Remember those simpler times when we didn’t know who Senators McCain and Obama would pick as their Vice-Presidential nominees?  It feels like decades ago, but there was  a time before “Hockey Mom” was a punchline and the media thought “Gaffezilla” was a poorly foreign translated movie.  It was August and anticipation was in the air: literally.  In the early hours of August 23rd, 2008, the Obama campaign made their announcement of running mate Joe Biden to the world over-the-air through a simple mobile text message.

That text message was the Obama campaign’s secret weapon for voter turnout.

In the weeks leading up to the announcement, the Obama campaign’s media team had been hyping the announcement, using every interview to encourage people to “Text VP to 62262″  to be the first to find out who the nominee would be.  Meanwhile the “sign up to find out” message was the centerpiece of a massive online ad campaign for much of August, eventually encouraging 3 million people to sign up.

And by the time the text message went out around 3am on August 23rd, the Obama campaign had compiled what was perhaps the largest list of campaign supporters’ mobile phone numbers ever assembled.

So far, there haven’t been any reports of the campaign using this list to make terrifying “robocalls”, but doing that would squander the value of the list.  Rather, the campaign likely plans to use the list of 3 million mobile numbers to send out one final text message right before the election: a simple reminder to vote on November 4.  It’s like a reverse American Idol.

Frederic Guarino, a mobile marketing expert at Hemisphere NoBrainer, put the strategy succinctly: “Mobile is a trigger.”  By collecting the mobile phone numbers of 3 million likely voters, the Obama campaign will theoretically be able to mobilize supporters to get to the polls, using a tactic cutting edge marketers have been advocating for years for their corporate clients.

Does it work – absolutely.  A 2006 study conducted by the New Voters Project found that a text message reminder increased the liklihood of a new voter actually showing up to vote by 4.2% and was considered “helpful” by 59% of recipients.  For the campaign consultants, the real value is the price: only $1.56 per vote cast.  While it’s just as effective in turning out voters as a “quality” phone call, the call costs about $20 per vote cast, meaning it’s efficacy and cost effectiveness makes it a viable tactic for upstart campaigns.  Get Out The Vote just got a lot more accessible.

And yes, even “likely” voters don’t turn out some times.  I spent a good deal of time working on my local Congressional primary, which coincidentially was the same morning I bought an iPhone.  Even though I was involved in the campaign, I’d completely forgotten it was primary day, and as I sat in the parking lot, checking my email on the iPhone for the first time, I got a message reminding me to vote.  The race wasn’t even close, but getting that email on my phone was what got me to the polls that morning.

Rana Sobhany knows a thing or two about the intersection of politics and mobile.  She’s a former grassroots campaign consultant turned rockstar publicist turned mobile guru who’s currently the head of marketing for Medialets, a creative ad network for the iPhone, Android, and other rich-mobile devices.  “As campaigns begin to shift their focus to digital, the promise of mobile becomes the epitome of personalized reach to constituents. The mobile phone is the most personal device one owns, particularly in middle America where mobile phones are far more ubiquitous and constantly connected than computers. which makes it the clear platform of choice for large campaigns, spearheaded by the Obama camp.”

This tactic could be the difference between electoral victory in several close states, mobilizing enough supporters to turn out to counteract the undecided voters who turn out for the other side.  Whether it’s enough to counteract the “Bradley Effect” is yet to be seen, but in a race where pollsters are only starting to come to terms with the “cell phone gap”, use mobile phones could turn out to be one of the most valuable tactics in any campaign’s arsenal.

On November 4th, watch the screens.

Disclosure:  David Riordan has previously worked with both Hemisphere NoBrainer and Medialets.

So here they are – in their entirety:

Apple Time Capsule (1987 -> 1997):

The Road Ahead – Home (1995 -> 2004):

The Road Ahead – Education (1995 ->2004):

Also, check out this display in The Road Ahead.  Look familiar?

Did Apple steal the design of the iMac from Bill Gates and Microsoft?!

WHAT?

In the year since he became the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, the charismatic 41-year old Cameron has reinvented British conservatism and revitalized his party to such an extent that it now maintains a 20-point lead in polls ahead of the incumbent Labour party, led by the wildly unpopular Gordon Brown.

Cameron and Obama have become the faces of the ideology of Change that citizens on both sides of the Atlantic are clamoring for.

And as men who have both been on rigorous campaigns and in interruption-laden jobs, they also share an understanding that it’s simply not possible to fulfill your duties by “working” 100% of the time.

Obama met with Cameron earlier today as one of the last stops on his international tour, and in a private conversation picked up by ABC, Cameron asked Obama if he’d gotten a break yet.

“You should be on the beach,” Cameron told Obama. “You need a break. Well, you need to be able to keep your head together.”

“You’ve got to refresh yourself,” agreed Obama.

“Do you have a break at all?” asked Cameron.

“I have not,” said Obama. “I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process –  said that, should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be — ”

“These guys just chalk your diary up,” said Cameron, referring to a packed schedule.

“Right,” Obama said. “In 15 minute increments …”

“We call it the dentist’s waiting room,” Cameron said. “You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.”

“And, well, and you start making mistakes,” Obama said, “or you lose the big picture. Or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel– ”

“Your feeling,” interrupted Cameron. “And that is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to make decisions.”

“That’s exactly right,” Obama said. “And the truth is that we’ve got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know ten times more than we do about the specifics of the topics. And so if what you’re trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you.”

(Conversation quoted from ABC’s Political Punch)

The residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and 10 Downing St. have two of the most intense and stressful jobs in the world, and that their next residents already recognize the need to deal with these stresses is a good sign.

Certainly there’s such a thing as overdoing it, but there’s a marked distinction between mindless vacation and thinking time.  Thinking time is like sleep, processing information and recombining it along with reducing physical and mental stress (in fact, sleep absolutely constitutes thinking time).

So to those who believe in the philosophy of 200% efficiency 100% of the time, take a minute to reflect on the thoughts of the next leaders of the free world; you might just come up with your next great idea in that moment of reflection.

Lets take a look at the live viewership per network:

Data from Silicon Alley Insider

And now lets look at DVR viewership over a 7-day period per network:

Data From Silicon Alley Insider

Notice anything?

Aside from the 20 year gap between the average CBS Viewer and the average CW viewer, the DVR doesn’t change things very much.

Now let’s add Hulu into the equation for DVR Viewership:

Data From Silicon Alley Insider & TV Week

The average age of a Hulu viewer is 32 years old.  While the average viewer age on DVR only drops 1 year from live viewership on NBC and Fox, their joint venture, Hulu drops the average viewership age by at least 12 years for Fox and by 17 years for NBC.

Hulu started off as a way to prevent networks from turning $100 bills into 100 pennies, but it might be just the reverse.  It’s the cheap yuppie’s DVR, but with one huge advantage for the networks: no fast forwarding through commercials.

If I were NBCU and Fox, I’d put on a big show at the Upfronts with a simple motto:

Hulu: It’s like TiVo with commercials and the kids like it.

Using apt, it was possible to install and update software, and even upgrade the OS, with just a simple instruction.  apt-get would download and install not only the program you wanted, but also take care of all of the dependencies it required.  There were many official mirrors of the core debian programs, called repositories, and thousands of unofficial repositories one could rely on if they couldn’t find the application they were looking for inside the core debian distribution.  apt was decentralized, yet controlled and efficient enough to provide a sufficient user experience for its core audience.  If your software didn’t make it into the core repositories, users could paste a URL into a text file, and unofficial software could be distributed along side the core Debian distribution.

The advantage of being in the core apt repositories was that users wouldn’t have to go to additional lengths to install your software since it was in the repositories that shipped with the OS (meaning increased distribution and use).  These were packages vetted by the core team, demonstrated to work with that version of the OS, and cause minimal compatibility issues.  Unofficial repositories couldn’t inherently guarantee that level of safety and stability, but applications distributed this way were just as easy to install.

And none of this precluded someone from distributing an application as source and compiling it locally.

In short, apt kicked ass.

The apt repository model was replicated by RedHat (and Centos) with yum and ultimately powered the Jailbroken iPhone’s Installer.app.

The apt-get model is fantastic for distribution of open projects, but doesn’t work natively for distribution of paid applications (though it wouldn’t take much to add it).

Yet when it comes to the iPhone, Apple is intent on acting as the sole distribution outlet.  There are several real benefits to both the end-user and most developers of Apple acting as the sole distributor, but it also means Apple is going to become (and maybe already has become) a bottleneck to distribution.

Apple is expecting itself to serve as the protector of its users, filtering inappropriate content (no porn apps) and malicious apps (no virus laden or private information stealing apps) out.  And while this can provide a huge benefit to its users (and provide assurances on behalf of developers) for content and distribution, it also serves as a gatekeeper for applications that might threaten the current business model of Apple or partners, or more realistically, simply just be a bottleneck for releases.  Applications will have to be re-approved, even for the slightest changes, in order to continue these assurances from Apple, as a developer could change an innocuous, approved application into a malicious one fairly easily.  That’s a lot of responsibility for Apple.  This means it’s going to be a lot harder to developers to rapidly iterate on their designs (as Apple promised would be possible) and push out updates, particularly critical security updates.

We’re apt to see an official apt-style model of distribution on the iPhone outside of the Jailbroken installer.app, though it doesn’t mean that the Jailbroken environment isn’t a fantastic playground for developers to innovate in (and it might even be possible to use the Apple SDK as a starting point, even for Jailbroken apps, though I’m not sure this is possible yet).

So what can be done about getting apps into the store faster?

For Developers:

Document like crazy – your code has an audience:  You aren’t just developing so your code can be used by yourself and your team.  It also has to be read by the Apple vetting team… EVERY SINGLE TIME.  Flag changes you’ve made and make it easy to find what you’ve done (detailed changelogs are insanely valuable here).  Apple has a limited team reviewing applications.  Make your code so an intro computer science student could understand what’s going on.  The reviewing team isn’t dumb, but after staring at other people’s source code all day, they’ll sure appreciate not having to decipher cryptic elements of yours.

For Apple:

[note I'm not in the developer program yet so I'm not sure how your process works entirely yet]

Implement a priority point release update approval process, and make it completely transparent.  Security updates should be moved up in review speed.  Security releases should be moved up in the priority queue.

Publish code documentation standards – if people know how to document their code for more efficient approval, they’ll assuredly do it.

Make your approval process transparent.  Sure, SJ’s temper might decide who has a job this afternoon, but that doesn’t mean your app approval process needs to be equally as opaque.  Let us know how things work.  We’ll work on making our apps better suited to you as a result.

Yet, Apple in the Middle means that if the Middleman fails, nobody wins.  There is absolutely no way to route around Apple, so as a developer, if Apple fails, gets backed up, or just decides your app is good enough as is, that’s final.  At least wiht Apt, even if the distribution stopped updating, or the repositories went down, the system could still live on.  No such luck here.

I’ve been using the location-driven social network BrightKite pretty heavily in the past few weeks (and it’s made me realize that I’m the only one who uses it since Fairfield County is not a web-hipster enclave), though for some reason, its SMS feature hasn’t been working at all.

This morning on the heels of Loopt’s demo at WWDC and Gawker’s proclamation that it will forever change public interactions, I started to rethink Verizon’s stance on social networks using its network.  Does it fundamentally make sense to block social applications until adequate parental controls are built in, particularly since their competiors are encouraging them?

Ultimately Verizon made the right buisiness decision to block BrightKite (and Loopt) until they deployed parental safeguards.  The number of web-hipsters who won’t choose Verizon as their wireless provider is far less than the number of parents who will choose Verizon for themselves and their children because they can block or constrain the use of these social networks.  Furthermore, while there’s no public research on the subject, I’m fairly certain that wireless providers are going to be like political parties, children will tend stick with the carrier their household used.  So all those kids whose parents chose Verizon because it blocked social networks will stay on, even when they move off the family’s bill.

House Music United – Yes We Can Obama’s entire Yes We Can speech over a gorgeous classic house track.  Truly inspirational.

Kidz in the Hall – Work to Do Kidz in the Hall are a Chicago-based group (formally on the new Rawkus Records).  MC Naledge was one of Obama’s earliest musical supporters, so last December, he and producer Double-0 decided to release one of the first Obama support tracks.  The Ivy-league educated duo (they met while at UPENN) followed this up in January with a remix featuring Bun B and Talib Kwelli.

Work To Do

Work To Do (Remix feat. Bun B & Talib Kwelli)

DJ Green Lantern – We Need Barack (feat. Mavado) Part of Green Lantern & Russell Simmons mixtape for Obama.

DJ Green Lantern – We Need Barack (feat. Mavado)

Pete Rock – Obama for the People

Nas – Black President (Produced by DJ Green Lantern)

Bonus 80’s Throwback: Grandmaster Flash and Mellie Mel – Jesse (thx Falcon)

First it was the white earbuds, then it was the white plastic and brushed metal with lighted Apple logos across college campuses.  Now, iPhones and Airbooks are becoming the chic and ubiquitous norm among the corporate set and the C-Suite; how?

Last week, eWeek released Apple’s new sales numbers.  Apple now has 66% of the market for new PC’s in the >$1000 category; 64% of new laptops and 70% of new desktops (that’s surprising).  Ok, so if you want to be hip and trendy, you’re going to have to do it by laser-etching or stickering your MacBook.  But what it does mean is that the people at the top are adopting Macintosh as their platform of choice at an astronomical rate.  It also means that Apple is refusing to compete in the commodity technology market.  For those who have the impression that computers are supposed to cost over $1000, the only choice is apple.  But for the majority of the world, where what matters most is access to technology, apple won’t even be recognized.

In a world where high tech is ubiquitous, Apple will become the mark between the Have’s and the Have Not’s.