Author: Eric Lipton and Somini Sengupta
Publisher: New York Times
Date: May 4, 2013

The television advertisement that hit the airwaves in Florida last month featured the Republican Party’s rising star, Senator Marco Rubio, boasting about his get-tough plan for border security.

The plan is being heavily promoted by senior executives from Silicon Valley, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.

But most who watched the commercial, sponsored by a new group that calls itself Americans for a Conservative Direction, may be surprised to learn who bankrolled it:senior executives from Silicon Valley, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, who run companies where the top employees donate mostly to Democrats.

The advertising blitz reflects the sophisticated lobbying campaign being waged by technology companies and their executives. Read more here.

Author: Steve Lohr
Publisher: New York Times
Date: November 8, 2012

Technology doesn’t win political campaigns, but it certainly is a weapon — a force multiplier, in military terms.

Both sides in the presidential contest mined click-stream data as never before to target messages to potential voters. But a real edge for the Obama campaign was in its use of online and mobile technology to support its much-praised ground game, finding potential supporters and urging them to vote, either in person or by phone, according to two senior members of the Obama technology team, Michael Slaby, chief integration and innovation officer for the Obama campaign, and Harper Reed, chief technology officer for the Obama campaign.

A program called “Dashboard,” for example, allowed volunteers to join a local field team and get assignments remotely. The Web application — viewable on smartphones or tablets — showed the location of field workers, neighborhoods to be canvassed, and blocks where help was needed. “It allowed people to join a neighborhood team without ever going to a central office,” said Mr. Slaby.

Another ground-game program was a tool for telephone canvassing from people’s homes instead of having to travel to a campaign office and work from a telephone bank. The call tool was a Web program that let people sign up to make calls and receive a list of phone numbers, names and a script to use, noted Mr. Reed. Read more here.

Author: Jessica Bruder:
Publisher: New York Times
Date: January 24, 2012

If you build it, they will code.

That’s the attitude behind a groundswell of learn-to-program start-ups, all competing to put aspiring coders through their paces online. With target audiences ranging from neophytes living under rocks – “What’s a browser?” – to tech-savvy kids, entrepreneurs and mid-level developers, these young Web companies use game mechanics and narrative techniques to hold users’ attention and are part of the ongoing boom in online education.

Here’s a look at three coding start-ups that are leading the way: Treehouse, Codecademy, and Code School by Envy Labs. Read more here.