Inside Obama's Meeting with Entrepreneurs on the Fiscal Cliff

via inc.com

When entrepreneur and Inc. 30 Under 30 alum Nikhil Arora received an email from the White House last Thursday to attend a small business meeting, he didn’t know exactly what to expect or even who from the Obama administration would be present.

He said it was only “one or two days” before the now highly publicized meeting took place Tuesday that he found out President Obama himself would lead a conversation on how to avoid the impending fiscal cliff with a group of 15 entrepreneurs.

“I didn’t expect that level of engagement from the administration,” said the co-founder of Back to the Roots, a company that makes mushroom growing kits from recycled coffee grounds. “This was not a presentation, it was an active back-and-forth discussion.”

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

Obama Turns His Back On Silicon Valley

via businessinsider.com

During the 2012 presidential campaign, Silicon Valley tech businesses overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama with their dollars.

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

Meet the Technologists that Helped win Obama the Election

via theatlantic.com

The Obama campaign's technologists were tense and tired. It was game day and everything was going wrong.

Josh Thayer, the lead engineer of Narwhal, had just been informed that they'd lost another one of the services powering their software. That was bad: Narwhal was the code name for the data platform that underpinned the campaign and let it track voters and volunteers. If it broke, so would everything else.

They were talking with people at Amazon Web Services, but all they knew was that they had packet loss. Earlier that day, they lost their databases, their East Coast servers, and their memcache clusters. Thayer was ready to kill Nick Hatch, a DevOps engineer who was the official bearer of bad news. Another of their vendors, PalominoDB, was fixing databases, but needed to rebuild the replicas. It was going to take time, Hatch said. They didn't have time.

They'd been working 14-hour days, six or seven days a week, trying to reelect the president, and now everything had been broken at just the wrong time. It was like someone had written a Murphy's Law algorithm and deployed it at scale.

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

What Obama's Victory Means for Tech

via gizmodo.com

Barack Obama's victory last night has far-reaching fiscal, social, and military implications, all of which are familiar to anyone who kept at least one eye open during any of this year's debates. But what do four more years mean for tech? Turns out, a lot.

While Obama hasn't indicated that he'll dramatically change course on any of his technological policies and initiatives, it's useful to look a little closer at the ones he's got. Here's what we can expect.

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

Obama vs Romney Mobile [Infographic]

via startapp.com

An informative infographic showing the mobile trends and statistics of this election.

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

Trump to give $5 million to charity if Obama releases records

via news.yahoo.com

Donald Trump offered to pay $5 million to the charity of President Barack Obama's choice if Obama releases his college and passport records, the real estate mogul and television personality said on Wednesday.

"Frankly, it's a check that I very much want to write," Trump said in a YouTube video released via his Twitter and Facebook pages.

Posted via email from Create | Inspire - DM2 Studios

Presidential Debate 2012 Live Stream: Mitt Romney, Barack Obama’s New York rematch

via news.nationalpost.com

Tuesday’s Presidential Debate is the second of two televised matches between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The candidates will face questions from citizens on policy issues, after which they’ll each be given two minutes to respond. The segments will wrap up with one minute of follow-up discussion led by moderator Candy Crowley.

Posted via email from Inspiration

Obama Romney presidential debate: How to watch and follow online

via digitaltrends.com

The first presidential debate of the 2012 U.S. election is upon us. Here's where to watch, follow, and get in on the action.

Kick the tires and light the fires, big daddy — the 2012 U.S. presidential race is about to head into its final lap. Starting at 9 p.m ET/6 p.m PT tonight, President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney will take the stage at the University of Denver for the first of three presidential debates. And this year, the Web will play a greater role than ever before in how we watch the debates and react to their substance — reactions that are sure to color the narrative of the election season’s final days. To get on top of the action, here’s our complete Web user’s guide to watching this year’s inaugural presidential debate.

Posted via email from Inspiration

How the Obama Campaign Uses Your Personal Information to Get Your Money and Your Vote

via gizmodo.com

In 2008, the Obama campaign enlisted the help of Facebook and Google bigwigs to help raise massive sums from a lot of small donors. Back then, the key was just a few pieces of data—today, that data mining effort has been expanded to a huge and very creepy degree.

Posted via email from Inspiration

How Barack Obama Made His Millions

via businessinsider.com

Two weeks ago, we looked at how Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican nominee for Vice president, made all of his money.

The answer? Natural resources, land rights, and stocks, all invested in mutual funds and limited partnerships.

We got a lot of requests to do the same thing to Barack Obama, and for him the answer is much easier.

First of all, Obama has released copies of his tax returns, so we're able to produce hard numbers when it comes to what he makes.

Posted via email from Inspiration

Has YouTube Sided With the Democrats?

0 0 1 364 2078 DM2 Studios 17 4 2438 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE

YouTube may hold itself to be a non-bias platform with no political affiliations, but their viewers certainly are not. A large majority of YouTube’s frequent viewers seem be to favoring the Liberals, at leased based on the views and ‘likes’ their videos receive. But is YouTube itself supporting the Democratic Party?   

Google, a major financial supporter of Barak Obama, has put itself in a rather uncomfortable position. For years Google has been accused of “filtering” search result, displaying top sites based on their Silicon Valley bias, instead of an impartial algorithm. Whether these accusations are true or not, search engines are meant to be a nonpartisan tool, rather than a political platform.

Google of course purchased YouTube for $1.65 Billion in October of 2006. Since then, the video hosting site has become one of the most popular services on the Internet, as well as a major media platform.

Until today, I always saw YouTube as being impartial. However, at 8:30pm Eastern Time on Friday September 7^th I went onto YouTube and saw a democratic video entitled: “Polis 2012 Democratic Convention Speech” in the most viewed of both the daily and weekly videos. For those of you who are unfamiliar with YouTube, to get on the most viewed videosrequires hundreds of thousands of views in a short amount of time - a fairly difficult task. How many views did this video have? The video had 2,314 views and only 7 comments - not nearly enough to be displayed in this exclusive list.

It isn’t unheard of to see the occasional video slip past YouTube’s watchful eyes onto this list, but not without adding unauthentic views. It makes you wonder if perhaps the online video giant has openly stepped out to support the Democratic Party. Regardless of whether it was a mistake or intentional, any video regardless of its message should be treated with impartiality, as to let the American people vote with a clear perspective.

The big question remains - where does it end? Are the public’s search results being displayed through a political filter? Are California media companies secretly promoting videos and messages from political parties? I for one think that some of the biggest issues America is facing today is because of private corporations getting too involved in politics. In this upcoming election America: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”. God bless the USA!

- Jordan Driediger 

Posted via email from Inspiration