PRESIDENT OBAMA AND DIGITAL DIVIDE!

Technologically the Bush administration was not completely up to level. Obama staffers have found old computers, outdated software and general inefficiency with regard to technology. The use of social media has been virtually non existent and many old and arcane government rules still stand in the way of Obama’s highly technical team.

Obama Administration will embrace technology in unprecedented ways. He seem to be backed up by web savvy technologists, President Obama’s new media team looks poised and ready to fulfill President Obama’s vision of open-source democracy and furthering the use of technology embracing the full use of multimedia technology in the real sense of multimedia and social networking to reach the grass-root democrats and non democrats alike.

Obama will be the first truly tech savvy chief executive the world has had. President-elect Barack Obama made use of text messages, e-mails and social networking sites to get elected. What role will these technologies play once he takes office! This will force Obama to plans for a digital White House!

His administration’s use of Google’s YouTube during both the campaign and after winning the election leverages Internet video to reach a generation of Americans and global citizens who no longer tune in to AM radio on a regular basis. President Obama vowed to continue video recording his message and publishing them via YouTube and other video sites. Today for the first time ever an official White House blog came online. You can sign up for email updates from the president. Through the blog, Mr. Obama is the first U.S. president to have an RSS feed!

During the campaign President Obama relied heavily on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter to build support, communicate with constituents and develop a core audience. By far, Mr. Obama has more followers on Twitter than anyone else (168,000). His fan page on Facebook has more than 4 million fans.

This is an exciting thing for the generation of digital natives that help put him into office. It should also see the improvement in technology policy over the next four years. Curriculum at all level will enjoy the use of multimedia within Obama’s administration! The new administration has been leveraging web technologies to meet most of his priorities. He and his staff suffered through a number of surprising headaches.

For example, many phone lines had been disconnected. Dialing numbers inside the building often resulted in a busy signal. Software installed on PCs left in the building was outdated. And worst of all, the folks so keen on their Facebooks and Twitters found that government regulations drastically curtail how they can communicate.

“It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs. Several staffers arrived to find that they had no computers or phones assigned to them.
Others struggled with too many computers, each for specific tasks.
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Cell phone manufacturers have long since recognised the consumer trend in next generation technology for mobile phones and have had to respond to the trend of ‘mobile convergence’ with key functions merging to introduce user-optimised applications. Next generation technologies began with the focus on camera phones which have now become standard with all hand sets however with fierce competition in the market; manufacturers are pushing the boundaries in pixilation advancement and high definition clarity.

The focus then turned to additional functions for example incorporating GPS. The mix of functions now available on phones will see 2009’s crop of mobiles sporting razor-sharp displays, lightning – fast processing speeds and built-in video conferencing capabilities. One of the most remarkable additional features of the 2009 phones that were introduced at the 3GSM conference was a Projector Phone; a touch screen projector phone that requires no external video source, projects images of different sizes and can be used for watching movies on the go or project them onto a wall – a device only slightly larger than the average sized hand-set. It really is apparent that consumer demands for additional features on their phones is forcing mobile manufacturers to raise the bar on advances set in the last round thus constantly pushing the limits of technological advancement.