Subject: Mid-week tech clips
From: Andrew Brown <[email-masked]>
To: TechClips <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 May 2016 14:28:15 -0700

TECH CLIPS

________________________________

Ahead of General Election, Democrat’s Most Powerful Campaign Software Gets Makeover<http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/05/06/dnc-voter-record-software-ngp-van-unveils-sidebar-navigation/>

Chris Bing // DCInno

D.C.-based NGP VAN, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tech company that specializes in providing campaign software to progressive campaign organizations, has been working to add a new and important feature to it's platform: a sidebar navigation bar feature. The update, however, is more significant than perhaps understood at face value because it represents a larger development trend for NGP VAN ahead of a complex general election.
The move effectively comes at a time when NGP VAN's internal design team, led by Justin Lewis, is following through on multiple projects that aim to make the platform—which is used by volunteers, canvassers and campaign staff to run on-ground operations—more user-friendly.

Donald Trump is Banking on Big Rallies, Not Big Data, to Win the Presidency<http://mic.com/articles/143196/donald-trump-is-banking-on-big-rallies-not-big-data-to-win-the-presidency#.F9kAUq5Rz>

Celeste Katz // Mic

Donald Trump will once again star in his own reality show as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — saying he'll bank more on huge rallies than data-driven voter targeting in the race to November.
Trump told the Associated Press he's got no plans to spend major money on the sort of microtargeting that served as a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 wins.
"Obama got the votes much more so than his data processing machine," Trump said in the Tuesday interview. "And I think the same is true with me."
Trump's arena-filling campaign events became a sensation early in the primary cycle, standing in notable contrast to the more intimate approach favored by not only some of his GOP rivals, but Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

Sanders Campaign Wields Social Media to Great Advantage<http://www.govtech.com/social/Sanders-Campaign-Wields-Social-Media-to-Great-Advantage.html>

Eyragon Eidam // GovTech

Even before presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders saddled up to the podium in front of more than 16,000 people Monday, May 9, the charge of the Sacramento crowd was already reverberating support into cyberspace through social media channels.
The argument has been well made that other presidential candidates, like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have basked in more than their fair share of the limelight when it comes to the mainstream media outlets — nonetheless, support for Sanders remains.

Trump, RNC begin voter modeling project in key November states<http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/10/politics/donald-trump-voter-modeling/>

Dana Bash and Theodore Schleifer // CNN

Donald Trump's aides and the Republican National Committee are beginning to craft voter models in key general election states, signaling a new attention to campaign analytics from the presumptive GOP nominee.
Even as the candidate downplays the investment he'll make in such efforts, it is a signal that his campaign and the GOP are ready to add layers of traditional campaign structures to his insurgent bid for president.
The investment in voter modeling, described by a Trump source Tuesday, is a departure from his tactics during the primary campaign.

Can Trump Win a Data-Free Campaign?<http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/trumps-disregard-for-data-another-challenge-for-the-gop/482334/>

David Graham // The Atlantic

For years, the two parties have been in an arms race over how to deal with the new capabilities opened up by technology and data—things like finding potential voters, advertising to them, and getting them to vote, though the whole suite of things is often shorthanded as “microtargeting,” which is just part of it. And for most of that time, Democrats have been the acknowledged leader.
Republicans were aware of the missile gap headed into the 2012 election. They even knew that President Obama’s team was developing something called “Narwhal” to centralize its data. So Mitt Romney’s campaign developed a countersystem called “Orca,” for the narwhal’s leading predator. It turned out to be a disaster. The system crapped out on Election Day, leaving the Romney campaign frantically without information it needed and contributing to his loss to Obama.

How One Big Data Startup Is Using Tech to Analyze Trump<http://dcinno.streetwise.co/2016/05/10/dc-tech-big-data-startup-icg-solutions-used-for-politics-defense/>

Chris Bing // DCInno

As a company, the name ICG Solutions implies nothing.
It doesn't hint at an angle, industry and/or motive. It is amorphous, just as its technology is intended to be, according to founder David Waldrop.
ICG Solutions, based in Potomac, Md., boasts just one product: a powerful data analytics engine that can be fed millions of individual data streams—anything from social media posts and geospatial data to open-source internet search information and cybersecurity threat intel—to identify connections between specific "events."
This cloud-based software is called LUX.

Election Tech: The animosity index - why the internet loves and hates Donald Trump<http://www.techrepublic.com/article/election-tech-the-animosity-index-why-the-internet-loves-and-hates-donald-trump/>

Dan Patterson // TechRepublic
Donald Trump is the nominee of the Republican party. Trump clobbered the competition at the polls in Indiana, and on social media all primary season. He survived #marcomentum, a #ContestedConvention blip, and the vaporware #stoptrump movement.
In the week leading up the the Indiana primary TechRepublic collaborated with Israeli firm Logz.io to scrape and analyize social media data about the Indiana primary.