If knowledge is a door to information, data is the key. When you’re talking about politics and government, information is extremely important to those who are making decisions on who to vote for and what legislation to get behind or block. Today, a company called ElectNext has raised a seed round of $1.3M led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures along with other strategic investors like Liberty City Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Digital News Ventures, Gabriel Investments, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Investor’s Circle.

When I spoke with ElectNext’s founder and CEO, Keya Dannenbaum, she explained ElectNext as something similar to our own CrunchBase, providing widgets full of data for publications to embed: “We have a comprehensive underlying database (on politicians on our case as opposed to companies in the CrunchBase analogy) from which we create data-driven content that lives inside, and gives relevant context to, political news.”

Dannenbaum knows politics, as she’s worked on 18 political campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s. ElectNext’s product, which pulls together political data from multiple sources and packages them together for news sites to embed, is something that Dannenbaum thinks is important for both voters and journalists. Most political data is stored in formats that aren’t accessible online, so ElectNext is working with national and state partners like The Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack and Follow The Money as well as open data-friendly cities to convert all of it. One of the cities, my hometown of Philadelphia, is a close partner.

Embedded profiles will start appearing today on PBS NewsHour, The Philadelphia Inquirer, NBC Politics and a few others. The six launch partners represent 15M monthly unique visitors, Dannenbaum tell us. That’s not a bad start.

I talked to Dannenbaum about how her experience makes ElectNext unique and how important this information is to unlock for constituents:

TC: What did you learn during your years working on campaigns that led you to working ElectNext?

Dannenbaum: Through my campaign experience, first in the 2008 Presidential and then at the hyper-local level, I got to observe firsthand how sharply levels of political knowledge and participation decline from the national to the neighborhood levels. Yet it’s our local representatives who make most of the decisions that affect our daily lives. So we’re all checking out precisely where it matters most, and I wanted to change that.

TC: How does data help shape political campaigns and inform voters?

Dannenbaum: In the 2012 presidential election, the Obama campaign most clearly demonstrated the power of big data. Their operation consolidated several previously disparate databases of consumer and citizen information (purchase history, tax records), social data (your facebook friends, likes), contact information (home, email and IP addresses), and internal campaign data (donor database, field notes), and mashed that up with the voter file (your political party, vote history) to build an unprecedented micro targeting machine that could deliver personalized marketing messages to the right people via the right mediums at precisely the right times.

ElectNext is looking to shift the paradigm and similarly harness the power of big data to empower citizens with relevant information on our politicians delivered in the precise moment we most need it. So what we do is consolidate several previously disparate databases, though in our case it is political data on them: campaign finance records, legislation, roll call votes, press releases/debates/other public speech, and we use that data to create simple profiles that describe who these guys and gals running our country really are. We know how they talk about issues vs. on what they actually spend their time legislating and how that compares to their sources of funding. And, best of all, we put those profiles directly in your news, do you can access it in the precise moment you’re already reading about a political person, or issue, you care about, when you need it most.

TC: How do these investors, who seem strategic, help you reach your goals as a company other than the funding?

Dannenbaum: We take a lot of care choosing who to work with and you’re right to notice that we have several media funds on board who absolutely bring more to the table than just funding. Our model hinges on publisher distribution, our backers can open those doors and advise from an insider’s perspective, and we’re so glad to roll up our sleeves together and work them as team members on the same side of the table.

———

ElectNext was a great resource during the last Presidential election, providing a wizard to match your political preferences to the right candidate. Matching up news articles with actual facts and historical data provides a really immersive experience for readers, who can then dig through the data to form their own opinions.

Information should be free, and with companies like ElectNext, those old files, surveys and census data won’t stay locked up for long. With former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush already interested in what the company is doing, I’d say that becoming the “CrunchBase for Politics” is pretty much a guarantee at this point. The company is currently accepting submissions for more publication partners.

[Photo credit: Flickr and Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Hacktivist organization, Anonymous, appears to have hacked MIT’s website and left a tribute message to the late Internet activist, Aaron Swartz. ”We tender apologies to the administrators at MIT for this temporary use of their websites,” writes a postscript to a memorial note posted by Anonymous, on a subdomain of the official MIT.edu website. “We do not consign blame or responsibility upon MIT for what has happened, but call for all those feel heavy-hearted in their proximity to this awful loss to acknowledge instead the responsibility they have — that we all have — to build and safeguard a future that would make Aaron proud”.

Earlier this evening, MIT’s network went offline and there was notable evidence that Anonymous had caused the outage.

Swartz was set to stand trial next month for releasing millions of pay-walled academic papers from the popular JSTOR database. The case has set off a firestorm of online protest related to overzealous litigation and copyright policy and the President of MIT has called for a formal investigation of the accusations.

The hacked page calls for an investigation into the Swartz case,  the reformation of copyright policy, and greater protections for a free Internet. The page also posted an open-information manifesto Swartz composed, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto”.

For now, the link here is still live. Since it will likely be taken offline soon (if it was indeed a hacked page), we have posted the full message below in block quotes,

In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz, November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013, Requiescat in pace.

A brief message from Anonymous.

Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government’s prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for — freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it — enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing — an ideal that we should all support.

Moreover, the situation Aaron found himself in highlights the injustice of U.S. computer crime laws, particularly their punishment regimes, and the highly-questionable justice of pre-trial bargaining. Aaron’s act was undoubtedly political activism; it had tragic consequences.

Our wishes

• We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of computer crime laws, and the overzealous prosecutors who use them.
• We call for this tragedy to be a basis for reform of copyright and intellectual property law, returning it to the proper principles of common good to the many, rather than private gain to the few.
• We call for this tragedy to be a basis for greater recognition of the oppression and injustices heaped daily by certain persons and institutions of authority upon anyone who dares to stand up and be counted for their beliefs, and for greater solidarity and mutual aid in response.
• We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all.

For in the end, we will not be judged according to what we give, but according to what we keep to ourselves.

Aaron, we will sorely miss your friendship, and your help in building a better world. May you read in peace.

—-

Who was Aaron Swartz? A hero in the SOPA/PIPA campaign, Reddit cofounder, RSS, Demand Progress, Avaaz, etc…:

Aaron Swartz’s funeral is on Tuesday. Here are details:

Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of #Aaron Swartz

—-

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy

—–

You were the best of us; may you yet bring out the best in us.

-Anonymous, Jan 13, 2013.

—-

(Postscript: We tender apologies to the administrators at MIT for this temporary use of their websites. We understand that it is a time of soul-searching for all those within this great institution as much — perhaps for some involved even more so — than it is for the greater internet community. We do not consign blame or responsibility upon MIT for what has happened, but call for all those feel heavy-hearted in their proximity to this awful loss to acknowledge instead the responsibility they have — that we all have — to build and safeguard a future that would make Aaron proud, and honour the ideals and dedication that burnt so brightly within him by embodying them in thought and word and action. Original frontpage)

[H/T: Digiphile/Alex Howard]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twenty twelve was a big year for tech news. Facebook went public, Instagram was purchased for $1B, and Apple released rehashes of previous products. But that’s just a small sampling.

The list that follows is which stories you, our fantastic readers, read the most throughout the last year in order of their popularity. Some stories are predictably at the top, but others are surprising. A story about Bruce Willis and iTunes ranks higher than the most read post concerning the Apple/Samsung patent trial.

TechCrunch’s top 25 posts ranked in order of pageviews.

1. Update: Facebook Confirms No Private Messages Appearing On Timeline. They’re Old Wall Posts.
   
2. Why Pundits And Politicians Hate NYT Election Forecaster Nate Silver
3. Day After IPO, Mark Zuckerberg Marries Longtime Girlfriend Priscilla Chan
4. Journalists’ Addresses Posted In Revenge For Newspaper’s Google Map Of Gun Permit Owners
5. Facebook Buys Instagram For $1 Billion, Turns Budding Rival Into Its Standalone Photo App
6. Apple Officially Reveals The iPhone 5: LTE, 4-Inch Retina Display, New A6 Chip, Lighter Than iPhone 4S
7. OS X Mountain Lion: Quick, Familiar, Cheap, And Drenched In iOS Goodness
8. GoDaddy Outage Takes Down Millions Of Sites, Anonymous Member Claims Responsibility
9. Facebook Targets May 17th For IPO Date
10. How To Enable Facebook Timeline Right This Second
11. Putting An End To The Biggest Lie On The Internet
12. Teenage Sexting Is Becoming The Norm
13. #ScratchGate: iPhone 5 Owners Are Discovering Aluminum Is Softer Than Glass
14. Bruce Willis Isn’t Suing Apple Over iTunes Music Ownership Rights
15. Zynga Just Shut Down Boston Office, Laid Off 100+ Employees From The Ville And Bingo Teams In Austin
16. Apple Awarded $1.049 Billion In Damages As Jury Finds Samsung Infringed On Design And Software Patents
17. Court Rules Software Not Protected By Fed Crime Laws, Overturns Conviction of Goldman Engineer
18. Watch Voting Machine Change Obama Votes To Romney Votes
19. Lit Motors Will Shake Up The Electric Vehicle Market With Its Two-Wheeled, Untippable C-1
20. The 20 Best iOS And Android Apps Of 2012 (So Far)
21. Just In Time For A Facebook IPO Tax Break, Eduardo Saverin Renounces U.S. Citizenship
22. The Top 30 Android Apps And Games Of 2011
23. Tim Cook Apologizes For Apple Maps, Points To Competitive Alternatives
24. Facebook Files For $5 Billion IPO
25. Samsung Galaxy S III Review: This Is The Phone You’ve Been Waiting For

But enough with 2012. Raise your glasses. Here’s to 2013. May startups avoid the Series A crunch, Randi Zuckerberg figure out Facebook’s photo sharing and something fucking entertain Arrington.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Europe is clearly switching its cultural gears. From saying how things can’t be done, to saying how thing can be done, our cultural mindset is changing, weather our politicians like it or not. The media might still be in the long grass of austerity, but here on the lawn, we’re celebrating entrepreneurship. So today it’s rewarding to see that a great event like The Europas, the annual awards for tech startups in Europe awarded by peers in the industry, is to be joined by another awards scheme, Europioneers, which will celebrate two top entrepreneurs individually, this time with the European Commission’s blessing.

Our industry colleagues at The Next Web are partnering with the European Commission to celebrate Europe’s finest tech entrepreneurs. Unlike The Europas, which has over 20 categories for individuals and startups and has run for the last four years, Europioneers will identify just one or two of Europe’s most innovative and influential tech entrepreneurs.

It’s an interesting cultural shift. While Europe is locked in the grip of economic austerity, culturally, underneath all the gnashing of teeth, it has started to realise that it needs to celebrate entrepreneurs, particularly in the tech sector, an area which can transform many surrounding aspects of economics by generating innovation – changing communities and industries.

As with The Europas, which – interest declared – I started – anyone can submit nominees via the site and a jury will pick a short list and winners.

We look forward to the event, which will take place in April and will be handed out by the Vice President of the European Commission, Neelie Kroes, who has recently made a lot of the right noises about startups, in contrast to previous EU Commission administrations.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We have a shared responsibility that kids go to school nutritionally ready 2 learn RT @MWadeNC nutrition is not responsibility of the gov't

—
Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) November 19, 2012

Part-time superhero, video platform entrepreneur, and Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker, has entered into a bet to live off of food stamps. The bet was made entirely over Twitter, after heated debate over the role of government in helping the nation’s poor.

Lets you and I try to live on food stamps in New Jersey (high cost of living) and feed a family for a week or month. U game? @MWadeNC

—
Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) November 19, 2012

After his challenger agreed, Booker notified his fans that he will start living off of food stamps sometime after Thanksgiving.

Been challenged by thoughtful people 2 go longer. I will & after Thanksgiving start MT @melmeyer23: Going to live on foodstamps 4 a wk?

—
Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) November 20, 2012

With this bet, Mayor Booker ups the bar even higher for what it means to be an executive in the age of social media. He’s already been made famous for shoveling constituents’ driveways in a blizzard in response to a tweet; then he launched a new video curation service #waywire (at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference). Now, he’s making headlines for agreeing to live by the principals that so many other politicians only give lip service to.

It probably also helps his technology street cred that he’s a bona fide science fiction geek.

But if u hold at Klingon Bat'leth to my neck & forced me to choose: Star Trek RT @Mlepore36: Star Wars or Star Trek?

—
Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) November 17, 2012

Details of the challenge are still pending.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Scientists are yesterday’s wizards and demigods. And Nate Silver is a scientist. One whose ability to predict the outcome of elections is so precise, it’s nearly indistinguishable from magic. That’s why IsNateSilverAWitch.com is so funny. But really what his flawless prediction of the presidential election signifies is the coming of age of the quantified universe.

The site answers its titular question “Probably”. For many, that’s a more satisfying answer than the truth, which is that he crunches massive data sets to come to his conclusions. Most people want to believe that instincts, emotions, impressions, and optimism can help them make the right decisions for their lives. But they can’t, as our politics writer Greg Ferenstein digs into.

Luckily, with time, we will become Nate Silver. That’s because technology is making the world increasingly quantified. Elections naturally produce enormous amounts of data. But devices like the iPhone, Nike FuelBand, FitBit, and Nest are squeezing data out of everyday activities that previously went uncalculated. Apps like Instagram, Foursquare, and Twitter are recording what we do, where we are, and what we think. And the data collection will ramp up as wearable computing evolves and products like Google Glass go mainstream.

Data hubs will emerge to combine and make sense of all this data. We’ll see trends in our behavior and those of others that will let us make accurate predictions about our future habits and preferences.

You might be able to expect a daily 3PM productivity drop from a trend showing that you browse humor sites like 9GAG and tweet without links at that time. The fact that you’ve never been to a certain park in your city, but people similar to you take lots of Instagrams near that location could signal you’d probably enjoy a trip there. Your NEST might see you spend a lot of thursday nights home alone but seem antsy, moving from room to room. That might mean you should plan to have friends over or go to a concert those nights.

Those examples might seem a bit far-fetched, but the shift to a quantified existence is underway. We’ll draw some conclusions ourselves from the raw data, but expert data witches like Nate Silver could certainly help.

The only problem is that humans (not even witches) scale. We’re going to need Nate Silver software — algorithms that can both make meaning from the data and recommend what to do with that. Suddenly, the joke that Google should acquire Nate Silver doesn’t seem so far fetched.

Someone in Google HR/M&A googling “Nate Silver contact info.”—
Alexia Tsotsis (@alexia) November 07, 2012

More from TechCrunch on Nate Silver:

Why Pundits And Politicians Hate NYT Election Forecaster Nate Silver

Pundit Forecasts All Wrong, Silver Perfectly Right. Is Punditry Dead?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mike Huckabee leads this week’s list of top gainers in the People Talking About This metric among political pages.

The top 10 pages gaining People Talking About This saw increases between about 45,000 and over 800,000 engagements. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

1	Mike Huckabee	913,088	0	+840,322
2	Barack Obama	1,524,605	+22,214	+467,789
3	Egypt	244,249	-5,902	+210,546
4	Sarah Palin	550,715	0	+173,362
5	Women for Obama	175,040	+9,854	+86,128
6	Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימ…	136,929	+13,519	+84,700
7	Roger Williams	164,603	+5,841	+58,520
8	”We want Narender MODI as…	66,231	+9,431	+48,650
9	Narendra Modi	94,186	+5,716	+46,858
10	Abhisit Vejjajiva	106,436	+37,555	+45,346

Once something is on the Internet, it’s typically pretty hard to delete it. Unless somebody retweets a posting to Twitter, though, a deleted tweet is pretty much gone forever. With Politwoops, however, the Sunlight Foundation is now preserving some of these tweets for posterity. Politwoops follows all the 433 official Twitter accounts for members of Congress, as well as President Obama’s and Mitt Romney’s.

As Tom Lee, the director of Sunlight Labs, noted in today’s launch announcement, “in politics, Twitter is part of the ever-present ‘spin room’ of the digital age. But unlike other mediums, the record of events can be edited; tweets deleted from twitter.com are hard or impossible to see after the fact.”

Politwoops doesn’t just preserve these deleted tweets but also tells you when it was deleted and how long it took the politicians (or their staff members) to delete it.

The reasons why politicians would delete a tweet are often pretty obvious, as in the case of Senator Chuck Grassley from Iowa, whose account was hacked a few months ago. Some of the deleted tweets were probably just a bit too off-topic or controversial (or in all caps), but for the most part, they just include bad links, typos or other common mistakes.

This project, it is worth noting, was first developed by the Open State Foundation of The Netherlands. The U.S. version of Politwoops is actually the thirteenth local version of the service, which is already live in a number of other countries including Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany and France.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail, has decided to raise the issue of Google’s influence on the UK government, after uncovering the fact that Conservative Party ministers have held meetings with Google an average of once a month since the General Election two years ago. There have been 23 meetings between Tory ministers and Google since June 2010, with Prime Minister David Cameron meeting Google three times and George Osborne – who as Chancellor of the Exchequer is supposed to meet with business leaders – four times in two years.

The story needs to be a seen in a wider context. The Conservatives have recently come under fire for having too close a relationship to another powerful entity, News Corporation (as did the Labour party during its tenure). A huge inquiry into Press standards has in large part focused on the ties between Rupert Murdoch’s media giant and the Conservatives.

But what the report buries way down in the article, is the number of times the newspaper itself has met with the Government. A Google spokesperson told us: “It’s absolutely right that governments speak with companies about issues that affect their citizens. The British Government makes the list of those meetings publicly available – including the Daily Mail’s 34 meetings over the same period.” In other words, the Daily Mail has met with the Government almost one and a half times a month (on average) since they entered office – that’s quite a bit more than Google has. It’s likely those were high-level meetings, not editorial ones.

That said, the issue does raise the question of Google’s closeness to the UK government and its ability to grab the ear of the Government on a number of topics. It’s the kind of access a lot of companies would be envious of.

Culture minister Ed Vaizey has met the firm seven times. Culture Secretary boss Jeremy Hunt has held four meetings. In David Cameron’s first months as party leader in 2006 and 2007 (though not yet Prime Minister), he spoke to the annual Google Zeitgeist conference.

Three senior figures have moved between the Tories and Google in the last few years. Rachel Whetstone is Global head of communications and public policy at Google and is married to David Cameron’s former chief of staff, Steve Hilton. Naomi Gummer was formerly adviser to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, but is now a public policy adviser to Google. Amy Fisher Was a press officer for Google, and is now a special adviser to the Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman.

On Hilton, the right wing Daily Mail newspaper has rarely missed an opportunity to attack his more radical attempts to shake up government thinking about technology and its effect on society. But it’s more likely that the Conservatives – in part driven by Hilton’s thinking – have realised that the world has moved away from the green-screen, big-IT projects which used to fill the coffers of the likes of EDS and others, towards embracing a more open standards approach. On the ground this has fed into attempts to open up government data, and led also the innovative project known as Gov.uk, which is taking a startup approach to government online, employing many of the UK’s best engineers and tech stars.

It’s also quite something to see a sentence describing Hilton as the “shaven-headed son of Hungarian immigrants” – a phrase which betrays the Mail’s antipathy to alternative thinking.

In March it was announced that Mr. Hilton was going to take an academic post at Stanford University in California to be near his wife who works at Google. He plans to return next year, though it’s not yet clear whether he will re-join the government.

Of course, back in the real world, these West Wing-like moves of advisers between big business and governments go on literally all the time. We don’t currently have the equivalent figures for meetings with Microsoft or Cisco, or Facebook, IBM or other companies, but I’d be amazed if there were not similar factoids waiting to scurry forth if someone someone decided to lift a few rocks. Indeed, Microsoft, Cisco and many other large tech companies have appeared several times at the government’s ‘Tech City’ meetings.

So quite why the Daily Mail has decided to home in on this issue is a little bit of a mystery. It may be that the story was placed as an attack by the Labour Party. Their health IT scheme to store patients’ records failed spectacularly just before they left office, so they would have smarted at the suggestion by Cameron that a company like Google could probably do a better job.

The newspaper quotes Helen Goodman, Labour’s media spokesman, who says “Of course it is important for ministers to listen to business, but a meeting with Google every month does look like the sort of privileged access that small businesses can only dream of.” Unfortunately, she neglects to mention the numerous tiny tech startups that have been invited to Number 10 Downing Street over the last couple of years as part of the government’s Tech City initiative, and its purchase of an entire building – Campus London – in East London which is housing small tech startups that have have nothing to do with Google. (As disclosure, I’m co-founder of a co-working space that’s a tenant in that building, but frankly, I’d point this out even if it wasn’t).

Then again, Google doesn’t help its own cause. In Europe it does not have a great record on tax. As Goodman points out: “Ministers must disclose what they discussed. Did they challenge Google over their repellent tax avoidance, which was uncovered by the Daily Mail?”

It’s here that criticism could land a big punch. Google has been oft criticised for paying tax on less than a quarter of its UK income. In 2010 it generated £2.1 billion in the UK but with its international operations based Ireland, where corporation tax is much lower than the UK, it escapes a great deal of tax.

And Google hasn’t always helped its own cause.

Last month Google executive Naomi Gummer, until recently a Conservative minister’s political adviser, caused a furore in the press when she implied (not unreasonably?) that it was the job of parents to stop children seeing adult content online, not Internet companies. Currently a debate rages in the UK about creating an ‘off switch’ at ISP level to block porn, allowing parents baffled by content settings or Net Nanny software to simply order a ‘clean’ version of the Internet direct from their ISP.

A Conservative Party spokesman told the Mail: “All these meetings have been properly declared and it is normal for relevant ministers to meet with a company of this size.”

Ultimately the Mail’s story does raise questions of perceptions over-all but as a major UK tech player, it would be extremely odd for it not to meet with whoever was in power fairly regularly. Neither Facebook not Twitter, for instance, have anything like the huge engineering bases and offices Google has in the UK. Do we want our politicians to remain in a worldview of tech dominated by the desktop and ‘licenses’ or one where developers, startups and apps can thrive? I’d hazard not.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I just finished a week long trip to San Francisco. This time I didn’t rent a car, meaning I didn’t have to deal with the rental cost, gas cost, parking and the delays in shuttling back and forth to the airport car rental area – usually at least $500 for the week and sometimes much more. I just used Uber instead, a service that launched last summer that lets you call up a black car service from your mobile phone.

Here’s our overview of the service. You add a mobile app, create an account with your credit card, and when you want a car you hit a button. A black car comes to you via GPS in a couple of minutes, and you can see how far away they are on your phone. When your trip is done, your credit card is automatically billed.

I’m going to share all the data from the week with you here.

Here’s how things worked out. I used Uber six times during the week, and three of those uses were either to or from the airport (I got a ride from a friend the fourth time). That seems to be what I use taxis and rental cars in San Francisco for the most – going to and from the airport.

I went a total of 46.32 miles on those six trips and paid Uber a total of $273, and that includes tips (just under $6/mile). By my calculations the same trips in a normal taxi would have been about $120. Or with tips around $140. Uber is twice the cost of using cabs.

And worth every penny. My average wait time was just about 5 minutes. I’ve waited hours for taxis in San Francisco, and you never quite know if they’re actually going to show up or not. And Uber’s cars are Lincoln Towncars or similarly large and nice cars, not the nasty cramped things that you end up in with taxis.

Even if the cars were the same or worse it would be worth the extra fee just because I know I can get a car in a few minutes without any hassle or stress at all.

In the future I’ll definitely only be using Uber for trips where I don’t need to do a ton of driving. I hope I never have to get in a taxi again.

It won’t be easy for Uber, the taxi people are already starting to put their politicians to work trying to shut Uber down. But I do know one thing, as long as Uber is up and running, I’ll be a happy customer.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch