Archive: Category: TechPresident

Joe Rospars recently wrote in Time about the perceived “creative crisis" in the Democratic Party, a debate about online fundraising, and the responsibility writers, digital directors, and even candidates have to the creative direction of a campaign. Joe's answer -- “Don’t be lame” -- is a great place to start. But it doesn’t answer the why: Unlike those TV ads, email is personal. We protect our inboxes fiercely. They hold our receipts, recipes, invitations, job applications unanswered, flirtations unsent. Not even our partners or friends get access. Unlike social networks that encourage us to put our stuff out there for the public not just to see but to evaluate, your inbox is private. We can't predict what Facebook will do with its...

Heavy Lifts Andrew Hyder of Hack Your City, Thomas Apodaca and the folks at MySociety have put the 4,799 page transcript of the Ferguson Grand Jury testimony into the SayIt transcript platform, making the text linkable and searchable. In the Washington Post's Monkey Cage political science blog, Dave Karpf explains why political emails don't stop after an election is over. In case you didn't already know why. While Uber has been in the news, its chief competitor Lyft has been quietly doing its own internal housekeeping to tighten up control over how much data its employees can access on users and drivers, reports Charlie Warzel for BuzzFeed. And, as if on cue, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) has a bunch of privacy questions for...

Records A person who had a job interview in Uber's Washington office in 2013 was given access to the company's "God view" tool for entire day, reports Craig Timberg for the Washington Post. "He happily crawled through the database looking up the records of people he knew – including a family member of a prominent politician," Timberg says. The New York Times' Mike Isaac sums up Uber's current efforts to manage its privacy debacle, reporting that in response to Senator Al Franken's detailed inquiries, the company has hired Hogan Lovells, a Washington law firm, "to conduct an audit of its privacy practices and recommend any changes." PandoDaily's Mark Ames has written damning story about the troubled relationship between eBay and Craigslist, a...

Determined Republican presidential candidates still have an uphill climb in their efforts to woo Silicon Valley tech money, reports Tony Romm of Politico. After detailing the efforts of Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul to make inroads, Romm notes the serious policy issues that divide them from many tech donors, including net neutrality, NSA reform and immigration reform. The Obama White House holiday tour has gone digital, with a robot dog as homage to the Maker movement, reports Juliet Eilperin for the Washington Post. Uber has taken "disciplinary action" against its New York City general manager Josh Mohrer for alleged privacy violations, Alison Griswold reports for Slate. Ex-Googler (and popularized of the hashtag) Chris Messina asks on Medium, "What’s going on...

Responding CNN's Don Lemon thinks that "actual protesters" in Ferguson, "most of them are peaceful," but "bloggers and people who are trying to make a name for themselves" are the people "causing the commotion every day." That is, as the Washington Post's Erik Wemple spotted, "People who want you to follow them on Twitter; or follow their blog; or follow them on livestream." On NewsGenius and on The Guardian, St. Louis prosecutor Robert McCulloch's controversial news conference statement announcing the non-indictment of officer Darren Wilson is being annotated line-by-line. Wikipedia's article on the shooting of Michael Brown was viewed nearly 500,000 times yesterday, five times its peak August 18th, a week after his shooting. How John Cornyn's Senate campaign used Facebook for voter targeting...

The following is an edited transcript of an interview that Alex Howard conducted with James Windon, the president of civic engagement startup Brigade, last Wednesday November 19 at the Fusion RiseUp event in Washington, DC. That morning, Brigade had announced that it was partnering with a “carefully curated” set of organizations: Rainforest Action Network, Americans for Tax Reform, the Drug Policy Alliance, Represent.Us, Generation Opportunity, Forecast the Facts, FreedomWorks and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. With more than $9 million in venture funding from Napster co-founder Sean Parker, Brigade has been amassing a staff of more than 50 while remaining quiet about how it plans to launch and grow a new social network for civic engagement. In this interview,...

Sad Reality As noted by many observers, St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCulloch spent a surprising amount of time attacking social media during his press conference last night announcing the Ferguson grand jury's decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown. "“The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything to talk about,” McCulloch said, “following closely behind with the non-stop rumors on social media.” On Mediate, Matt Wilstein rounds up the responses. It's worth recalling that without social media, and Twitter in particular, the killing of Michael Brown and the Ferguson police's hyper-militarized response might never have become a national news story in...

All Against All Sharing economy critic Tom Slee explains why Uber represents "a future," not "the future" and goes into great detail why Canada, his home country, should reject the kind of jobs, accessibility and city its model would bring if adopted. Most critically, he details how Uber has vastly overstated the earnings of its drivers, and argues that if Canadian cities like Toronto bless Uber's entrance into their market, they will also be also allowing "bad labour practices to intrude further and further into Canada's workplaces." For the opposite point of view, here's venture capitalist Mark Suster of Los Angeles explaining why he loves Uber (IN CAPS). In addition to solving his professional need for faster taxi pickups, he writes, "It's...

Power Frames In the Harvard Business Review, Jeremy Heimans of Purpose and Henry Timms of the 92nd Street Y explain how to understand the differences between "old power" and "new power." They write: Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures. New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it….New power models are enabled...

Creeping In the wake of BuzzFeed's report on Uber executive Emil Michael's threat to journalists, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) has written a tough letter to Travis Kalanick, the company's CEO. Franken notes that Uber's privacy policies "do not in any clear way match or support" what the company has been saying in the wake of Michael's reported statements. He asked Kalanick to address several key questions, including how he explained Michael's failure to heed Uber's privacy policies, why customers aren't told about "internal reasons" for sharing their information with third-parties, why they aren't asked to affirmatively consent or opt out of such information sharing, whether customers are notified if their data is inappropriately access, and whether any disciplinary actions have ever...