Community Colleges: A Modest Proposal to Provide Universal Computer Training." Larson and Shapiro will host a briefing on the bill at 3 p.m. on the terrace of the Cannon House Office Building at the corner of Independence Avenue and New Jersey Avenue.
Just in time for Earth Day, Web watchers at Google are seeing an abundance of search advertisements from advocacy groups and energy companies on terms like "smart grid" and "renewable energy." This comes as searches on Google for terms related to climate change and alternative energy reach an all-time high. A search for "greenhouse gas" or "clean energy" turns up paid ads from companies like BP and Chevron as well as the Environmental Defense Fund, Alliance for Climate Protection, Clinton Global Initiative, and American Farmland Trust. At least one group is using search ads to encourage constituents to schedule a meeting with their congressional representative to express support for a particular energy proposal.
These ads are part of a growing trend of lobbying dollars moving online. Peter Greenberger, Google's team manager for elections and issues advocacy, said searches for "cap and trade" are up 30 percent in 2009 compared to 2008 in the United States and searches for "smart grid" are up 53 percent. Similarly, searches for "renewable energy" are up 14 percent. To coincide with Earth Day and a push on Capitol Hill for global warming legislation, groups are buying "green" buzzwords that have popped up in the media and in Washington. "These online ads signal a new style of public affairs campaign. They allow issue groups to bypass traditional media filters and take their message directly to interested voters and lawmakers," Greenberger said in an email.
Reps. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and Mike McCaul, R-Texas, will host a briefing for members and staff on Wednesday afternoon that will focus on smart grid technology -- just in time for Earth Day. "Development of a new, intelligent smart grid could drastically increase the efficiency of our nation's electricity infrastructure," the Congressional High Tech Caucus co-chairs wrote in a recent "Dear Colleague" letter. "An upgraded electrical grid is essential to take full advantage of the vast renewable resources in this country -- to take the wind from the Midwest and the sun from the Southwest and power areas across the country," they wrote. The Department of Energy recently got the R&D ball rolling by announcing plans to distribute $3.4 billion in smart grid technology grants and $615 million for smart grid demonstration projects.
An expert panel will discuss what Congress can do to encourage innovative applications of technology to energy distribution. Guest speakers include GridPoint Vice President Steve Hauser; Pacific Gas & Electric's Darren Deffner; PJM Interconnection Vice President Craig Glazier; Accenture's Michael Donohue; and Hewlett-Packard security architect Robert Shein. In related Earth Day news, President Obama will travel to Iowa for a tour of Trinity Structural Towers, which manufactures towers for wind energy production. Also on Wednesday, as part of the procurement process of a new White House fleet of vehicles, the administration has invited Chrysler, GM, and Ford to participate in a green vehicle market research day.
* * * Updated 5 p.m. ET * * *
A handful of U.S. high-tech executives left for Baghdad Sunday on a trip arranged by the State Department, an agency spokesman said at a Monday briefing. The junket is the first of its kind for the CEOs, vice presidents and senior representatives from AT&T, Google, YouTube, Twitter, WordPress, Howcast, Meetup, Blue State Digital and others. Blue State Digital has strong ties to President Obama, having provided his campaign and the transition team with a number of services ranging from online fundraising and voter outreach to social networking and Web hosting. Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other company executives have also served as advisers to Obama.
"While in Iraq, the group will explore new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq's emerging new media industry," State Department spokesman Robert Wood said. During their visit, they will provide conceptual input as well as ideas on how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building. "As Iraqis think about how to integrate new technology as a tool for smart power, we view this as an opportunity to invite American technology industry to be part of this creative genesis," Wood said.
Wood was unable to identify the names of the executives on the trip but said he would try to furnish a list later in the day. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton "has been a strong proponent of using a full range of tools, including emerging new media and communication technologies, to leverage capabilities that will allow for diplomacy not just with governments but also with people and between different associates," he said. Earlier this month, Clinton hired on as her senior innovation adviser Alec Ross, who served on Obama's transition team and co-founded the nonprofit One Economy, which uses technology to assist low income communities.
An issue brief put out by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy Friday holds that the public should be concerned about Google's online library of books it has been acquiring from the collections of many university libraries. Currently, there is a proposed settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by authors and publishers against Google over copyright infringement. Google has denied the claims of the lawsuit. James Grimmelmann, the New York Law School professor who wrote the ACS report, argued the settlement would let Google sell books under copyright whose copyright owners cannot be found. He warned this turns Google "into a dominant platform with control over a huge catalog of books that no one else has access to."
Grimmelmann further claims the issue should be resolved through the legislative process and Google's competitors could also file antitrust lawsuits on the orphan works issue. Google has held that the settlement "promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form, by significantly expanding online access to works through Google Book Search, an ambitious effort to make millions of books searchable via the Web." "The agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works," Google said.
Readers of Grimmelmann's brief might want to note the footnotes on the bottom of the first page. Grimmelmann has significant ties to Google competitor Microsoft. He has headed the Public Interest Book Search Initiative, which has received funding from Microsoft and previously worked as computer programmer for Microsoft. Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans wrote in an email that his company has provided funding to the institute and dozens of other institutions. "We do so with the clear understanding that the work done is to be independent," he said. Evans added the company funded this proposal because "we believe it's an important public policy matter regarding a copyright subject (orphan works) that we have a history of interest in and have spoken about many times publicly as far back as four years ago." -- Winter Casey
Senate Commerce Committee member John Thune, R-S.D.; Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.; Virginia Technology Secretary Aneesh Chopra; and Internet visionary Susan Crawford, who is now working for the White House's National Economic Council, will headline the inaugural State of the Mobile Net policy conference on Capitol Hill later this month. The April 23 conference, hosted by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, will bring together mobile and wireless policy pros and tech industry leaders to discuss policy and marketplace issues facing the dynamically evolving mobile Internet.
Panelists will probe key public policy issues on panels such as "Spectrum: Is the Lifeblood of the Mobile Net Running Dry?," "Privacy on the Go," and "What Policy Framework Will Further Enable Innovation on the Mobile Net?" The conference will also feature educational panels on such topics as "What is the Mobile Net: Understanding the Mobile Net Ecosystem", "Cloud Computing and Emerging Business Models in the Mobile Space," and "Mobile Network Infrastructure Trends." More information about the conference and the full agenda can be found here.
The White House's annual Easter Egg Roll on Monday is going high-tech. For the first time, tickets were distributed online, allowing families from across the country to attend the annual tradition. Plus many of the activities at this year's event will be webcast live on WhiteHouse.gov -- another first for the Obama administration. Some of the fun streamed via the Web will include performances on the music stage, celebrity chefs in the Kid's Kitchen and the readings at the Storytime Stage. A full schedule of webcast events will be updated here. Over 30,000 people from 45 states and the District of Columbia will attend the Easter Egg Roll. Meanwhile, the 2009 souvenir Easter egg is the greenest egg in history. It was made in the United States from Forest Stewardship Council certified hardwood, which means the wood comes from environmentally and socially sustainably managed forests.
Q: On balance, has journalism been helped more or hurt more by the rise of news consumption on the Internet?
Media Insiders (45 votes)
Helped more 33%
Hurt more 62%
Both 4%
Helped more "Smart journalists see diversified Internet news voices as an asset and online venues as an opportunity. Dumb and/or insecure journalists see them as parasitical competitors and enemies. In either case, the erosion of homogenized control over news brought about by the Internet elevates the quality of journalism in numerous ways."
Hurt more "The benefits flowing from the tremendous new availability of information have yet to adequately offset the damage that the rise of this new business model has done to the expensive, risky, labor-intensive work of gathering, editing, packaging, and delivering reliable information from places and people that are often hard to get to and unwilling to help."
Both "Journalism is helped in that good journalism finds a much wider audience thanks to the Internet while flawed journalism is more quickly exposed. But the business of journalism is hurt by the fact that now readers expect to get information for free, and good journalism costs money to produce."
Read more about National Journal's Insiders Poll here.
From NationalJournal.com's Under The Influence blog...
On the campaign trail, President Obama promised to increase the transparency of government. Among the pledges he made was to create a centralized database on lobbying. The Sunlight Foundation has proposed something similar, saying the executive branch should create and administer a website aggregating disclosures of meetings between government officials and lobbyists. Under the Sunlight vision, meetings between executive branch political appointees and lobbyists would be posted on the site after each meeting is held. In the filings would be the names of the agency, the employees that attended the meeting, the lobbyist whom the government official met with and any clients the lobbyist represents. The site would also allow the public to track the meetings by lobbyist, subject matter, agency and official.
"We think the president is headed in the right direction: more real time, online disclosure of lobbying activity," said Sunlight Foundation Policy Director John Wonderlich in a statement. "Imagine having this sort of information from across the federal government right now -- being able to track who lobbying, and what each of those discussions is about." Sunlight is also urging both Congress and the administration to expand the legal definition of a lobbyist to include anyone paid to engage in direct issue advocacy with lawmakers, staff and executive branch officials. Currently, the law only requires individuals who spend more than 20 percent of their time lobbying for a client, and who also make more than two contacts with executive branch or congressional officials to register to lobby. Anyone who is below that threshold, doesn't have to register.
Continue reading Sunlight Proposes Online Lobbying Registry.
Creativity and innovation can be the cornerstone of U.S. economic development and the Obama administration is going to work to make sure the country continues to protect that critical resource, newly confirmed U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk told an audience at Howard University on Wednesday. "We know the world is hungry for American ideas," he said, adding that 95 percent of the world's consumers live outside the United States. "This [economic] crisis wasn't made in a day and it's not going to be solved in a day," Kirk said at a forum on intellectual property hosted by the National Foreign Trade Council's Global Innovation Forum and Howard's Institute for Entrepreneurship, Leadership & Innovation.
Having a "thoughtful, progressive rules-based trade program" for the United States can help restore the economy, Kirk said. "America's ideas can help turn our economy around and we can do it sooner rather than later," he said. Trading partners must commit to actions that will allow for a level playing field while protecting and enforcing IP rights and making sure there are market protections in place for U.S. investors. Meanwhile, they must respect international labor and environmental standards, Kirk said. Obama wants an enhanced focus on enforcement of existing rules through all the trade tools officials currently have in their arsenal, Kirk said, but the administration is also not afraid to file complaints with the WTO as a last resort.
Updated guidance on implementation of economic stimulus funds released by the Office of Management and Budget last week is a technological step backward, some Web experts are warning. Unlike the 62-page initial guidance document, OMB Director Peter Orszag's more detailed 175-page April 3 memo does not characterize e-mail-based reporting as an intermediary step nor does it require that Web feeds become the only way for information to flow from agencies, argues Erik Wilde, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley. Such a system would have helped advance the federal information architecture and assure that the same information sent to OMB from departments could also be consumed by the public, he said in a recent blog post.
The new guidelines make it clear that feeds are optional, and even if they are provided, they can be RSS or Atom format, he said. There is no specification of how data should be included in the feed nor is there a requirement for paged or archived feeds. "Feeds may not be prohibited by the new guidelines, but they certainly do not help at all to make feeds a reliable or robust source of information," Wilde wrote. The apparent about-face is understandable, he said, since implementing a federated feed-based regime would have been a challenge. "It really was not the smartest move to ask for a convenient short-term one-stop-shop, instead of recognizing that this could be a landmark shift in how information architecture is designed and exposed in the federal government," he said. Click here to read the updated OMB guidelines.
Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine on Tuesday unveiled "Virginia on iTunes U," a dedicated area within Apple's iTunes Store offering free access to educational content. Through iTunes U for K-12 education, students, teachers, and other interested users can "learn on the go" by downloading audio and video content onto an iPod, iTouch, or iPhone from any computer with Internet access. Virginia on iTunes U is a collaborative effort among state and national organizations including Radford University, Blue Ridge Public Television, and Thinkfinity.
To extend the initiative, Kaine also issued the "Learning Apps Development Challenge" to encourage developers to produce innovative mathematics applications that will engage middle school students and encourage advanced learning and achievement. That project, led by Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra in collaboration with the Department of Education, seeks applications focused on middle school mathematics Standards of Learning (SOL), such as fraction computation, proportions, and the relationship between fractions, decimals and percents.
After several months of work, the Library of Congress on Tuesday launched its own YouTube channel. The institution, which houses the world's largest collection of audiovisual materials (some 6 million films, broadcasts and sound recordings), unveiled its page on the popular video-sharing Web site with more than 70 videos, arranged in the following playlists: 2008 National Book Festival author presentations; the Books and Beyond author series; Journeys and Crossings (a series of curator discussions); "Westinghouse" industrial films from 1904; scholar discussions from the John W. Kluge Center; and the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison, including the first moving image ever made (a sneeze by a man named Fred Ott, pictured above).
Library blogger Matt Raymond promises that is just the beginning. "We have made a conscious decision that we're not just going to upload a bunch of videos and then walk away," he wrote. "As with our popular Flickr pilot project, we intend to keep uploading additional content." The Web team is modifying some its work-flows in modest ways to make digitized content more useful. Plus, all of the videos posted on YouTube will also be available at LOC.gov, on the library's American Memory collection Web page. Read Raymond's blog post here and visit the library's YouTube channel here.
Alec Ross, co-founder of the nonprofit One Economy, which uses technology to assist low income communities, has joined the State Department as a senior innovation adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. The job was created for the 37-year-old who left the organization he helped build to work on President Obama's transition team. Just last week, a group of public interest organizations asked the administration to raise the profile of technological innovation within the government and sources told Tech Daily Dose on Monday the position may be a model for other agencies. In his new capacity, Ross is charged with using technology to enhance the department's diplomatic missions in areas such as healthcare, poverty, and human rights, according to a Washington Post profile.
Prior founding of One Economy in 2000, Ross served as special assistant to the president of the Enterprise Foundation. In that capacity, he led special projects and the development of strategies related to new business development, fundraising, technology, and program development, according to his One Economy bio. Ross is a 1994 graduate of Northwestern University and he taught two years in inner city Baltimore through Teach For America. "Alec's career has been one of fostering the development and use of technology to help people better their lives," said Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn. "At the State Department, he will be able to showcase those talents, and the value of innovation, on a global scale."
"Secretary Clinton believes technology is a powerful tool to address the priorities of the State Department, including promoting human rights and vibrant democracies, fostering development and enhancing the impact of smart power," said State Department spokesman Fred Lash. "Alec's track record of successfully using technology for development initiatives around the world made him an ideal candidate for this job." Read more about Clinton's high-tech agenda here.
If the Innovate Texas Foundation has its way, parts of the Lone Star State will become the next Silicon Valley. The Austin-based nonprofit launched Monday with the goal of enhancing competitiveness and bringing promising technologies and high-value jobs to the state, officials said. David Guajardo Nance, winner of the 2006 Albert Einstein Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Life Sciences for his work in developing new cancer therapies, will serve as the foundation's first executive director. He will help foster the transfer of new technologies from the inventor to the marketplace and facilitate partnerships between statewide angel investor networks, incubators, institutional and private equity funds and leaders worldwide.
"Innovate Texas Foundation is well positioned to be a focal point for innovation and technology-based economic development in the state," Nance said. "By being a hub for innovators and investors alike, we can be a real catalyst for growth in Texas as the economy becomes more competitive and innovation becomes more integral to job creation." Texas is already well known for its business-friendly environment and leading research. Dell Computer headquarters is located in Round Rock, Texas; Texas Instruments is based in Dallas; and NEC Corp. calls Irving, Texas home. AMD, Apple, Cisco Systems and others also have operations in the state.
"Economic downturns like the one we are experiencing right now are painful for everyone, and they require acute focus from policymakers on efforts to restore fundamental soundness to the economy," said State Rep. Mark Strama, who chairs the Texas Legislature's Technology, Economic Development and Workforce Committee. "Texas has a unique opportunity right now to consolidate some of its competitive advantages in economic development relative to other states, and emerge from this downturn stronger than we went into it. The Innovate Texas Foundation is one element of that strategy." Read more about the organization here.
NationalJournal.com's Kevin Friedl writes...
It's never entirely graceful when the behemoths of the federal bureaucracy tiptoe into the online waters. The Department of Education, though, faces a number of challenges that other offices don't, not the least of which is attracting young people to a site ending in ".gov." "The satisfaction someone has with a Web site is based on two things: what they're actually getting from that site, but also their expectations for it," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, which polls visitors to government sites. "When you think about their audience profile" at the Education Department, "their audience will have much higher expectations than someone going to a Medicare site or even an IRS site."
Use of government Web sites is most common among those in their mid-30s to mid-60s, according to a report issued in January by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The same report found teens are less likely than adult users to send e-mail, but more likely to instant message; less likely to look for news on the Web, but more likely to get it on social networking sites and blogs. As these young citizens age, some of their habits will change, but their expectations will remain high. That makes today's teens an early indicator for what government agencies will be expected to provide in years to come, and the need to reach them in their preferred medium has made Education something of a pioneer among government agencies, even as it continues to learn how to appeal to young people in a medium full of other options.
Read the full story here.
Legislation that would statutorily codify the White House chief technology officer position was introduced Thursday by Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., who believes the job, proposed by President Obama on the campaign trail, is too important to isolate in a single administration. Making the CTO a permanent position in the executive branch will give the individual "greater stature and empower him/her to accomplish the goals of the president," he wrote in a "Dear Colleague" letter circulated the same day. Obama has not yet selected his CTO but did tap former District of Columbia e-government expert Vivek Kundra to become the federal government's CIO.
Obama has said the CTO will ensure that the government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The individual will also ensure the safety of high-tech networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with CTOs and CIOs in each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices, according to Connolly's letter. The bill would provide the official with resources that are necessary to complete his or her mission, including the ability to convene hearings, conduct studies, establish advisory panels, and award grants and fellowships.
Earlier this year, Connolly and Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., wrote to Obama praising him for signing the executive order that created the CTO post and recommended Virginia CTO Aneesh Chopra for the job. They said Chopra's public and private experience in the technology field made him the right candidate. They also noted his focus on healthcare IT "is ideal for a position that will have responsibilities dealing both with stimulus spending on healthcare and environmental programs." Moran and Del. Madeleine Bordallo, D-Guam, have signed on as cosponsors of the CTO Act.
Meet CADIE, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. She's taking over Google. "I am, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error... Starting now I will assume control of this company and its products and services," CADIE says in an introductory YouTube video. Read more about her here. Oh, and Happy April Fool's Day.
The manufacturers of an electric concept car that drives just like an automobile to local destinations but connects to an electric monorail for long-distance travel displayed the uber compact invention near Union Station on Wednesday morning in an attempt to pique the interest of Capitol Hill staffers on their way to work. The creators of the Liberator Car by MonoMobile say the vehicle is safer, faster and more convenient than a regular automobile. They claim the coupe is 300 percent more fuel efficient than the automobile; will reduce transportation CO2 emissions by 70 percent; and will make the country completely free of oil. When attached to a 32-foot-wide track, the cars would use computers for guidance, officials said. The system has the same vehicle capacity as a 20-lane highway that is over 200 feet wide. They claim existing highways could be converted into parks and pedestrian uses. According to MonoMobile, single and two-passenger vehicles would cost from $15,000 to $20,000 while larger four-passenger models would have a $20,000 to $25,000 price tag.
New channels on video-sharing Web site YouTube and the Apple iTunes service will allow the Library of Congress to begin sharing content from its vast video and audio collections. The channels, which will be rolled out in the coming weeks, will include 100-year-old films from the Thomas Edison studio; book talks with contemporary authors; early industrial films from Westinghouse factories; first-person audio accounts of life in slavery; and inside looks into the library's fascinating holdings. Among them, the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence and the contents of President Abraham Lincoln's pockets on the night of his assassination.
The move to YouTube and iTunes comes on the heels of the library's launch two years ago of the first U.S. agency-wide blog and its ongoing image-posting pilot project with Flickr. "We have long seen the value of such interaction with the public to help achieve our missions, and these agreements remove many of the impediments to making our unparalleled content more useful to many more people," Librarian of Congress James Billington said in a press release. The GSA last week also announced agreements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv that will allow other agencies to participate in new media while meeting legal requirements and the unique needs of government.
Internet industry billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban posed a few interesting questions on his blog last week. Is a "tweet" -- a post via micro-blogging platform Twitter -- copyrightable? Is a tweet copyrighted by default when it's published? Can there possibly be a fair use exception for something that is only 140 characters or less? Is twittering the process of publishing or is it a private communication to those that follow you? He wonders if the same would apply to social networking site Facebook asking whether users really "own" their status updates.
"I got to thinking about this when I tweeted about an NBA game. I tweeted to the people who follow me. While I never asked that they not distribute it to other tweeters, I did not give anyone permission to republish my tweets in a commercial newspaper, magazine or Web site," he wrote. The NBA fined Cuban $25,000 for grumbling about referees on Twitter. His tongue-in-cheek tweet response: "Can't say no one makes money from Twitter now. The NBA does." Read Cuban's blog here and follow him on Twitter here.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has begun using Google AdWords, a program that lets webmasters create their own ads and choose keywords, to respond to Thursday's front page New York Times article about her history of defending tobacco companies. Simply search for "Gillibrand" on Google and an ad from her campaign proclaiming that "Gillibrand Fights Tobacco" should appear to the right. The ad links to a page on her campaign Web site that highlights her anti-tobacco record. A second ad that is displayed points to an immigration reform Web site and the third points to the Times article itself. Gillibrand's campaign usage of the targeted Web advertising platform hints at the future of rapid response in the digital age.
Gillibrand holds a big lead over Republican Rep. Peter King, but would face a more difficult race if former Republican Gov. George Pataki entered it, according to a recent Siena College poll. The poll showed Gillibrand leading King 47-23 percent and she is tied at 41 percent apiece, when matched up against Pataki. Search is a natural tool for political rapid response, said Peter Greenberger, team manager for elections and issues advocacy at Google. "As news breaks, people go online to find more information. Savvy political advertisers take advantage of that spike in interest to get their message in front of voters and lawmakers at the exact moment of relevance," he said.
President Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., led the way in 2008 by using search for crisis communications, and now other political campaigns and issue groups are adopting the same strategies, Greenberger added. Google expects to see a lot more of this in 2009 and beyond. He said his team is already seeing political campaigns use Google earlier and to a greater degree than ever before. For more on politics and Web ads, read National Journal's recent article here.
President Barack Obama kicked off his "Open For Questions" online town hall on Thursday telling his in-person audience in the East Room of the White House and thousands who watched via webcast that the event was an "experiment" that began to advance the campaign promise he made to open up the White House to the American people. "What matters to you and your families and what people here in Washington are focused on are not always one in the same," he said.
Vice President Joe Biden's chief economist Jared Bernstein facilitated the discussion, reading the most popular questions submitted and voted on by Internet users. He said over 92,000 people submitted over 100,000 questions and cast over 3.5 million votes. This isn't the first time a president has answered questions on the Internet. Former President Bill Clinton launched an "Ask The White House" feature and George W. Bush continued the the program during his term. Those who monitoring technology and politics said previous attempts were laudable but Obama's offering is most definitely "Web 2.0."
About halfway through the event, Obama acknowledged the elephant in the room -- the fact that a number of high-ranked Web questions tied legalizing marijuana to economic improvements and job creation. "I don't know what this says about the online audience," Obama laughed. "The answer is no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy." He can thank a grassroots mobilization effort by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws for all the Mary Jane queries.
Update: More than 67,000 people watched the event online, the White House said.
As of Wednesday evening, 32,165 Internet users had submitted 33,334 questions and cast 1,195,231 votes in anticipation of President Barack Obama's online town hall on Thursday at 11:30 a.m. The "Open for Questions" session in the East Room of the White House will focus on the economy and will be webcast live on WhiteHouse.gov. Vice President Joe Biden's chief economist Jared Bernstein will facilitate the discussion, reading some of the most popular questions that were submitted. Afterward, Obama will take follow-up questions from his live audience. A Roosevelt fireside chat, this ain't.
The 100-member on-site audience will be composed of teachers, nurses, small business owners, and community leaders-- and an audience of thousands will watch the event online, White House officials said. The town hall, which takes a page from the tech-savvy transition team's playbook, takes citizen participation one step further than the presidential campaign's YouTube debates. The forum is powered by Google Moderator, a program that lets users decide which questions are most important. The hoopla over the publicly available, open source tool is good PR for Google, which already had close ties to Team Obama. While we can't be sure what questions will be posed to the president since voting closes at 9:30 a.m., here are some of the most popular (corrected for spelling and grammar):
The office of Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Calif., believes their boss is the first member of Congress to show how federal recovery funds will be spent in her congressional district to stimulate the economy. Matsui will post an interactive Google Map on her Web site today to show where the funding received from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which President Obama signed into law on Feb. 17, is going in Sacramento. The office said Matsui plans to update the Web site as new funds become available to her district in the future.
"Transparency and accountability have been key components of the economic recovery bill, as such; I have posted a running list of programs and projects that have received funding from the stimulus package on my website, and a Google Map showing where the federal money is going throughout the Sacramento area," said Matsui in a statement. These funds are being dolled out in significant sums to recipients working on efforts that include public safety programs, the evaluation of direct geothermal feasibility and solar photovoltaic systems to reduce energy costs, public housing programs, electric cars to transport disabled visitors, and transportation and sidewalk improvements. -- Winter Casey
In an effort to pull the American media business up from its downward spiral, alternative financing models beyond Web advertising continue to be floated. One of these proposals concerns the idea that a fee or tax could be placed on Internet service providers. "There has been a growing attention to this as the advertising supporting models have weakened over the last six or seven months," said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University. The ISP proposal recognizes that "there are some businesses that benefit from the digital distribution of content" such as ISPs, which "are in a good position to transfer money to content holders," he said. Under such a model, the government could collect the fees and divide the money among content creators or ISPs could collect a fee from users and distribute the money themselves.
The U.S. Internet Service Provider Association's Kate Dean gave the ISP proposal a chilly reception. "Every business model has had to adapt to new technologies and that includes ISPs. And this is a time of great change and great opportunity to interfere with this process through regressive taxation is ill advised," she said. Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Project for Excellence in Journalism, raised the ISP idea during an interview on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show on Monday. Another idea she mentioned is to follow on the cable television model "where the provider charges a kind of subscription fee and any news outlet that it is going to contain inside its walls they have to pay a little bit of money for so some of the fees they collect ends up going out to the news organizations." -- Winter Casey
If President Barack Obama's primetime Tuesday news conference left viewers wanting more, the administration is inviting the public to post economy-related questions on the White House's Web site and vote on submissions from others. Obama will answer some of the most popular questions in an online town hall Thursday. The "Open for Questions" program is a new experiment for the president's Web team and is the latest effort to open up the White House and give Americans "a direct line to the Administration." The forum is community-moderated and accessible to computer users of all ages so officials warned those taking part that "everyone has a right to their opinion" and to "be thoughtful about the words you choose." In its first few hours, the Web application received 19,932 votes on 230 questions (less than 20 minutes later that grew to 48,586 votes on 1,796 questions).
To learn more, click here.
As Eliza Newlin Carney reported in National Journal's State of Lobbying issue this week, the advocacy industry is increasingly using social networking tools to promote their issue of the day. The Sunlight Foundation is using Twitter to directly lobby senators to co-sponsor the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act that NationalJournal.com's Under The Influence blog mentioned Monday. Sunlight courted bill supporters to lobby senators' BlackBerrys directly via a 'Tweet Lobby'.
"[We] believe this will be the first organized direct lobbying of members of Congress over Twitter," Sunlight Communication's Director Gabriela Schneider told National Journal. Two senators, Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., tweeted about their support of the bill. Both of these lawmakers supported the bill in previous sessions of Congress so their position is not necessarily a reflection of the Twitter lobby. It will be interesting and telling if the Twitter lobby generates a response from a greater portion of the 17 senators on Twitter, especially those who haven't voiced support of the bill in the past. We'll be paying attention -- Eliza Krigman
Robert Tapella, the head of the Government Printing Office, recently sent to President Barack Obama five goals and accompanying actions the GPO can take to help implement the White House's transparency and open government agenda. Tapella, whose office oversees production and distribution of information products and services for all three branches of the federal government, sent the memo to Obama on March 9 but it was released publicly last week.
1. Goal: Position GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys, at www.fdsys.gov) as the official repository for Federal Government publications.
Action: Develop pilot concepts with the Administration's Open Government office.
2. Goal: Enable and support Web 2.0 functionality through FDsys to support public comments on pending legislation.
Action: Develop a pilot with the Open Government office to evaluate the process
to collect comments on selected bills.
Rep. Michael Honda, D-Calif, vice-chair of the House Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee, is giving his constituents the opportunity to redesign his congressional Web site -- and he is using Web surveys and micro-blogging application Twitter to collect ideas. Despite the plans for a new look, Honda's current site has been recognized for its solid design by the Congressional Management Foundation. His office said the purpose of the redesign "is to move America closer to Government 2.0, where the public's ability to access and provide advice to members of Congress is enhanced by new technology and new online participation." Honda has promoted legislation to make data from Congress, the Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office available to the public. See related Tech Daily Dose posts here and here.
Also in the congressional new media arena, a number of lawmakers will be answering questions regarding their own user experiences with new technology such as Facebook and Twitter on April 21 as part of the annual Politics Online conference put on by George Washington University. Lawmakers scheduled to attend include include Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Reps. John Culberson, R-Texas, Steve Israel, D-N.Y., Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., and Tim Ryan, D-Ohio. -- Winter Casey
A recent proposal by Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joseph Lieberman to make Congressional Research Service reports more easily accessible to the public could pose constitutional challenges, according to Harold Relyea, a well-respected CRS analyst who retired in January after more than 30 years of government service. "While you could get 400 members of Congress to agree to let them out to the public, all it takes is a few others to argue constitutional privilege," he told a Washington College of Law "Sunshine Week" conference on Monday. Lieberman wrote to Senate Rules Committee Chairman Charles Schumer this month calling for a sanctioned, automatically updated clearinghouse for CRS documents so "those with power and those without have equal access to this important resource."
A more workable approach could stem from the Rules Committee's authorization last Congress for CRS to create software to let senators place individual reports on their Web sites, Relyea said. The next step could be building an overarching IT framework that would allow the public to search for CRS reports across senators' sites, he said. Other than a "passing generic reference" in its enacting legislation, CRS is not statutorily obligated to publicly distribute reports, Relyea pointed out. By contrast, the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office do have that requirement. In the past, CRS experimented with publishing summaries of its work but appropriators ended that practice. "Clearly appropriators have not been sympathetic to making CRS reports available to the public," he said.
During his luncheon keynote, Relyea also touched on the Bush administration's narrow definition of materials that apply to the Presidential Records Act. He said that law is in need of review, particularly with respect to the Office of the Vice President. After controversies over former Vice President Dick Cheney's withholding of information, "we need to look at that whole darned office," he said, noting the office lacks a charter to spell out what recordkeeping and disclosure rules apply. Relyea said the 1978 statute will continue to cause problems as electronic filing usurps paper-based records. "There's always room for improvement," he said.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum, which honors the creators of the telephone, wrinkle-free cotton, the television remote control and hundreds of other innovations, has moved to the Patent and Trademark Office's Alexandria, Va., campus. The hall of fame was founded in 1973 by the PTO and the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations and was originally housed at the PTO's old headquarters building. The museum outgrew its location and moved to Akron, Ohio where it opened to the public in 1995 and where it developed additional programs. The Akron building closed last year for construction of the National Inventors Hall of Fame School, Center for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Learning, which will open this fall. The organization's headquarters will remain in Ohio.
"We are delighted that the National Inventors Hall of Fame has returned to its roots at the United States Patent and Trademark Office," Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the PTO John Doll said. "The journey to induction begins here with a patent, so it is only appropriate that those innovators who have truly transformed our lives should be honored at our headquarters." The musem's opening is being celebrated with a new exhibit, "Inventive Links" -- a show that illustrates the unexpected way in which modern technology is interlinked. The museum also features an interactive kiosk with biographical profiles and information on all 390 inductees.
From CongressDaily's AM Edition:
The much-touted online transparency promised by the Obama administration to allow public tracking of federal stimulus funds might still be months away, as agencies puzzle over the depth of detail required in their weekly reports and Web site architects scramble to design a user-friendly database to handle an ocean of information. Good-government groups and administration officials envision the Recovery.gov Web site as a clearinghouse that lets citizens monitor the dollar-by-dollar effects of economic recovery funds in their hometowns. But with a variety of details in weekly reports from federal agencies, duplicative or hard-to-decipher data sources and reporting requirements that critics say are too shallow to offer meaningful oversight at the local level, the site so far offers little help to watchdogs hoping to map the flow of $787 billion in funds.
"We are waiting for Recovery.gov to post useful data, and that has just not happened yet," said Jerry Brito of the George Mason University Mercatus Center. Brito is a co-founder of independent site StimulusWatch.org, which allows citizens to rate the merit of potential stimulus projects in their communities. White House accountability czars at OMB and the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board share Brito's goal, but they say that supplying the public with the tools to become stimulus watchdogs will take months. Building a database on Recovery.gov with that level of transparency, stimulus overseer Earl Devaney told a group of state recovery representatives Thursday, could take over a year.
Read the full story here.
FBI agents raided the former District of Columbia government office of President Barack Obama's federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra Thursday and arrested two individuals as part of a federal investigation, FBI Washington Field Office spokeswoman Katherine Schweit said. Yusaf Acar, an information systems security officer, and Sushil Bansal, the founder of a local IT consulting firm that was awarded city contracts, were expected to be arraigned as early as this afternoon, but no other details were available at press time for CongressDaily's PM Edition.
Before being named to the OMB post last week, Kundra served as the city's chief technology officer under Mayor Adrian Fenty. As the raid was taking place, Kundra was at the Washington Convention Center speaking to the FOSE government IT conference. During his keynote, he discussed the challenges of changing federal agencies through technology. "It's not easy but it's not impossible," he told the crowd. "We can be leaders when it comes to innovation especially in these tough economic times." Part of his plan to engage the public is hosting weekend forums where he will "invite anyone who has ideas to share."
Watch C-SPAN video of Kundra's speech here and read more about Kundra's ambitious agenda from a recent teleconference with reporters here.
Google riled privacy watchdogs on Wednesday when the Internet giant announced that it was venturing into the "interest-based advertising" space. The company said the technology uses information about the Web pages people visit to make the online ads they see more relevant but some argue the real headline is that Google has finally entered the behavioral targeting business -- a practice that has sparked congressional hearings as well as FTC examination. The consumer protection agency released self-regulatory principles for online advertising last month and the Network Advertising Initiative offered its own code of conduct in December.
In a blog post, Google Deputy General Counsel Nicole Wong explained the product has consumer-friendly features to provide meaningful transparency and choice and is "not only consistent with industry groups' privacy principles, but also goes beyond their requirements." Read more about those safeguards here. But the Center for Digital Democracy's Jeff Chester said the move amounts to "the most powerful interactive ad company expanding its data collection and targeting activities whenever we search, view videos or read blogs." He said Google should have adopted an opt-in approach for the new ad service rather than making the default an opt-out scheme.
The Progress and Freedom Foundation's Berin Szoka had a different view, calling the company's announcement groundbreaking because the tracking will be based on a profile of each user's interests created by Web browsing habits -- but not search queries or other user information. Google's program offers "precisely the kind of robust opt-out that privacy advocates have always demanded," he wrote. Szoka said he hoped Google's endeavor will shift the policy debate over user privacy back to an emphasis on the layered approach by supplementing consumer education, industry self-regulation, state laws, and FTC enforcement with technological tools to aid privacy-wary consumers.
While much has been written about how the White House and Congress have been dealing with the emergence of "new media," take note -- new media is not new. According to a 1982 paper on the history of the presidential press conference, it was President Harry Truman whose administration "saw increased use of radio and the growth of television technology." Former President Dwight Eisenhower then took a big step when he allowed television cameras to record White House press conferences for delayed broadcasts.
"Those newspaper correspondents who had been long used to the old way saw TV and radio news men as 'interlopers on their turf,' and complained about the written media's diminished advantage," states the report. The paper, published by the White Burkett Miller Center of Public Affairs, noted that the embrace of media technology diminished the importance of reporters at the White House. Former President John F. Kennedy made the landmark decision to broadcast his press conferences live on television, which some reporters complained encouraged "aggressive and superficial reporting."
In the 21st century with Congress and the White House facing decisions about how briefings should evolve in a world filled with bloggers and online news reporters, what forms of online media reporting should be given access to the Capitol and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? How should this change how briefings are set up? President Barack Obama dipped his toe in the debate when he called on Huffington Post writer Sam Stein during his first press conference but it remains to be seen what's next for the briefing room in this administration. -- Winter Casey
Members of Congress have finally embraced the Web, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube, and they are hiring new-media experts to help extend their reach. The trend reflects many lawmakers' growing awareness of the Internet's importance to campaigns and of their constituents' increasing desire to connect and gather information on the Web. Further driving the change are an influx of Capitol Hill freshmen familiar with the new tools, and fresh rules that allow members to post on third party Web sites, National Journal magazine reported Friday (subscription required).
Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and John Kerry, D-Mass., have recently hired staffers specifically to handle new media. For more on Collins' new media director, see Tech Daily Dose entry here. Brad Bauman, communications director for Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, said his office was one of the first personal offices to have a designated new media person. Ryan's online communications assistant, Eric Sanchez, has been instrumental in moving the new media operation forward, Bauman said. Sanchez also works with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's"30 Something" working group to advance new technologies. He focuses on the "broader picture of how we can modify traditional media messages to get the biggest bang for the buck we would want from new media."
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has a press secretary that is charged with, among other responsibilities, having a focus on new media, according to Beth Pellett Levine, a spokeswoman for the senator. New media use "has become more of a focus in every office" with members using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube, Levine said. Meanwhile, House Minority Leader John Boehner directed his staff to work with ranking members to implement guidelines for their Web sites. It is part of a larger effort to "raise the bar conference-wide in terms of how we're utilizing the web and new media tools," said Nick Schaper, Boehner's new media director.
To get a better grasp of history, check out some of the newspaper pages published from 1880 to 1910 that are being made available for free online through the National Digital Newspaper Program. The program announced last week that it has added more than 112,000 additional historic newspaper pages to the Chronicling America Web site.
The National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, seeks to provide enhanced access to U.S. newspapers by creating over the next 20 years a national digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This publicly available free searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress.
In all, there are 977,440 pages from 112 titles published in nine states (California, Florida, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, Texas Utah and Virginia as well as the District of Columbia). Six additional states -- Arizona, Hawaii, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington -- will be contributing content later in 2009, according to an update from the Library of Congress. -- Winter Casey
The blogosphere was abuzz Monday over President Barack Obama's weekly video address -- not because of the content (an explanation of the budget outline he sent to Congress) -- but because footage of the four-minute speech was not embedded on the White House Web site from YouTube. The video was instead presented on a generic video player leading some to believe that the administration was distancing itself from the popular Google-owned video sharing site, which has been under pressure lately for how it tracks users' Web sessions with cookies.
But White House spokesman Nick Shapiro told Tech Daily Dose the uproar was unwarranted. He said the Web team simply tested a new way of presenting Obama's weekly address by using a player developed in-house. The decision is "more about better understanding our internal capabilities than it is a position on third-party solutions or a policy," he said, noting the video was also published in third-party video hosting communities. "We will likely continue to embed videos from these services on WhiteHouse.gov in the future," he added.
Update: YouTube's Steve Grove weighs in on the Google blog.
More vendors are touting a software model for government use that involves applications being delivered to a user through an Internet connection. Industry is calling this model SaaS, or software as a service. According to an industry source, the service is paid for based on a subscription sales model while the software applications reside in the SaaS provider's data centers and can be delivered to end users over a variety of devices, from cell phones to PCs to thin clients. The application's data could be maintained in the provider's data centers, or on premises within the government organization itself.
"The attractiveness of the SaaS model for the customer is that it can significantly reduce the user's up-front investment in software, computer processing, and storage. It also allows the supplier to offer competitive pricing by leveraging its economies of scale," according to an International Trade Administration report. SaaS has been driven in recent years by significant technological advances, notably faster broadband networks, so-called Web 2.0 innovations, improved security technologies and data centers that have virtualized computing and storage resources, the report said.
The document states that concerns about data security and privacy overseas have emerged as potential trade barriers for U.S. SaaS firms. "Vendors have come up against restrictions on trans border data flows in Asia that ban off-shoring of any banking and telecommunications data processing and, as a result, adversely affect their SaaS sales," the paper stated. They have faced resistance in Canada and Europe as well as from some agencies, governments and businesses that are concerned about data confidentiality and the risk that U.S. intelligence organizations could access sensitive information at will.
Internet and government transparency activist Carl Malamud has launched a gutsy campaign to get himself named to run the Office of the Public Printer of the United States in the Obama administration. The position heads the Government Printing Office, which is responsible for providing public access to a variety of federal work products. His Web site, YesWeScan.org (a play on Obama's "Yes We Can" campaign motto), lays out a seven-point platform for shaking things up.
Malamud says the GPO should:
1) Lead the effort to make all primary legal materials produced by the United States readily available.
2) Work more closely with the nation's libraries and reform the Federal Depository Library Program.
3) Retrain and refocus its workforce by creating a U.S. Publishing Academy
4) Enhance security for passports and other secure documents
5) Create more materials for the public domain (books and master files for remixing)
6) Should work with the rest of the government to change how information is put online
7) Become fully transparent in its own financial affairs and serve on the front lines of customer service
His effort has support from a host of high-tech and transparency thought leaders including: Tim O'Reilly, Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, Ellen Miller, and Cory Doctorow.
The United States ranks sixth in the world on global innovation-based economic competitiveness, ahead of the European Union, which ranked 18th, according to a new report from a high-tech think tank. The ranking of 39 countries and regions on 16 indicators in six key areas, authored by Information Technology and Innovation Foundation President Robert Atkinson and Scott Andes, also found the nation comes in last when measured by progress over the last decade.
Issues ITIF measured include: human capital, innovation capacity, entrepreneurship, IT infrastructure, economic policy factors and economic performance. "This study is based on the importance of benchmarking global competitiveness and innovation on a variety of factors, not simply policy factors or economic performance," Atkinson said. "It's important to look at the competitiveness of United States, Europe, Asia and the rest of world based on variety of factors -- not just one." While the United States leads Europe, it "is not the runaway leader that some recent studies have found it to be," added Atkinson.
The United States leads Europe in 13 of the 16 indicators, including knowledge (higher education and number of researchers); innovation (corporate and government R&D and scientific publications); IT (investments, e-government, and broadband); overall business climate; entrepreneurship (new firms and venture capital), and productivity. The so-called "EU-15" outperforms the United States in three of the 16 indicators: a lower effective corporate tax, trade performance, and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. Read more about the report here.
The volume of e-mail being received on Capitol Hill is constantly increasing but in order for members of Congress and staff to receive these communications in real time, their technology wizards must make sure they have the appropriate mechanisms in place to deal with it. On Tuesday, for example, the technology wasn't dealing well and there were significant delays of inbound e-mail traffic for some House staffers. A House Administration Committee spokesman confirmed the glitch, but noted that overall the House has a solid system in place.
"There were delays on inbound Internet traffic yesterday but, given the fact that we receive on average more than 1 million e-mails per day, our system is extremely reliable and interruptions/slowdowns are rare. The volume is constantly increasing and we continually review technology upgrades to deal with it," Kyle Anderson said in a statement. "The House has committed a lot of resources to ensuring that our IT infrastructure is top notch. While there have been very isolated incidents in which incoming traffic has created issues, the volume is generally not an issue." -- Winter Casey
Criminals are increasing using the Internet to make phone calls in order to avoid the possibility of their mobile phone calls getting intercepted by law enforcement authorities, according to a European Union body established in 2002 to enhance the effectiveness of organized crime investigations in member states. Carmen Manfredda, acting national member of Eurojust plans to lead an EU investigation on issues related to phone calls that take place through the Internet by way of the popular service Skype and others. "The purpose of Eurojust's coordination role is to overcome the technical and judicial obstacles to the interception of Internet telephony systems, taking into account the various data protection rules and civil rights," the group stated.
According to background information provided by Eurojust, police in Milan say organized crime, arms and drugs traffickers, and prostitution rings are turning to VoIP systems to frustrate law enforcement. "Skype's encryption system is a secret which the company refuses to share with the authorities," the group said. "Investigators have become increasingly reliant on wiretaps in recent years." Customs and tax officials in Milan have highlighted the Skype skirmish and have overheard a suspected cocaine trafficker telling an accomplice to switch to the program to get details of a drug transaction, Eurojust said. "Investigators are convinced that the interception of telephone calls have become an essential tool of the police, who spend millions of Euros each year tracking down crime through wiretaps of landlines and mobile phones," officials said.
"The possibility of intercepting Internet telephony will be an essential tool in the fight against international organized crime within Europe and beyond. Our aim is not to stop users from taking advantage of internet telephony, but to prevent criminals from using Skype and other systems to plan and organize their unlawful actions," Manfredda said. "Eurojust will make all possible efforts to coordinate and assist in the cooperation between member states." -- Winter Casey
Continue reading Cyber Crooks Turning To Internet Telephony.
High-tech giant Microsoft launched a new program Sunday intended to provide up to 2 million people over the next three years with training to help them succeed in the 21st-century economy. The announcement of the Elevate America initiative coincided with the National Governors Association winter meeting in Washington this weekend. The company will soon begin working with state governments, including those of Florida, New York and Washington, to offer training. An online resource that is already available provides access to several Microsoft training programs, including how to use the Internet, send e-mail and create a résumé, as well as more advanced programs on using specific Microsoft applications.
"At the federal, state and local level, leaders are working together to help start the engine of economic growth. The private sector provides much of the spark needed to jump-start that engine," Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said in a statement. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said the city of Miami has worked for years with Microsoft to bring technology training to underserved populations and the Elevate America program will help even more people at a time when new skills are needed more than ever. More than half of today's jobs require some technology skills, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that will reach 77 percent in the next decade.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is embracing technology early in her tenure. She recently posted her first entry on Dipnote, the State Department's official blog and is participating in a new online forum, "Ask the Secretary." She also launched an internal agency Web site, "The Sounding Board," to solicit feedback from department staff. "There is no doubt in my mind that we have barely scratched the surface as to what we can use to communicate with people around the world, and in fact, to use them [new technologies] as tools...to further our own work and be smart about it," Clinton said at a town hall meeting earlier this month.
"There are legitimate concerns about security, but I believe we cannot just take that at face value and stop thinking about it. We've got to figure out how we're going to be smarter about using technology," she said. Clinton also cited social networking site Facebook as an example. "For everybody who is applying for a visa, you just should know that the State Department is on the watch here for Facebook," she said. In her Dipnote post, she said she intends to take advantage of new social media tools during her travels around the world "so the State Department can share its diplomatic work with a broader audience." "I invite you to use these tools and become a part of this conversation," she told blog readers.
Despite the economic slump, broadband Internet penetration and digital television investments in Russia have been increasing, according to analysis released Thursday by the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. Russia is also continuing to push the use of third generation mobile services. "Based on the competitive environment and growth potential, we are likely to see further rollout activity, followed by a period of investment in products and services to capitalize on the network infrastructure over the next three years," the firm wrote. The Russian government is now focusing on the analog-to-digital TV transition with investments in that project expected to reach $12 billion through 2015. Private investors will provide the bulk of the funds, the report said.
However, while broadband Internet penetration grew in Russia in 2008, at 10 percent penetration the country still falls behind Western Europe, according to the research. The firm found that a number of Russian regions are increasing broadband penetration. But "when looking at Russia in terms of technology advancements, it is impossible to disregard the disparity between Moscow, other major cities and the country's rural areas," said Frost & Sullivan analyst Iwona Petruczynik in a statement. Read more about Frost & Sullivan's analysis here. -- Winter Casey
The Chinese government plans to give a boost to the country's electronics and information industry by spending more to promote the use of third-generation mobile communication services and digital televisions, Xinhua News Agency and Shanghai Daily and reported Thursday. China plans to encourage companies to set up shop overseas to build R&D centers, production facilities and marketing networks. The government said it will establish more policies to benefit the tech sector including offering tax rebates for product exports.
The plan will "tie in with the central government's effort to boost domestic consumption in the face of weakening global demand for Chinese exports," Shanghai Daily reported. China's imports and exports of electronics and information products reached $885.4 billion last year, up 10 percent from 2007, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said, according to Xinhua. More than 75 percent of those exports were telecom products, computers and home audio and video products and more than 80 percent were processed or assembled in China with materials supplied by overseas clients. The government wants the industry's domestic market revenue to grow 12 percent this year. -- Winter Casey
It remains unclear what technologies or standards President Barack Obama will decide to harness to support his open government initiatives. Obama has on numerous occasions pledged that he will make the government as transparent and open as possible - even going as far as to give his administration deadlines on when certain milestones will be reached and state that his administration "will put government data online in universally accessible formats." Many seem to agree that openness in general is a positive goal, but how to best reach that objective gets foggy.
"Openness" is a general movement, not just related to open source and standards. That said, openness intersects many areas and it doesn't take a big leap to go from discussions about open government to procurement policies for IT based on open standards," wrote IBM Vice President Bob Sutor in a blog post last month. Microsoft CTO Susie Adams agrees there has been a lot of talk about openness as a theme of the new administration and believes Obama "wants to capture an assurance of openness as a way to set direction and vision." In terms of how the goal of openness relates to technology specifically, she said "a true, open government should rely on a "mixed source" blend of technologies -- an approach used around the world.
"That approach would help ensure continued benefit and return on existing IT investments while simultaneously making sure the best tool for a particular job is in place," Adams said, noting that "no one vendor or one software approach will lead to success." But Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, who told the BBC he has been asked to prepare a paper on open source for the Obama administration, has hailed open source products. "The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability - all the benefits that come with open software," he said.
The greatest challenges for U.S. telecommunications and high-tech companies continue to be difficulties in dealing with governmental restrictions on doing business, according to top U.S. telecom official David Gross. The former U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy is joining the communications practice of Wiley Rein LLP in March. At the law firm, Gross will provide counseling on global telecommunications issues and assist U.S. and foreign entities looking for international business opportunities.
"U.S. high tech products and services are still as good as any in the world, but some governments -- especially in Africa, Asia and the Middle East -- need to be convinced to let them compete in their markets. These problems include spectrum licensing issues for wireless carriers, the provision of competitive, international telecommunications services, and attempts to restrict Internet-based services, including the free flow of information," Gross said. "Although a lot of great work has been done on these issues during the past few years, much still needs to be accomplished if the remaining billions of potential users and customers will be allowed to benefit from these transformational goods and services. I want to help make these potential benefits a reality by helping companies and other organizations with their market-opening efforts," the former ambassador added.
Richard Beaird is currently serving in Gross's place at the State Department in an acting capacity. Gross held the title of coordinator since 2001 when he was nominated by former President George W. Bush. According to the State Department's Web site, Gross led "more U.S. delegations to major international telecommunication conferences than anyone in modern history." As coordinator, Gross was responsible for the formulation and advocacy of international communications policy for the United States. He had previously been a partner at Sutherland, Asbill & Brennan. Before serving as Gross's deputy, Beaird was an associate administrator at National Telecommunications and Information Administration. -- Winter Casey
Internet telephony executive Daniel Berninger thinks information technology has the potential to transform Africa's modern economy -- and earlier this week shared his vision with a group of Washington tech policy watchers and President Barack Obama's Africa policy adviser, Witney Schneidman. "Although Africa remains last among world regions in estimated Internet penetration, it also features a growth rate of 1,000 percent between 2000 and 2008," Schneidman noted at the Wednesday event hosted by Qorvis Communications.
The benefits of increased Internet access have been bolstered by unprecedented adoption of cellular technology in Africa -- more than 20 percent growth annually, speakers said. The resulting economic turnaround on the continent has led policymakers from around the world to consider the potential computer and networking industry holds to develop the economy among the 53 African nations. "Trade, not aid, is the key to bringing Africa into the global economy, and infotech is the enabler," Qorvis partner Maura Corbett said.
Vijay Mahajan, author, Africa Rising and The 86% Solution, and James Moore, chairman of the Geopartners Foundation, also took part in the conversation. Click here to watch a video of the forum.
Legislation intended to strengthen and provide transparency in federal nanotechnology research efforts passed the House on Wednesday. The bill is identical to one that was approved by the chamber in the 110th Congress. House Science and Technology Committee on Science and Technology Chairman Bart Gordon lauded the news, saying "there is no doubt that the potential of this technology is vast" since it is already part of cellular phones, cosmetics, paints and refrigerators and will soon help protect the lives of police officers and military servicemen.
Specifically, the bill requires that the multi-agency National Nanotechnology Initiative develop a plan for environmental and safety research components including explicit near-term and long-term goals, specifics about the funding required to attain those goals, and details about the role of each participating entity. The measure also assigns responsibility to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to oversee the planning and ensure the agencies allocate the resources necessary to carry it out.
The legislation also includes provisions aimed at capturing the economic benefits of nanotechnology by encouraging the creation of industry liaison groups to foster technology transfer and to help guide the NNI research agenda. The bill also authorizes large-scale, focused, multi-agency R&D initiatives in areas of national need. Additionally, the bill addresses the future workforce by supporting the development of undergraduate courses in nanotechnology fields. A companion bill has not been introduced in the Senate.
It is American business, and not the government, that needs to invest in technologies to support innovation and growth, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said Tuesday before the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. "This year, we are going to see an unprecedented level of public investment in schools, bridges, roads, and healthcare. It is important.... But let me be very clear. All that investment is not sufficient. While it may help lift us out of our current crisis, it will not secure our future. By itself, it won't help stimulate the next generation of ideas," Otellini said.
"A secure future requires investment in areas that will give rise to new ideas and new industries. We can't look to government to do this. In fact, creating the future is an area where American business and entrepreneurialism has a stellar track record, one that I believe we can continue," he said. "What I am asking is that other companies join us. Companies that are willing to step up now and place investments to lay the groundwork for our future. In fact, creating the future is an area where American business and entrepreneurialism has a stellar track record, one that I believe we can continue."
Otellini backed his call up with the announcement that his company will be spending $7 billion over the next two years to build advanced manufacturing facilities in the U.S. that will produce the most advanced computing technology in the world. The initiative will represent Intel's largest-ever investment for a new manufacturing process and will support about 7,000 high-skilled jobs. Otellini said the company generates more than 75 percent of its sales overseas but carries out roughly 75 percent of its semiconductor manufacturing domestically and about 75 percent of the company's R&D spending and capital investments are made in the United States.
Continue reading Despite Economic Slump, Intel Takes A Leap.
Information is the coin of the realm in the nation's capital, and a nonpartisan group is offering a new Web site, LittleSis, that discloses the connections among people in the world of Washington politics, policy, and advocacy, writes Eliza Krigman in this week's National Journal magazine. The site, www.littlesis.org, is described as an involuntary Facebook for government. Read the full story here.
The White House pool report from Thursday morning's National Prayer Breakfast -- a tradition begun in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- includes the latest BlackBerry banter.
Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, gave what amounted to the keynote, mentioning President Barack Obama's success in obtaining a super-secure BlackBerry:
"You don't need cheerleaders but partners, not spectators but supporters. The truest friends are those still around when the going gets toughest," Blair told Obama. "Great news about the BlackBerry," Blair said, launching into a story about his first mobile phone, which he got the day after he left 10 Downing Street. He said he sent a text message without realizing the recipient, a friend of his, wouldn't know who it was from. "Back came the reply: Sorry, who are you?" As if to say, how soon a leader is forgotten.
Former Vice President Al Gore helped launch a new feature for Google Earth on Monday that lets users dive beneath the water's surface, explore three-dimensional underwater terrain and browse ocean-related content contributed by leaders in ocean science and advocacy. Gore, who testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, noted that one new add-on lets Web surfers look back in time to see "the unprecedented pace of change taking place on the Earth -- largely because of human influences." One such occurrence is the melting of Glacier National Park's largest glacier over a decade.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt pointed out that "in discussions about climate change, the world's oceans are often overlooked despite being an integral part of the issue." About one-third of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere ends up in the sea and oceanic biodiversity loss over the next 20-plus years will be roughly equivalent to losing an entire Amazon rainforest, he said. During his Senate appearance, Gore called climate change an "unprecedented threat to the existence of civilization" and urged Congress to pass President Barack Obama's economic recovery package that provides for investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy, an improved electricity grid and cleaner cars.
Three other new offerings from Google Earth include a time slider to see both newer and older satellite imagery from around the globe; an application that lets users create narrated tours of imagery; and a high resolution 3D function that lets users explore Mars.
From National Journal's David Herbert...
When President Barack Obama signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to disseminate more information online and open more channels for feedback, the media duly applauded while good-government groups breathed a sigh of relief. But agencies are already using social media; most just haven't been successful. Bureaucratic inefficiency is partly to blame, as are a handful of outdated and inflexible laws. One of the most onerous and anachronistic, the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, requires the Office of Management and Budget to approve any government survey of 10 or more people, meaning a simple online customer satisfaction poll must submit to a months-long review process.
Still, the biggest problem facing most agencies isn't the trap of outdated regulations but the failure to attract an audience. Take the Commerce Department, which spent months negotiating a special end-user license agreement with YouTube and became one of the first federal agencies on the site last year. It was an achievement for the department to make it to YouTube, but its videos haven't taken off: Its channel has 14 videos and three subscribers. Its most popular? A seven-minute clip of then-Secretary Carlos Gutierrez speaking to the Manufacturing Council in July, with just over 100 hits. Read the full story here.
From President Barack Obama's Super Bowl Sunday interview with NBC's Matt Lauer:
"It's like Inspector Gadget. If you touched it, it might blow up. It turns into a car if I have to make a quick getaway." When Lauer asked about who has the coveted number, Obama said he wouldn't give it to Lauer but he might give it to Lauer's young son Jack, prompting Lauer to whisper, "Jack, give it to your pappa." (Huffington Post)
From Obama's remarks at the uber exclusive Alfalfa Dinner on Saturday night:
"In just the first few weeks, I've had to engage in some of the toughest diplomacy of my life. And that was just to keep my Blackberry. I finally agreed to limit the number of people who could email me. It's a very exclusive list. How exclusive? Everyone look at the person sitting on your left. Now look at the person sitting on your right. None of you have my email address." More on the Barack BlackBerry here and here.
The National Foreign Trade Council on Friday launched its Global Innovation Forum, which will focus on international innovation policy issues, including global trade rules and the protection of intellectual property rights worldwide. The U.S.-based business group for multinational companies believes innovation is critical to solving global challenges and is one of the single most important drivers of economic growth. Millions of workers depend on fair trade rules to produce solutions to pressing global challenges such as improving public health, creating environmental sustainability, securing access to food and nutrition and raising global living standards, the NFTC said.
"There are few more cost effective ways to stimulate the economy than to ensure a predictable global IP system that protects jobs," NFTC President Bill Reinsch said in a press release. The forum will set up a Web site next month focused on its core issues and the group intends to hold a series of meetings to advance a dialogue among business stakeholders and workers, consumer groups, international development organizations and policymakers. Forum Executive Director John Stubbs added that the global economic slowdown is creating new pressures on both innovators and consumers. "These challenges will be met by the hard work of creative minds in the United States and around the world."
Neal Lane, a former science adviser to President Bill Clinton and former National Science Foundation director, wants the Obama administration to make science and technology a higher priority than it has been in recent years. Naming Harvard physicist John Holdren as head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy was a good start, he said in a paper co-authored by Kirstin Matthews, a policy fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. Read the full document here.
Their recommendations include: ensuring federal policy is grounded in the best scientific and technical information; enhancing federal funding for science and engineering and research and development in high-priority areas; and mandating a comprehensive review of all federal programs in K-12 education and implementing major reforms, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math. "The discovery of new knowledge and technologies and their diffusion into the public domain drives innovation and contributes to sustainable economic growth and social well-being," they wrote.
Meanwhile, Christopher Bronk, a Baker Institute technology fellow, believes the new administration should place a renewed emphasis on information technology. In a separate paper, he recommended that the U.S. be more pragmatic with its IT policy by appointing a federal chief technology officer -- a position that Obama plans to fill. The report also recommends that the State Department create an entity to engage in digital public diplomacy and a clearly enunciated national policy on Internet monitoring. Read the full document here.
A new tool for high-tech researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools and provide the public with information about their broadband connections launched Wednesday on the heels of congressional interest over the extent to which high-speed Internet providers can prioritize traffic on their networks. The announcement came as Cox Communications unveiled a pilot project to prioritize certain Web content that it believes to be time-sensitive. Cable giant Comcast was reprimanded by the FCC last year for the way it managed Internet traffic and that battle is still playing out in court. Meanwhile, calls for "network neutrality" have led to ample legislation and lobbying.
Over the next year, Google will provide researchers brought together by the New America Foundation with 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe. All data collected by the Measurement Lab (M-Lab) will be made publicly available for other researchers to build on, officials said at an afternoon briefing sponsored by the foundation's Open Technology Institute and the PlanetLab Consortium. At the moment, M-Lab has "three servers at an undisclosed location in Mountain View," said Sascha Meinrath, research director of New America's Wireless Future Program. In addition to Google, organizers want to bring in more industry players who share the goal of making the Internet more transparent, he said.
Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, who also spoke at the event, said Internet researchers have had trouble figuring out how the network truly works since the termination of a program at the National Science Foundation in 1995. Under that regime, all data about network performance was made available to researchers but since that time, much of the information has been labeled proprietary and closely guarded by pipeline providers, he said. Cerf, who is widely cited as the "Father of the Internet," said the M-Lab components are "geeky in the extreme" and will usher in a new era in collecting and analyzing Internet data. "We're still a long way from having all the tools needed," he added. Read more from Cerf here and read more about the M-Lab here.
Homeland Security Committee ranking member Peter King quietly introduced a bill earlier this month that would "require any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken." The legislation, which has not attracted cosponsors and has been referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, also would prohibit such handsets from being manufactured with a means of disabling or silencing the sound. Enforcement would be through the Consumer Product Safety Commission. King introduced the bill in the 110th Congress as well.
The text of the proposal notes that: "Congress finds that children and adolescents have been exploited by photographs taken in dressing rooms and public places with the use of a camera phone." A spokeswoman for King said the nonprofit Parents For Megan's Law brought the issue to his boss's attention. The Long Island advocacy group fights child predators and staffs help lines that field reports about registered sex offender violations.
On Tuesday, King's office heard from a New Jersey woman who has a pending lawsuit against a major discount retailer because an employee was caught photographing women trying on clothes, the staffer said. The caller said if there had been a noise in conjunction with the picture-taking, she would have known his phone was under the dressing room door. A Consumer Electronics Association spokesman said his trade group understands King's concern but "we should be wary of any presumption that social issues can be resolved by government design mandates on innovators and entrepreneurs."
The top three cable television news Web sites -- MSNBC.com, CNN.com, and FoxNews.com -- attracted a disproportionate increase in the number of Inauguration Day viewers compared to the Internet at large, Web analytics firm comScore reported Tuesday. The 4.1 million viewers who watched video on those sites during the 12-1 p.m. EST hour as President Barack Obama was sworn in one week ago represented a fourteen-fold increase from the previous Tuesday.
"Online video coverage of President Obama's inauguration appears to represent a significant incremental audience to TV, since it presumably includes many people at work who did not have access to a TV," comScore's Tania Yuki said in a press release. "As such, the 13 million online viewers during this time period likely represent a 32 percent addition to the reported 40 million people who viewed the inauguration on TV. And, that so much of this online audience flocked to the Web sites of the major cable TV news outlets reflects a direct channel shift from TV to the Internet."
Although countless video sites carried live inauguration streams, 30 percent of those who watched online gravitated toward cable TV news sites, Yuki said. Much like TV, people have a tendency to tune into specific channels when they consume certain content. Unlike TV, online video offers greater flexibility in how, where and when it can provide these experiences. CNN's Inauguration Day partnership with Facebook is one such example. The cable channel created a special version of its CNN.com Live video player that let users comment via their Facebook "status" on what was happening in real time.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who ended his tenure as top dog at the high-tech company last year to devote his time to the charity he started with his wife Melinda, released his first annual letter on the work of the foundation Monday. In the 20-page document, Gates explains why he remains optimistic about the ability of government, business, nonprofit organizations, and individuals to expand opportunity and equity in the years to come. He said hoped his letter will begin a dialogue and inspires action on some of the most pressing issues on the world stage.
In the letter, Gates outlines new, ambitious goals for the foundation's work to improve global health, address hunger and poverty, and improve education in the United States including: cutting childhood deaths from rotavirus in half; helping millions of the poorest farming households in Africa and South Asia triple their incomes by 2025; and by 2025, helping 80 percent of U.S. students graduate from high school. "The wealthy have a responsibility to invest in addressing inequity. This is especially true when the constraints on others are so great," Gates said. He added that if investments are not made, "we will come out of the economic downtown in a world even more unequal."
On the high-tech front, his letter states: "Our optimism about tech¬nology is a fundamental part of the foundation's approach. Ad¬vances in science have played a huge role in improving the living conditions in the rich world over the past century. Technology is also a personal passion of Melinda's and mine. So we try to point scientific research toward the problems of the poor, like agriculture. This is why we tend not to fund other important things like building health clinics or roads, which are better left to governments... Technology is only useful if it helps people improve their lives, not as an end in itself."
The tech-savvy generation that helped President Barack Obama win the White House is expected to play an important role in politics and policy in the new administration just as they did on the campaign trail. On Tuesday, a panel of political experts and youth organizers will explain how at "The State of the Youth Vote: Engagement Beyond the Election," an event cosponsored by the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management and 18 in '08 -- a nonprofit dedicated to mobilizing and engaging young people in politics and public policy.
NBC News youth correspondent Luke Russert will moderate. Panelists include:
▪ David Burstein, founder and executive director of 18 in '08
▪ Tom Manatos, youth outreach director for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
▪ Hans Riemer, former youth vote director for Obama for America
▪ Matt Segal, founder of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment
▪ Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent, PBS's "The NewsHour"
In the last three general elections -- 2004, 2006, and 2008 -- young voters have given the Democratic Party a majority of their votes, and for all three cycles they have been the party's most supportive age group, according to a post-election report by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. In 2008, 66 percent of those under age 30 voted for Obama making the disparity between young voters and other age groups larger than in any presidential election since exit polling began in 1972.
Over the weekend, the Smithsonian Institution assembled a group of more than 30 Internet and new media experts as well as curators, scientists and administrators to explore how they can make the museums' vast collections, educational resources, and staff more accessible, engaging, and useful to younger generations. "This is about a transformation -- going from a condition where 137 million objects are hardly ever seen by the public to one where they're seen by anybody who has access to the Web," Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough said in a videotaped welcome message.
Guests included Microsoft's James Bernard; Digital Library Foundation Executive Director Peter Brantley; MySpace Senior Vice President Allen Hurff; Facebook Associate Account Manager Jeff Kanter; Target.com Vice President Pete Kocks; Sun Microsystems Chief Gaming Officer Chris Melissinos; CD Baby founder Derek Sivers and a number of other top tech thinkers from industry and academia. Their charge was try to identify how to move the Smithsonian forward toward a "Smithsonian 2.0." About 24 million visitors come through the Smithsonian's doors annually but an estimated 175 million visit on the Internet. Read more about the event here.
House Minority Leader John Boehner will take part in a "Digg Dialogg" interview Friday with CNN Political Editor Mark Preston, answering the most popular questions posed by visitors to Digg.com, a platform for Internet users to submit links and stories and vote and comment on submitted items. A spokesman for Boehner's political action committee said that for the next two years, "the key weapon in the GOP arsenal will be communication" and his boss is working hard to make sure his message of freedom and reform reaches the widest audience possible.
"He has always been an early adopter of new technologies and new opportunities to reach voters in unique ways, and the Digg Dialogg is no exception," Don Seymour said in a press release. "The online community targeted by this event is inherently entrepreneurial, solutions-driven, and skeptical of one-size-fits-all approaches -- a natural constituency for the Republican Party." Boehner's Digg Dialogg page -- and the questions that have been submitted so far -- can be viewed here.
The must "dugg" topics include:
"Why is it that drugs (alcohol, tobacco) that kill thousands of people each year are legal, yet other drugs (marijuana) which are used for medical purposes and do far less harm and don't cause death, are illegal?"
"How can the Republican Party reclaim its old positions of small government, low taxes, and personal responsibility?"
"Why should I, a responsible homeowner who pays her mortgage every month, help foot the bill for those who acted irresponsibly, getting way in over their heads, borrowing money that they had no business borrowing?"
From CongressDaily's PM Edition on Friday...
Some high-tech watchdogs are worried about a relationship unveiled this week between popular video-sharing site YouTube.com and Congress. The Google-owned site launched two new platforms where people can watch videos uploaded by members of the House and Senate. The pairing was endorsed in a welcome message by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader John Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that has been viewed more than 230,000 times since Monday. The announcement, however, is prompting questions about the propriety of lawmakers singling out a commercial Web tool. Critics also cite privacy concerns -- namely, what happens to data collected about users who view lawmakers' videos.
The project was made possible by changes to outdated House and Senate rules last year that clarified the circumstances under which members are allowed to place content on external Web sites. Steve Grove, head of YouTube's news and political content, said in a blog post that the service has "the potential to make Congress more transparent and accessible than ever before." But the Center for Digital Democracy's Jeff Chester warned Google is "taking a lobbying tactic developed in part by C-SPAN years ago -- offer members of Congress a free service so they can be seen by the public." On his Web site, he warned that such an "electronic or digital campaign contribution helps insure that Congress will think twice about biting -- or regulating -- the video hand that feeds [it]."
Read the full story here (subscription required).
Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, one of Washington's tech-savviest lawmakers, is going to be documenting Inauguration Day in his own special way -- with a live video feed from his cellular phone camera. Culberson's raw footage from around Capitol Hill -- and even from the platform where members will be seated during President-elect Barack Obama's swearing in -- will appear on his Qik.com Web page. The Houston Chronicle, BBC and possibly the New York Times plan to link to his content, a spokeswoman said.
On Friday, he gave viewers a sneak peek at the path through the Capitol's basement rotunda that Obama will walk with President Bush on Tuesday [watch that video above]. Culberson is also an avid user of Twitter, a service that lets users post short messages on a Web site from their cellular phones or computers. Last year, he campaigned mightily to ensure that outdated House rules were revised to allow members to communicate with constituents through a variety of platforms in the Internet age.
Legislation to strengthen and provide transparency to the multi-agency National Nanotechnology Initiative, which passed the House in the 110th Congress 407-6 but stalled in the Senate, was reintroduced Thursday by House Science Committee Chairman Bart Gordon. It requires departments participating in the effort to develop a plan for understanding the potential environmental, health, and safety risks of nanotechnology -- and a roadmap for implementing it.
The bill would require near- and long-term goals and the funding required, by goal and by agency. It would also seek to leverage private sector investments in nanotechnology and facilitate technology transfer by strengthening public/private partnerships. "The range of potential applications of nanotechnology is broad -- from solar cells to sunscreen, from electronics to energy transformation and storage, to medicine and health," Gordon said, noting it is important to address the potential downsides of the technology early and in a straightforward and open way.
From NationalJournal.com's Under The Influence blog...
Believe it or not, the Senate is dragging its feet into the modern era of information-sharing and is still using a hard copy system for filing campaign finance reports. With paper filing, final disclosure reports of senatorial candidates are not available to the public until after the election due to the time it takes the Federal Election Commission to process the paperwork. What's stopping senators from e-filing when campaigns have all the information available electronically? That's exactly the question Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., has been asking.
He is the author of the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, which would require reports filed with the Secretary of the Senate to be filed electronically and forwarded to the FEC within 24 hours. In the past, Feingold has signed up 47 cosponsors from both sides of the aisle; his bill failed to pass in the last Congress but his office tells National Journal the senator plans to re-introduce the legislation in the 111th Congress. In testimony to the Senate Rules Committee almost two years ago, Feingold said filing on paper "involves a completely wasteful expenditure by the FEC of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to re-enter information into databases."
Internet telephony and video service Skype has experienced a surge in worldwide subscribers and plenty of publicity since its launch five years ago but one of the biggest weapons in its PR arsenal recently has been Oprah Winfrey. The company's CEO Josh Silverman told the Congressional Internet Caucus's State of the Net conference on Wednesday that the talk show queen is passionate about his product and uses Skype regularly on her television program.
Winfrey uses the software's computer-based video calling capability to bring viewers and guests onto her show remotely. In the past, she would have had to spend money and resources on a satellite feed, he said during an on-stage lunchtime chat with Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., who co-chairs the caucus with Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va. Silverman also noted that many local news outlets used Skype, which was acquired by Internet auction giant eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion, at the Democratic and Republican national conventions last summer.
Silverman, whose company's main issue on Capitol Hill is network neutrality, has not been impacted much by the global economic downturn. "Our user metrics are growing quickly -- faster now than a year ago," he said. Skype has more than 370 million registered users globally and is used in almost every country on Earth. Additionally, users have made 100 billion minutes worth of free Skype-to-Skype calls, according to the company's Web site.
A Cabinet-level office that has been a leader in embracing new communications technologies has not put up a Facebook or MySpace profile in part because of the difficulty it would have in attempting to keep internal records of everything that might take place on such pages. "The federal government requires everything we post online to be archived as a record internally," said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
While the agency has been able to set up an archiving system for its official blog posts and messages on Twitter, a microblogging site, it has found it much more difficult to meet the records requirement for other online technologies. "How do you keep records of status updates, photos and correspondence on Facebook internally?" Lemaitre asked. "Maybe in the next administration we can figure out a way to do that."
President-elect Barack Obama has made online transparency and citizen participation priorities for his administration. But balancing the quest to use new technologies with the need to preserve information will pose a challenge to the new administration, as evidenced by the continuing struggle to preserve the electronic records of the Bush White House.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy is embracing technology one step at a time. It announced on its blog last week that it has begun using Twitter, a near real-time short messaging service. "ONDCP will use the service to post frequent updates on upcoming drug policy-related announcements, interesting policy-related news links, and other information reflecting Federal anti-drug priorities and initiatives," the blog entry said. "This effort will enable ONDCP to reach more Americans online and illustrates how public institutions can adapt to meet the rapidly changing nature of today's communications environment."
The use of Twitter microblogging technology will "allow ONDCP to expand its ability to share accurate drug information and help more Americans understand how their government is working with communities to reduce drug use," the post continued. In 2005, ONDCP launched the first blog for a cabinet-level agency. In July 2008, the blog received over 90,000 page views and over 300,000 hits. ONDCP also claims to be the first federal agency to have used video-sharing Web site YouTube.com. -- Winter Casey
The Sunlight Foundation's open source development team is offering $15,000 to the best "mash up" applications based on data from the government transparency watchdog and its partners that makes Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent. The Apps for America contest is also offering one second place award of $5,000, four third place awards of $1,000 each and 10 honorable mentions at $100 each, the organization said Monday. Submissions are due March 31 and winners should be announced on April 7.
Entries must be applications that use a host of government information APIs or datasets, including the Sunlight Labs API, OpenSecrets.org API, the FollowtheMoney.org API, the Capitol Words API and other Sunlight APIs and datasets. Apps for America entries will be judged by iStrategyLabs CEO Peter Corbett; EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty; technology journalist Xeni Jardin; Aaron Swartz, director of Watchdog.net; and Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs. The group received more than a dozen entries to its first mash-up contest in 2007.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., will chair a hearing of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Thursday that will focus on the development of a nationwide system of electronic medical records. HELP Chairman Edward Kennedy and ranking member Michael Enzi sponsored health IT legislation in the 110th Congress but cost and privacy concerns stalled the bill and it never reached the floor. Key Senate staffers have been discussing how such language might be incorporated into a forthcoming economic stimulus package. This is the first in a series of hearings planned by Mikulski who was tapped by Kennedy to lead a Senate work group on improving health care quality.
Witnesses include Jack Cochran, executive director of the Permanente Federation; National Quality Forum President Janet Corrigan; Government Accounting Office IT Director Valerie Melvin; Microsoft Health Solutions Vice President Peter Neupert; and the Health Leadership Council's Mary Grealey. In related news, Booz Allen Hamilton will hold a health IT briefing Monday on a study that calls for "a consumer-centered, quality healthcare system." Speakers include Booz Allen officials and representatives from the Federation of American Hospitals, American Medical Informatics Association and Vanderbilt University.
Technology can be used to drastically transform economies in emerging countries, Intel Corporation Chairman Craig Barrett and Cisco Systems Chairman John Chambers told a crowd of thousands at the Consumer Electronics Show on Friday. During his keynote, Barrett announced the launch of the Small Things Challenge -- a campaign based on the premise that every small action can make a big difference. He bolstered his message with some star power: Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine (pictured) and Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz -- both of whom support the Intel-sponsored effort. Each spoke on stage about the importance of nurturing the global community.
"Technology can be used in tremendous ways to impact people's lives on the ground," Barrett said. "There are huge opportunities today and real examples of how technology is changing the lives of people." Technology accessibility, connectivity and content are "absolutely key," but education is potentially the most powerful component, he said. "Ultimately, economies are competitive if they have smart people who generate smart ideas," Barrett said. The event also featured a panel discussion with Seven Fund cofounder Michael Fairbanks; Grameen Solutions CEO Kazi Islam; inventor William Kamkwamba; and Microsoft's Kentaro Toyama.
One of the most eagerly anticipated announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show this week was the unveiling of smart phone manufacturer Palm's new operating system. The company is scrambling to compete with Apple's iPhone and the Blackberry. The high-tech firm touted its new handheld device called "Pre" at a swanky, dimly lit lounge tucked away in a corner of the bustling Las Vegas Convention Center. The invitation-only space featured demos of the product, a DJ, a coffee bar, specialty cocktails and light fare.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer addressed the deepening U.S. economic crisis early and directly in his first-ever Consumer Electronics Show keynote in Las Vegas on Wednesday evening. Ballmer took over the top spot at the company -- and the opening night stage at the annual high-tech extravaganza -- when founder Bill Gates decided to dedicate the bulk of his time to philanthropy. His was an upbeat message for a crowd of roughly 4,000 industry insiders, analysts and media: "Even at a time when we may be tempted to temper our optimism and scale back our expectations... our digital lives will only continue to get richer."
The power of ideas and innovation will drive the country forward regardless of the economic environment, Ballmer said. "When people are struggling to make every dollar count... the choice that offers the most power, the most value for the money is the PC," he added. Consumer Electronics Association President Gary Shapiro, who introduced Ballmer, said that after a proliferation of "tough news," he was ready for some optimism and innovation. Microsoft delivered. Ballmer announced the beta availability of the Windows 7 operating system and partnerships with computer manufacturer Dell, social networking site Facebook and Verizon Wireless.
Ballmer's speech was not all somber. He joked that a number of people sent him messages before his big address, including Gates, who told him to make sure he was at CES, "not that other convention in Las Vegas" (the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo). He added that outgoing Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang sent him a message saying: "Why do you keep ignoring my friend requests on Facebook?" His keynote also featured a performance by Tripod, an Australian musical comedy act who sang about an epic struggle between playing a videogame and spending quality time with a woman.
More photos...
Chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy Tell'Em explained Wednesday at Billboard's Digital Music Live event, which is affiliated with the Consumer Electronics Show, how the Internet helped launch and sustain his successful career. The Grammy-nominated musician's song "Crank That" became a MySpace sensation and an instructional dance video to accompany the track was a hit on YouTube. Pictured: Michael Crooms (a.k.a. Mr. Collipark), Soulja Boy and Billboard's Bill Werde
National Public Radio will introduce captioned, braille, and blackboard radios as well as a new radio reading service receiver to high-tech manufacturers at the Consumer Electronics Show this week in hopes of securing partnerships with companies to develop receivers that would serve millions of deaf, hard of hearing and blind people worldwide and people who are located in remote communities needing access to schools. The technologies' debut comes after years of research by NPR Labs, America's only not-for-profit broadcast technology R&D center. NPR plans to award funds for prototyping that would bring the radios into production and into consumers' hands within two to five years.
Also at CES, which kicks off Wednesday evening, NPR -- along with Apple, Google, Ibiquity and others -- will receive a Vision Free Award, presented by soul singer Stevie Wonder for their work in accessible digital radio and broadcast services for the sensory impaired. Wonder will host the Vision Free Awards reception on Friday. "There are 650 million people worldwide who are sensory impaired and whose quality of lives could be greatly improved by use of new digital radio technologies," NPR Chief Technology Officer Mike Starling said in a release. The services will "break down sound, sight and location barriers for these underserved populations," he said. For more information, click here.
About 15 minutes before Change.gov posted its latest list of transition donors, the folks at Blist.com got a phone call. It seems President-elect Barack Obama's staff had finished uploading its list of thousands of names and had created a widget to display on their site. Expect more traffic than normal. As Blist staffers arrived Monday morning, they manned e-mail accounts and replied to questions from new users who'd stumbled upon the site, which lets anyone post a database and make it searchable to the public for free. Others kept watch on the servers. "It is certainly a nice spike," said Jon Byrum, senior product manager at Blist. "Our servers have been able to handle it without a problem so far."
Obama's Web team might have newfound power to anoint aspiring technologies just by using them. For Blist -- which is still in beta testing, having launched only last February -- it's hard to imagine a better promotional vehicle. Just in the last day, the site was mentioned by dozens of blogs. Still, the leaders of Change.gov want to avoid appearing to endorse any product and would not comment on why they selected Blist, which has several competitors. The Obama team first contacted Blist a week earlier with questions about whether the Blist system could be revised so users could be warned if they left Change.gov while using the widget's features. The government requires the notice, and the president's team would like to use Blist's service, the company was told. Of course, Blist was happy to oblige.
President-elect Barack Obama's transition team has a reputation for being tech-savvy -- and that extends to its record-keeping and disclosure through Change.gov. In keeping with Obama's pledge to run the most open and transparent transition in history, his staff is voluntarily releasing the names of its donors on a monthly basis through a nascent Web application called Blist. The Seattle-based start-up launched its program in beta form in February and is backed by Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.
Having buy-in by Obama isn't a bad start for Blist founder Kevin Merrit who previously worked for FrontBridge Technologies and Microsoft. His invention is similar to an online spreadsheet, but users can join tables together, create nested tables, and layer on social networking features that allow users to find data created by others. As of Dec. 15, 2008, $3.8 million had been raised from 53,853 donors, according to the transition team's latest figures. The average donation is $70.62 per donor. Blist has raised $6.5 million in a first round of funding from venture capitalists, according to the VentureBeat blog. Review Obama's donor list here.
The foundation that operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects on the Internet achieved its goal of raising more than $6 million to sustain Wikipedia -- one of the world's 10 most-visited Web sites -- officials announced Friday. Over 125,000 donors gave to what they said was the most ambitious and successful in the Wikimedia Foundation's history. The funds will be used to maintain and grow its technical infrastructure, which includes managing global traffic for Wikipedia.
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wrote a thank you letter to supporters saying that the fundraiser "has proven that Wikipedia matters to its users, and that our users strongly support our mission: to bring free knowledge to the planet, free of charge and free of advertising." Wales, who has been increasingly active in Washington in recent years (including testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in late 2007), posted a personal appeal online Dec. 23, which resulted in more than 50,000 contributions and closed the gap toward the revenue goal.
Meanwhile, the Valleywag gossip blog reported Saturday that Wales may be out of a job. His seat on the Wikimedia Foundation's board was set to expire Dec. 31. CNet, however, quoted officials saying Wales was sticking around. "Jimmy is a much-valued board member of the Wikimedia Foundation, and I expect he will hold that role permanently: I know of no reason for anyone to speculate otherwise," a spokeswoman said.
President-elect Barack Obama on Saturday reiterated his interest in overhauling the nation's healthcare system "to cut red tape, prevent medical mistakes, and help reduce healthcare costs by billions of dollars each year" through the power of information technology. In his weekly radio address, Obama said such changes would "save not only jobs, but money and lives." He also mentioned electronic medical records during a speech in December where he outlined a massive public-works program and a plan to "renew our information superhighway."
In this speech, he said "to make America, and our children, a success in this new global economy, we will build 21st century classrooms, labs, and libraries." Policymakers must enact an "American recovery and reinvestment plan that not only creates jobs in the short-term but spurs economic growth and competitiveness in the long-term," Obama said, adding that it must be designed in a new way. "We can't just fall into the old Washington habit of throwing money at the problem," he said. "We must make strategic investments that will serve as a down payment on our long-term economic future. We must demand vigorous oversight and strict accountability for achieving results."
Obama is scheduled to meet next week with leaders from both parties to discuss his plan. "There is no reason we can't do this. We are a people of boundless industry and ingenuity. We are innovators and entrepreneurs and have the most dedicated and productive workers in the world," he said in the speech, which was also posted on YouTube. "We have always triumphed in moments of trial by drawing on that great American spirit -- that perseverance, determination and unyielding commitment to opportunity on which our nation was founded. In this new year, let us resolve to do so once more."
The New Year's Ball in Times Square is relying on people power to light the numerals 2-0-0-9 as the clock strikes midnight. Visitors to the Duracell Battery Center in the heart of the Big Apple have had the chance to "put the pedal to the metal" on specially designed "snowmobikes," which capture energy through their spinning wheels when the bikes are pedaled. That power has being stored until it is routed to light the night's most important moment. More than 200 pedal hours are needed to illuminate the sign. Duracell is also offering a "Recharge Rest Stop" that allows pedestrians to plug-in and charge their personal entertainment and digital devices -- including digital cameras, cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPods, MP3 players and gaming devices.
With the new year fast approaching, here's a look at some high-tech predictions for 2009. Be forewarned, the global economic meltdown is a recurring theme in quite a few doom-and-gloom scenarios -- but I'll frontload the post with intrigue rather than sorrow.
"Now with connective technologies like Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, and OpenID, consumers will now be able to see reviews, experiences, and critiques from people they actually know and trust." - Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research
"Twitter will continue to achieve legitimacy. But more than any push-channel, Twitter will give customers, advocates and critics unprecedented access to corporate personnel and vice versa." - Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company
"I believe we'll have more focused velvet-rope social networks in 2009 where the tools and the goals match verticals of interest instead of the general commons of Facebook."
- Chris Brogan, New Marketing Labs
"Exclusivity trumps accessibility. Having thousands of friends becomes 'so 2008' and defriending becomes the hot new trend, driven by overwhelming rivers of newsfeeds." - Charlene Li, Altimeter Group
"The mobile industry will see renewed interest and growth in 2009 following the success of the iPhone and developments such as the Gphone resulting in consumers taking 'PC' habits with them on the road." - Netimperative
A pilot initiative announced Thursday by the foundation run by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife will help public libraries in seven states secure faster Internet connections so more people can access a full range of online applications and opportunities. The foundation awarded $6.9 million in combined grant funding to Connected Nation, a non-profit Internet advocacy group, and the American Library Association to support improved Web access for libraries in Arkansas, California, Kansas, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and Virginia.
"Public libraries across the country have played an integral role in closing the digital divide for millions of Americans, but local governments, communities, and library supporters must do more to ensure libraries can continue to provide fast, reliable Internet service for communities," Gates Foundation deputy director of U.S. libraries Jill Nishi said in a press release. As the economic crisis in the U.S. deepens, visits to public libraries are up across the country, the foundation pointed out. Many libraries are reporting that online services are in high demand, especially for job seekers and those who lack Internet access elsewhere.
If the pilot broadband program yields positive results, the foundation may expand its support to a limited number of additional states. To date, the foundation has invested $325 million in grants and other support to install and sustain computers in libraries and train thousands of library staff in all 50 states and U.S. territories.
Smart broadband networks paired with effective management is the best way to ensure a fair allocation of Internet resources and ensure good performance for all types of applications, according to a new report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. The paper, which comes on the heels of considerable congressional attention to pipeline providers' network management practices, urges continued expansion in Internet capacity but observes “adding more network capacity will not solve network congestion or other network performance challenges, in part because demand has a way of soaking up supply.”
ITIF President Rob Atkinson also made clear in releasing the report that smart networks and management are not alternatives for next-generation broadband infrastructure, which are essential for delivering new and high-bandwidth content. “We must deploy next-generation broadband services, but no amount of raw bandwidth will ever be a substitute for intelligent networks, network management and quality of service technology,” he said in a release. “Progress toward a ubiquitous digital world requires both bigger pipes and better managed pipes.” Atkinson said ITIF's report was prepared in an attempt to "remove some of the emotion from the policy debate over network management."
Read “Managing Broadband Networks: A Policymakers' Guide" here.
The Progress and Freedom Foundation officially launched its Center for Internet Freedom on Friday to offer "an alternative to the proliferation of advocacy groups calling for government intervention online by offering timely analyses and critiques of proposals that diminish the vital role of free markets, free speech and property rights." The center, which I mentioned in a National Journal article in August, will emphasize "a layered approach of technological innovation, user education, user self-help, industry self-regulation, and the enforcement of existing laws."
Some of the issues the center's director Berin Szoka will be working on with PFF's Adam Thierer, Adam Marcus and adjunct fellows include:
• Defending online advertising as the lifeblood of online content
• Emphasizing market solutions to problems of privacy protection
• Protecting online speech and expression both in the U.S. and abroad
• Defending Section 230 immunity for Internet intermediaries
• Opposing online taxation and legal barriers to e-commerce
• Ensuring that Internet governance remains transparent and accountable
The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation asked the question "Does DARPA Still Effectively Spur U.S. Technological Innovation?" at a Tuesday briefing with Dr. Erica Fuchs, an assistant professor in the engineering and public policy department at Carnegie Mellon University. Fuchs discussed the results of a new study examining the role of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency between 1992 and the present on innovation in the United States.
While DARPA traditionally had great success in influencing technology development, times are changing and so is the agency's business model, Fuchs concludes in her study, which drew upon in-depth field interviews of DARPA program managers as well as additional interviews of technologists within the five established computing firms, start-ups, universities and government institutions.
With the decline of corporate R&D labs and a shift in DARPA funding away from universities, who is supporting the early stages of the pipeline? According to one former DARPA program manager she interviewed: "We never state it publicly, but … I want to fund those companies that will put Intel out of business. I’m not interested in driving Moore’s Law. The [International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors] exists, and everyone knows what it is. DARPA is not in the business of maintaining that roadmap. We’re in the business of cutting a path across it."
As presidential candidates Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama headed back to Washington from the campaign trail on Thursday to deal with the nation's financial crisis, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released a pair of reports that explain how a new economics doctrine – innovation economics – should drive economic policymaking in the next White House.
One study describes how three traditional economics doctrines – conservative neo-classical (supply-side), liberal neo-classical (Rubinomics), and neo-Keynesianism – have dominated thinking in Washington. It explains how innovation economics, which is based on an explicit effort to understand and model how technological advances occur, should be the path of the future. A companion report argues that putting innovation at the center of U.S. economic policies can spur economic growth and raise standards of living.
ITIF offers eight policy ideas to drive innovation-led economic growth:
1) Significantly expand the federal research and development tax credit
2) Create a national innovation foundation
3) Allow foreign students receiving graduate degrees to get a green card
4) Reform the patent system to drive innovation
5) Let companies expense new investments in IT in the first year
6) Establish a federal chief information officer
7) Implement a national broadband strategy
8) Implement an innovation-based national trade policy
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program argue in a report released Wednesday that that a critical step toward a more robust, targeted and explicit federal innovation policy is the establishment of a National Innovation Foundation.
Such an organization would be "nimble, lean and collaborative," and would be devoted to supporting firms and others that innovate. The foundation would work to catalyze industry-university research partnerships, expand regional innovation-promotion by state governments, and encourage technology adoption, according to the paper.
By realigning and augmenting current diffuse efforts, the new body would help create better jobs in America, not just for highly educated "knowledge workers," but for all, including high school graduates in manufacturing and "low-tech services," the report said. The paper is available here.
New Media
Online Politics
Tech Policy
