Data drove many decisions for the campaign. The team amassed more than 13 million email addresses and more than 5 million friends across the social networking landscape. Of the roughly $750 million Obama raised, two-thirds of it was donated online. There were field offices across the nation. Data was coming from everywhere — every time someone signed up on Facebook, donated $5 or requested info from my.barackobama.com, the campaign got at least a phone number or an email address.

Corralling the various data was critical, Peterson said during the presentation, as it allowed the campaign to “break down the walls between departments.” In early 2007, when Iowa was the focus, Team Obama built a tool that meshed voter registration data with data collected online to determine the geographic location of voters. This allowed precinct organizers to more fully personalize the experience for voters in their precincts. Instead of generic phone calls asking people to vote for Obama, callers were able offer rides to caucus locations or talk about issues that voters might have raised via a forum post. While all this was going on in Iowa, another web tool was feeding information to volunteers in states with later primaries and caucuses, who built and grew coalitions until the official campaign focused its attention on those states.

The main objective of this data integration strategy was to make the most of resource expenditures. The Obama campaign didn’t want to waste time going through the phonebook cold calling, so it used data mining and integration to figure out “who the cream was on our barrel,” on whom it should unleash its hordes of volunteers. This was the campaign’s single biggest technology-derived success, Peterson told me. It gave the campaign a leg up on the Republican effort, which Peterson thinks lost its analytical edge thanks to “data nerd” Karl Rove’s absence.

The end-result of data integration is creating what Peterson calls “one picture of the truth” across the board, where organizations see all the relevant data for a particular need in one place instead of having the data isolated in their respective departments. Siloing data points decreases efficiency and usefulness. Peterson said corporate America’s bureaucratic structure and cultural resistance to departmental integration slow down data integration projects, even though corporations all strive to make the best use of their data.

As opposed to established corporations with legacy systems and practices, campaigns are like startups: They’re pretty much built from the ground up each election cycle, meaning there are no deeply rooted architectural or cultural obstacles standing in the way of integration. When the Obama 2012 campaign begins to take shape — strategies developed, infrastructure put in place and resources allocated — Peterson hopes 2008 veterans bring the institutional memory to build in data integration from the start.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell the rest of the story — how technological advances ranging from Facebook to mobile processors to cloud computing helped revolutionize the way campaigns are run.

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This week as the sold-out Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference kicks off, and Congress sits down to vote on a new, pared-down stimulus package that includes billions for jobs in energy efficiency and clean power, “green jobs” are at the forefront of everyone’s minds. But the cleantech industry hasn’t proved to be recession-proof, and layoffs and hiring freezes are leading would-be green employees to question just how soon the jobs will arrive, and what kind of cleantech companies will be hiring. Here’s what we see:

Where The Green Jobs Ain’t Right Now:

In the near term, the recession has caused many large renewable energy developers to shed staff — the New York Times had an excellent article last week on the hard times for renewable developers. A big part of the problem is that debt and tax-equity financing dropped off late last year, making it far harder to finance new clean power projects. And after a period of high demand, high prices and high margins, manufacturers have been suffering.

The wind industry has been blown over. Clipper Windpower is laying off 90 workers at its Ceder Rapids, Iowa, plant and cutting its production for 2009. Gamesa is laying off about 180 workers at its plant in Fairless Hills in eastern Pennsylvania. Even Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s No. 1 turbine maker, is reportedly seeing lowered demand for its products.

Large solar makers are feeling the same pain. Suntech Power, Day4 Energy, GT Solar, Emcore and Advanced Energy have announced layoffs, and still more have delayed or suspended new plants.

In addition, younger startups in capital-intensive businesses — many of which grew too big too fast in the good times — are in varying stages of crash and burn. OptiSolar ramped up at an incredible pace out of nowhere and recently had to chop half its staff. Electric-car maker Tesla underestimated just how difficult it would be to raise the money to mass produce vehicles and started cutting staff last year. Basically, if you see a new firm that needs to raise hundreds of millions to manufacture a lot of gear in order to start generating revenues, it’s probably not a good idea to turn in your resume.

Where The Green Jobs Still Are:

In the near term, early-stage firms and less conventional sectors of cleantech are still providing jobs. Greg Chin, a partner at law firm Latham & Watkins, says he’s seeing a net increase in jobs among his early-stage cleantech clients, with jobs mainly in science, engineering and marketing. Amy Vernetti, a managing director at headhunting firm Taylor Winfield,
says many of the jobs are coming from more obscure cleantech sectors, such as fuel additives and air filtration. She pointed us to Accsys Technologies, which is hiring and has developed a nontoxic chemical process to harden fast-growing pine so it can be used in place of hardwoods or even steel.

Startups that are building tools that can help companies save money on their energy bills can still move product in a downturn, and many are still hiring skilled employees. IT companies like Sun Microsystems are increasingly focusing on cutting the energy consumption in their data centers, which requires engineers, installers and designers. Sentilla, a startup that makes energy management services for data centers and industrial manufacturing, recently raised funding and is hiring engineers. Positive Energy, a startup that builds energy management reports for utilities, raised money in late 2008 and has over a dozen jobs for engineers, executives and designers listed on its site.

But a couple things to consider about these current openings: smaller, early-stage firms hire fewer people, and that means more competition. And getting those jobs will require more skill and experience than they did previously. “A lot of people might be trying to come into the sector at a time when many people have got a three- to five-year head start on them,” says Ron Pernick, a principal of research firm Clean Edge.

Down the Road: Green Jobs From the Stimulus

A lot of hope is being pinned on the green jobs that will be created in the stimulus package, particularly jobs in building out infrastructure. The package, if passed, could allocate $4.5 billion to build out a smarter power grid, which could create jobs for electricians, installers, engineers. Smart grid software company eMeter says it has seen increased interest from utilities based on stimulus expectations. Though other utilities are slowing their smart-meter rollouts in the face of the downturn.

The stimulus package is allocating a massive $6.2 billion to weatherize public housing, which would create jobs for local construction companies that can install new insulation and more energy-efficient windows. The DOE’s Weatherization Project Manager, Robert DeSoto, told us that every local agency that will be allocating these funds will be searching for new home retrofitters to work with.

The stimulus package also allocates billions in tax breaks for renewable energy projects. This could help those large clean power developers down the road that have recently been shedding staff. The more-established, later-stage companies are the ones that are far better poised to answer Obama’s call for “shovel-ready” clean power projects than new startups. And new projects could also create a substantial amount of construction jobs, which would have a far bigger impact on green jobs overall than a small number of highly-skilled openings for executives and engineers in Silicon Valley. Another bonus: clean power construction jobs can’t be outsourced.

While it remains to be seen how many green jobs the stimulus package will deliver, as Latham & Watkin’s Chin, says: “I expect the pickup in cleantech job creation to come before the pickup in the overall economy.”

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With those words, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chair of the House Financial Services Committee, wrapped up two days of testimony from auto executives intended to be something like a truth commission for the incompetent but ending up more like sado-masochism in bespoke suits. It leaves one wondering what happens if we aren’t lucky — and generally not looking forward to this week.

It also raises a question. What kind of solution would everyone like?

Enter Chad Holliday, CEO not of a Detroit automaker, but of Delaware’s DuPont. It shows just how far the U.S. auto industry has fallen when it’s getting schooled by a guy who makes freon and spandex. DuPont gets a fifth of its revenue from its automotive division, so Holliday urged executives at a luncheon in Detroit’s storied Book Cadillac Hotel to consider a “Detroit Project” — a new Manhattan Project with all the innovations and none of the bombs.

Holliday says his idea is “not totally crazy” — which these days is another way of saying it’s a pretty good idea. As the Free Press reported, he envisions

[a] new-generation car as very safe and environmentally sensitive, perhaps using solar cells. The $5-billion project would be paid for through the public sale of bonds and would be operated on a tight timeline. It would involve the best scientists and engineers from the Detroit auto companies as well as Microsoft, Intel, Google, Boeing and DuPont.

Two days later in Washington, Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla) was making the same pitch to the Big Three themselves, only with an open-source twist. According to the New York Times’ Tom Zeller, Klein suggested:

that American automakers ought to form an research-and-development collective — a “Manhattan Project” of sorts, he says — to conceive and develop the very best concepts toward creating clean, efficient automotive technology. That body, Mr. Klein says, would then share and distribute this knowledge base and innovations, among all automakers.

Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli piped up that he would “totally subscribe to the concept,” although you have to wonder whether he wouldn’t totally subscribe to In These Times if it would help him get his piece of that $34 billion.

So why not a Motor City Project? A few reasons. While nothing is preventing the companies from such an ambitious transition, it’s just not in the DNA of the current management to oversee it. The notion of them relaxing their paranoid instincts to share the best research is hard to imagine. Also, the Big Three have already received a commitment of $25 billion for just such next-gen cars, but with no provision that they share information — or any strings attached, really.

A Detroit Project would mean a bailout with accountability: Take this money, share the engineering, and do something useful. The problem with the Big 3 is not the economy; it’s that this simple task is beyond them. So I guess we’re stuck with that bill that nobody likes.

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For basic photo editing, if you’re running OS X 10.5 Leopard you don’t need Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator. Leopard’s Preview graphics viewer application is much more than a viewer; it now incorporates some very handy image correction tools that are not only user-friendly and intuitive to use, but also work really well.

Consequently, if you take digital photos or scan transparencies or prints onto your computer and want to optimize them, you may not need a traditional image editor application at all. Preview can do the job for you.

New Tools

Check out Preview’s new Tools Menu. If you’re familiar with the Tools Menu in OS 10.4 Tiger Preview, you’ll note that there are some new selections.

Now, say you’ve downloaded a photo from your camera, and you’re not quite happy with the exposure, color rendering, or other picture attributes. For example, here is a photo of a beach near my home. It’s straight out of the camera (an old, 3.2 megapixel unit) and is a bit underexposed, has a greenish tinge, and it isn’t as sharp as it probably should be.

So, open the image file in Preview and choose Adjust Color from the Tools Menu. A translucent black color and exposure adjustment palette will appear, with ten sliders that facilitate the adjustment of exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sepia, black level, white level, and sharpness.

Real Time Feedback

The adjustment sliders give you real time feedback, and I have found that they work beautifully. I love to play with all possibilities, and after my adjustment efforts, my beach photo now looked like this. It definitely has more brightness and pop and I like the color balance better. I was also able to make it sharper, although in cranking up the brightness I lost the cloud detail in the sky.

However, if you’re pressed for time, or are not quite sure what adjustment/correction effects you would like, just click the Auto Levels button and the program will make its best guess as to what the optimum values should be, automatically adjusting the sliders. You can still tweak individual qualities if you wish before saving the image. Here’s Preview Auto Levels’ best guess for my beach shot. I like my manual effort better, but it does retain the cloud detail.

Best All Around Tool For Simple Image Correction?

What both surprised and delighted me the first time I used it is how well this all works, and from one simple palette too. I’m not sure that this isn’t the all-round best tool I’ve ever used for this sort of image correction. It’s certainly the most convenient, and has added a great deal of value to the Leopard Preview application from my perspective.

But there’s more. Preview now has an image scaling and resizing tool as well, allowing you to conveniently and quickly change a photo’s resolution. Just select Adjust Size from the Tools Menu, and either manually enter the desired dimensions in the provided fields, or pull down the menu and choose one of the resolution selections provided. You can also change the resolution of your picture (number of pixels per inch) by setting it in the resolution box.

Of course, if you need to do more advanced correction such as red eye or spot removal, or retouching, you’ll still need an application like Photoshop Elements, Pixelmator, or iPhoto. But for basic exposure, color and sharpness correction, Preview is now a very quick, handy, and effective tool.

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How about a virtual world space, where you can follow and discuss the tally live with avatars from around the globe? Here’s a handy traveler’s guide for doing just that:

WeeWorld (free reg. required)

For the election, the avatar-based chatroom/social network has released McCain and Obama WeeMee characters, created in its distinct, South Park-esque style, so you can add the Presidential candidate of your choice to your WeeWorld room. (While decking your avatar out in campaign gear, of course.) With a simple “Who else has this” search, WeeWorld users can find others who’ve also added McCain and/or Obama to their room — a good way to find and meet up with like-minded avatars.

Barely Political on Vivaty (Plug-in installation required)

The web-based 3-D scene platform Vivaty recently partnered with Barely Political (the Obama girl people) to create official rooms for the viral video producers.

You can watch BP’s many election videos with other avatars in their loft-style hangout; assuming enough fans show up, a potentially nice place to be during the final outcome.

Second Life (Free reg. and software download required)

Of course, there’s only one virtual world where your avatar can actually look like Obama Girl or Sarah Palin. Linden Lab’s metaverse is teeming with political activity and real world social advocacy groups, so it’s no surprise that election day will be rocking in SL. An unofficial Obama group is 1,500+ members strong, while a McCain group is much smaller (450+ members) but also active. Both will be following election results from their respective headquarters. There’s also a dynamic electoral college map that will be updated through the night at Capitol Island, while Info Island will host a bipartisan blow-out starting at 4pm, with mud-wrestling matches for avatars who want to release pent-up partisanship.

Teleport links to the above locations (launch SL and take you directly to designated spot):
Obama Headquarters
McCain group’s Straight Talk Cafe
Capitol Hill Island
Info Island

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Last week we wrote up some of the best places to watch election results online. Since we compiled that story, additional news outlets have finalized their plans of attack, and more people have pointed us to other great resources.

If you want to get your election news from a linear TV channel, that’s your call. But as Slate editor Joan Walsh told the New York Times, “At a time when almost anyone can check voter turnout in certain neighborhoods in Cuyahoga County, I don’t think everyone is going to sit there and wait to be spoon-fed the election results in the order Brian Williams thinks is appropriate.” So if you’re planning to set up a multiscreen command center, here are some sites to pull up:

Video streaming by Ustream

Both the presidential candidates, Rock the Vote, ABC News, PressPassTV (professional athletes talk politics…no really), OneNewsNow.com (conservative Christian coverage — embedded above) and Politico (YouTube favorite James Kotecki) will all be streaming on Ustream.TV. A ton of other outlets, including USA Today and a bunch of other Gannett properties, will be using live Mogulus channels.

The Associated Press will be issuing its first-ever live webcast, hosted by reporters from its Washington bureau, and including voter interviews.

The New York Times has built an online election dashboard that will incorporate news and state-by-state results as they are called by its staff and other major news organizations. On its home page, the NYT will publish videos every 30 minutes throughout the night from inside the newsroom. The paper is also catering to mobile users, with full results available for phones as well as text message news alerts. For alerts, send the word “NEWSALERTS” to 698698. To customize for a particular zip code,
send “ELECTIONS [ZIP CODE]” to 698698. All of the options are summarized in this blog post.

The Washington Post is hosting all its election coverage on an interactive map and timeline. Via socialmedian, users can chat about the election, see an aggregation of news sources with relevant Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube posts, and see hot discussion topics rise to the top.

For live citizen news from around the country, try The UpTake, which will be streaming reports on voter reaction and turnout.

The Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident is also pulling together a “Twitter Vote Report,” effectively a citizen-created national exit poll that combines “tweets” about users’ voting experiences into a cohesive interface.

C-SPAN will offer live streams of John McCain‘s and Barack Obama‘s election night events via Mogulus.

ABC News will offer livestreams of its own newscast, the scene at both the McCain and Obama campaigns’ headquarters, and a stream of roving reporters in battleground states. It will also offer a live results map, searchable exit polling data, liveblogging and results via SMS.

CBS News will be offering county-by-county results updated every minute, liveblogging, as well as a simulcast of its TV coverage, starting at 6:30 p.m. EDT. Around 2 a.m. EDT, Katie Couric will host a live webcast on CBSNews.com and CNET.com to address participants’ questions.

Current is offering a user-contributed party. Instead talking heads blabbing away, it will instead a provide a pulsating map set to a live DJ set by Diplo. Contributions will pop up from users on Digg, Twitter and 12seconds.tv.

For an international perspective, Livestation will stream Al Jazeera English, BBC World News, euronews, France 24 and C-SPAN, and will integrate viewer comments with some of those networks.

Stateside, there is Fox News‘ Elections page, and its live video page (and embedded above is a tour of the channel’s election studio setup). FNC will offer a special live webcast of strategy discussion all night from New York.

CNN has a comprehensive Election Center. Users can also customize the site around the races they care most about. The site has its own team producing CNN.com Live video throughout the day and night.

Live (and embeddable!) video coverage will be available from MSNBC. Also see their “Decision ’08 Dashboard” — which consists of maps, fundraising and other data, as well as discussion.

Yahoo News will be simulcasting ABC News Now alongside a Political Dashboard, and Google will offer a results map with feeds from the AP.

If you want to go old-school — or maybe you’re just driving from one place to another — NPR will offer live radio coverage from 7 p.m. ET (and reporters will be tweeting as well).

As for text updates throughout the night, a great place to check will be Mememorandum, which tracks hot political stories and analysis. If you install this cool Greasemonkey script, you can see a red-and-blue overlay on links, indicating stories from conservative and liberal bloggers, respectively. Memeorandum tells us it will be increasing the speed with which items rotate off its site so that the newest news and analysis can dominate as they change throughout election night.

Meanwhile, who won’t be streaming live? Hulu, for one, even though it got in on the live debate action. Also, no Comedy Central Indecision 2008, sadly. Though if you go to Times Square it’s free on the JumboTron.

Nor will MySpace be embedding live coverage, as it had previously indicated it might. But it will be offering a live-updating map, text and video blogging by the MySpace Impact team and celebrities, as well as user-generated video.

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Here’s a quick summary of events so far: Kozinski, chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, was presiding over an obscenity case when the LA Times reported that the judge was hosting sexually explicit images on his own, publicly accessible, web site.

As Lawrence Lessig explains in a good overview of the situation, the judge sent a link to a file on his server. The server wasn’t very well configured: Visitors could browse its directories at will, even though Kozinski told the LA Times he “was not aware the images could be seen by the public.” A disgruntled plaintiff forwarded a variety of material to the press.

Kozinski requested an investigation into the situation, then subsequently removed himself from the proceedings of the original obscenity case. As he told the San Jose Mercury News earlier this week, “A lot of this is OK in private but looks awful put into the public.”

The situation reveals two major issues we have to come to terms with as a society, and even as a species, as we connect ourselves to the global Internet and one another.

The first is intended privacy. We use many systems to store personal information, both private and public. It’s easy to get them mixed up. The privacy the publisher intended, not that which the meddler was able to obtain, should be what matters. The fact that the server was readable doesn’t mean the judge intended to share the materials; it was a misconfiguration.

The second is that of community decency. As Lessig points notes, a Playboy magazine on the table is “a legal publication, harmless in the eyes of some, scandalous in the eyes of others.” We judge what’s acceptable based on the standards put forth by the community in which we live. Nude sunbathing is fine on the Riviera, verboten in the Vatican. The act of taking an adult magazine, or a viral video, out of the house and into the community changes the standards to which it is compared. Put it on the Internet and someone’s bound to be offended.

When the disgruntled plaintiff put content that was intended to be private into a public place, he changed the standard to which it would be held. That doesn’t mean the judge should have to tailor his private material to the public Internet. If there’s something genuinely illegal going on, then we have legal systems to investigate and expose it, but those systems aren’t meant to tar and feather those with whom we merely disagree.

The web broadens our community of standards to include that of the whole world. Leaky privacy means someone’s personal predilections and closed-door kink can be held up to the most offended audience in the world: The Internet. Often, a minority of vocal objectors sets the tone for the “community” because it’s an open-access medium. Those same critics aren’t able to take an adult film from Cinemax, screen it on Nickelodeon, and then cry foul. But as things stand, they can take a person’s content and make sure it shows up on the nightly news.

Whether the judge was right or wrong, we need to revise our definition of community and privacy if we’re to live together in a connected world.

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“Ideeli is an invitation only shopping community,” says Paul Hurley, founder and chief executive officer of the company. “Think of it as an advertorial that combines mobile, e-commerce and community.” By keeping the service invitation only, Hurley says, Ideeli is an attractive option for designer labels who want to maintain exclusivity but want to tap the web for its commerce potential. “We have built this from a brand owner’s perspective.” Oscar De La Renta and Baccarat have already signed on as partners. Why not? The service has a precedent, and is inspired by super-successful French site, vente-privee.com.

The website offers luxury goods such as clutches and bags from high end designers at discounts of between 50-to-90 percent. Ideeli sends out the members an email every week letting them know what products are going to go on sale in the coming week.

Then, every day a single such product (or brand) goes on sale, and the date and time of the sale is kept a secret. The members of Ideeli are sent an SMS alert or an email when the products go on sale. In addition, the company also offers weekly giveaways, typically one exclusive item. In order to become a member of Ideeli, one needs to invited by a current member.

There are two tiers of service – the basic service called Second Row. The premium option that costs $7.95 a month is called First Row and entitles you to get SMS alerts and a one-hour head start over others as far as sales are concerned. The First-come first-serve nature of the service is one of the reasons Hurley believes people will sign-up for the premium SMS alert option. So far, they have seen about 10% conversion among their beta testers. (Warning: ideeli doesn’t work with T-Mobile for now.)

The company plans to expand into other verticals sometime in the future, but for now they are focusing on the Cosmopolitan-set. When I showed the service to some of my lady friends, they approved the selections on offer, though were quick to point out that some of the stuff wasn’t that au currant. Would they bid? Of course .

What’s my prognosis on Ideeli? If they manage to get the viral growth they are hoping for, they will have suitors in big fashion-oriented publishing houses: CondeNast, Hearst, Hatchette and even Time Warner.

To try out, click here.

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