(CNN) — When Rita Bryer sees 300-foot-tall wind turbines sprouting up from the prairie near her home in western Oklahoma, she can’t help but wonder about the view from the top, where blades the size of semi-trucks spin.

“Out here, you can see the wind turbines from 10 miles away,” she said. “Think about how far you’ll be able to see when you’re at the top.”

So, partly out of curiosity, partly because she wants to be part of something new, the 51-year-old is leaving behind a career of odd jobs and oil-field work.

She’s going back to school to become a wind turbine mechanic — one who’ll have to scale the turbines to make repairs.

Across the country, people like Bryer are looking to the renewable energy sector in hopes its “green-collar jobs” will offer them stability in this shaky economy. Some are signing up for community college or apprenticeship programs that train students to be wind turbine mechanics, solar panel installers, fuel-cell engineers or energy efficiency experts. Watch how the green economy is growing in Pennsylvania »

Government support has rallied excitement for the prospect of a green jobs corps, as President Obama’s stimulus package puts about $20 billion into greening the economy, according to the White House.Obama says country will double renewable energy in three years »

In his recent speech to Congress, Obama said the U.S. will double its supply of renewable energy in three years. To do so, he’s calling on a new class of workers to be trained in environmental fields. Green jobs training programs will get $500 million from the stimulus.

At a summit in Philadelphia on Friday, Vice President Joe Biden said people who make $20 per hour before a green jobs training program can make $50 per hour after. On average, the clean-energy jobs pay 10 to 20 percent more than similar work outside the field, he said. Watch how to land green jobs »

Adding to the enthusiasm, Biden cited a recent case in Chicago where a maker of energy-efficient windows intends to gradually rehire 250 workers who were laid off when their window company closed late last year.

There is a “very direct” correlation between the stimulus package and Serious Materials’ ability to reopen the plant, said Sandra Vaughan, chief marketing officer for the California-based company.

But not all signs for green industries are so positive.

Wind and solar companies have cut staff and stalled new projects as the credit crisis has tied up money, meaning banks are less able to invest in renewable energy.

In the short term, that will make things difficult for the newly trained green work force, said Kathy Werle, dean of applied sciences and technology at San Jose City College, in California, which offers associate degrees in solar panel installation.

“Right now, money is so tight. People can’t borrow money to put solar on their homes,” she said.

Werle said she expects Obama’s stimulus plan to help jump-start the industry. Within a year or so she expects the graduates to be able to find plenty of green jobs.

The uncertainty appears not to be tempering student demand for green education, though. Earlier this semester, 260 people showed up for 44 seats in solar panel installation classes at San Jose City College, Werle said.

“Anything green is very popular,” she said.

Meanwhile, some schools that train the green-collar work force are billing their programs as near-guaranteed ways to find stable jobs.

Sidney Bolfing, chairman of the Texas Renewable Energy Education Consortium, an association of community colleges, said nearly 100 percent of his graduates find jobs in the fuel-cell industry — many before graduation.

“Typically all of these students all get jobs,” he said.

Bolfing is so confident in the idea that he markets green-collar careers to high schools and elementary schools in the area.

He hopes that the standard list of childhood dream jobs — astronaut, firefighter, police officer — soon will include things like wind technician and fuel-cell engineer.

Even if there’s trouble in the short term, green jobs are needed to fight climate change and spur economic growth, he said.

“We need to develop these new technologies like there’s no tomorrow,” he said.

Matt Raines, 31, of West, Texas, had a career as an auto mechanic. But that didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so now he is enrolled as a community college’s hydrogen fuel program.

He said local people look at him funny when he tells them about the decision because they don’t understand what he’ll be doing.

“I had one lady who actually asked me if I was building hydrogen bombs. I was like, ‘No ma’am, it’s energy production, green energy,’” he said.

Raines finds the program exciting, and says he’s been contacted about jobs by three companies, even though he is yet to finish his two-year degree.

Maria Kingery, co-founder of Southern Energy Management, a North Carolina company that installs solar energy panels, said schools need to catch up with the changing industry.

She applauded money in the stimulus package that will go to green job training programs, but said “training is going to be a real challenge” in the coming months.

Her company has a hiring freeze in place at the moment because of the economic downturn, but expects to grow in 2009, she said.

Some green jobs are low-tech and require little or no specialized training.

A former construction worker could easily take up a career in home weatherization and energy efficiency, said Bob Logston, owner of Home Energy Loss Professionals (HELP) in Baltimore, Maryland.

Some weatherization steps are as simple as shoving newspaper insulation in a home’s attic, caulking windows and repairing ductwork.

More than $11 billion of the economic stimulus package is intended to help people make their homes more energy efficient, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Because of those efficiency provisions, Logston said he expects his business to quadruple.

He employs six people now and expects to hire at least 12 more, he said. He also plans to offer his employees insurance for the first time.

“Everything’s budding, so to speak, everything’s in bloom even though it’s winter,” he said of green jobs in the home weatherization business. “The energy costs are so high people can’t afford” not to increase efficiency.

Part of the trouble with estimating the profitability of green jobs is that no one seems to be able to agree on a definition for the term. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics does not separate data on green jobs or jobs in renewable energy, and economists disagree on how many new green jobs the stimulus package will create.

In such a murky situation, community colleges often network with the local business community to gauge their interest in students from green-jobs programs. Many have banded together to dig up regional knowledge.

“The students always ask, ‘Can you guarantee job placement?’ No, I can’t guarantee it, but I can tell you I’ve spoken with local wind farm managers and everybody I’ve spoken with says there is a need, (and) there will be a need,” said Kimberlee Smithton, director of business and industry services at the High Plains Technology Center in Woodward, Oklahoma.

That school, where Bryer is taking classes, is offering a wind turbine technician program for the first time this year.

Bryer said she doesn’t know how much money she’ll make in the wind business. She doesn’t much care.

“To me, especially, it’s going to be a job — a good job I think I’ll like, and I just look forward to doing it,” she said. “It’s always nice doing something different, not the same old thing.”

The woman who’s always been seen as a rebel because she was the lone female working tough jobs in the oil fields now feels like she’s part of a movement for change.

[via CNN.com] by John Sutter

Fortune Magazine put together a list of the top 10 companies that have never laid anyone off. Great idea.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/fortune/0901/gallery.no_layoffs.fortune/index.html

This week I’ll be heading off to Davos, Switzerland with my colleagues from Nike, Inc. for the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting. It’s no surprise that the entire meeting will be focused on the global economic crisis. All the big names from business, government and the media will spend the week asking questions on everyone’s mind: Where did we go wrong? What tough calls need to be made? How do we get out of this mess?

The answer to these questions lies in someone unexpected. There is an amazingly powerful force we can unleash to solve the world’s problems if we do the simplest thing: invest in a girl in poverty. With all this talk of the economy, it may seem odd to focus on adolescent girls, but we already spend a ridiculous amount of money and time trying to solve the world’s ills in the same old way. This financial crisis intensifies the need to invest existing resources more effectively, and a new and effective approach is right under your nose. It’s called the girl effect.

The World Economic Forum has made a powerful statement by placingirls on the Forum’s official agenda for the first time. Throughout the week — and culminating at a public session on January 31 — Nike CEO Mark Parker, Gates Foundation Co-Chair Melinda French Gates, World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and others will urge the world to invest in girls.

You might be asking, “Why now, of all times?”

Each day I’ll be blogging from Davos to reveal how world leaders are answering that question. I’ll also share some of the buzz — people we’ve all heard of who are talking about girls — as well as those who aren’t, but should be.

Until then, here’s some food for thought:

People ask if we can afford to invest in girls right now. I say look at Kenya. Girls who go to secondary school make $2,000 more per year than girls who only attend primary school. Multiply that by 1.6 million out-of-school girls and there’s a potential $3.2 billion increase in national income. The same is true in developing countries throughout the world. So the real question is, “How can we afford not to invest?”

(These numbers are from a nifty piece of research on which Jad Chaaban of the American University of Beirut, Wendy Cunningham of the World Bank and Navtej Dhillon of Wolfensohn Center at Brookings collaborated to shed some light on what excluding girls is actually costing us — more to come on that.)

To learn more about the girl effect before Davos, check out www.girleffect.org.

[via Huffington Post] by Maria Eitel

CNN’s THE MOMENT – stitched with Microsoft’s Photosynth, an impressive tool for stitching together dozens of photos to allow a place or event to be viewed from multiple angles.

The only hard part is it really takes 75 photos or more to get the optimal experience. That’s a lot of work for one photographer. But, with big events, one can also rely on crowdsourcing. Which is what CNN has done with the inaugural, asking viewers to send in their photos of Barack Obama’s swearing in.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/44.president/inauguration/themoment

GOOGLE SATELLITE PHOTOS – GEOEYE-1 captures some amazing images of the inauguration.

[Click each image to Enlarge]

1,474 Megapixel Inauguration Panorama Shot – this is my favorite. A really powerful CANON G10 Bridge Cam, taking a panorama of the inauguration. Try to zoom and and read the musicians sheet music, or check out Yo Yo Mo taking pictures on his iPhone.

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?auth=033ef14483ee899496648c2b4b06233c

Is this for real? Check out the great accessories, and also various hands with different finger options. Also, see Barack Obama challenge Darth Vader with his matching light saber.

-

In November, not two weeks after winning the election and still two months from becoming commander in chief, Barack Obama brought the government into the 21st century. Or at least that was what we were told when he released his first Web video address as president-elect. The clip, billed by some as a modern fireside chat, was embedded as a YouTube video on Change.gov, the incoming administration’s Web site. Sitting in a leather chair, framed slightly off center from his chest up, Obama delivered a three-minute talk on the economic crisis, vlog style.

The video quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and within a few days hundreds of blogs were linking to it. Obama’s foray into viral video, the story went, heralded the beginning of a new era in government communication and transparency—”Franklin Roosevelt 2.0,” in the words of The Huffington Post. The Washington Post proclaimed the advent of the “YouTube presidency.”

1 million:
The number of views received by Obama’s first YouTube address as president-elect.

It wasn’t long, however, before savvy observers noted what was missing from this and other Obama videos: the chance for ordinary citizens to talk back. The campaign initially disabled the comment function on YouTube and prevented response videos from appearing alongside. A YouTube video without comments, some pundits groused, is more like a monologue than a chat, fireside or not. “I don’t see how one-way messages provide any more transparency for the work of the White House or government than the current old-style radio addresses,” blogged Ellen Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government-transparency watchdog group. “Is Obama ready,” challenged TechCrunch, “to be a two-way president?”

Of course, Obama’s transition team had good reasons for disabling responses. For starters, YouTube comments are typically the intellectual equivalent of truck-stop graffiti. (When the team belatedly allowed comments a couple of weeks later, the site was flooded with insights like “USA susks.”) Also, his team would have zero control over the potentially critical or embarrassing response videos that users would post next to the address. The real reason, however, was that Obama wasn’t actually trying to have a conversation with Americans via YouTube. Like every president before him, he was simply harnessing the latest tools to talk to them, one-way.

Technophiles who watched the campaign closely expected more, and now they are putting pressure on the White House to govern with unparalleled transparency and citizen interaction. Dan Froomkin of the Niemen Watchdog Journalism Project and The Washington Post summed up expectations in a blog post calling for Obama to embrace “wiki culture” in which “major policy proposals have public collaborative workspaces.”

150,000+ subscribers
follow Obama’s Twitter feed.

0 tweets
have been posted by Obama staffers since the election.

Obama has himself to blame for raising such expectations. During the campaign, he embraced every form of social media. At My.BarackObama.com, supporters could create profiles, talk to each other, and—by election day—plan some 200,000 offline dinners and living room fund-raisers. Users could log in from home to get lists of swing-state voters to telephone; this generated 3 million calls in the final four days of the race. Those efforts were combined with massive database-crunching to identify potential voters who could be approached door-to-door by last-minute canvassers, myself included.

As for John McCain’s efforts, well, he didn’t really have any. According to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, cofounders of the Personal Democracy Forum and the blog TechPresident, Obama had four times the number of Facebook supporters, 24 times the Twitter devotees, and three times the visitors to his site in the final campaign week. The public watched about 15 million hours of Obama campaign videos on YouTube. Along the way, Obama collected 13 million email addresses, more than a million cell phone numbers, and a half-billion dollars in online donations.

There’s also another reason to expect a tech-driven presidency: Obama promised it. He said he would expand government transparency by putting more data up on the Web, streaming meetings live, and letting the public comment on most legislation for five days before he signs it. He said he would bring blogs, wikis, and social networking tools with him into the executive branch—all overseen by a new national chief technology officer. Indeed, Obama’s transition site, Change.gov, offers glimmers of a potential digital presidency with its YouTube addresses, issue-based discussion forums, and inside-the-transition videos featuring future cabinet members responding to comments.

But turning his innovative campaign and transition into Government 2.0 won’t be easy. The nimble Obama startup is about to be absorbed into a stodgy, technologically backward behemoth: the federal government. Ahead are bureaucratic obstacles the campaign never imagined, along with the political land mines that transparency brings. Obama will have to preserve the enthusiasm of his supporters while engaging the larger group of people who either didn’t vote for him or didn’t vote at all. His task is to rebuild the personal connection that supporters felt they had with Obama the candidate, assuring them that he is listening to them—without being deafened by the cacophony. If he can do that, Obama can alter how the government engages its citizenry and accomplish what he really cares about: his own policy goals.

Building that intimacy from the Oval Office will be a delicate and complex task, and just letting “AcidTrout” respond to a YouTube address with “Who’s the black guy?!?” isn’t going to do it. “One of the things that gives me ulcers is that there are a lot of high expectations,” says an Obama aide. “But we’re going to have to change how government thinks about the Internet before we can do the things we want to do.”

500+ PDFs
submitted by third parties for viewing and public comment are available on Change.gov.

Still, Macon Phillips, the campaign’s deputy director of new media, who has served in a similar role for the transition, warns: “Day one is going to be a lot different than perhaps day 100.”

The basement of the General Services Administration building in Washington, with its maze of identical hallways and frosted glass doors, reeks of generic federal bureaucracy. But if the new administration plans to reboot the system, it will find a pair of guides here in Bev Godwin and Sheila Campbell, cheerful doyens of the executive branch’s Web strategy. Godwin, director of USA.gov, the federal government’s all-purpose information Web portal, and Campbell, head of the government’s Web Best Practices Team, know every manacle and chain shackling the government to the 20th century. In a drab conference room one afternoon in late November, they discussed their optimism—and detailed their concerns.

For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date. “Nobody stepped back and asked strategically, how do we do this?” Godwin says. “Whenever there is a new initiative or program, they put up a new Web site.” And the first thing they usually do on that site, she says, is post a bandwidth-hogging picture of the bureaucrat in charge.

3,701 comments
on health care were submitted online to secretary of health and human services designate Tom Daschle.

Godwin and Campbell have been pushing government agencies to treat citizens more like customers, rebuilding their sites to help visitors do things like find loans or obtain passports—rather than serve as static repositories for press releases and personnel photos. “At Housing and Urban Development, for example, one of the missions is to reduce homelessness,” Godwin says. “If you go to HUD.gov, can you find shelter? The answer is no.” If the government can improve itself in these little ways, they say, great. Don’t worry about trying wild stuff, like setting up federal social networks. Many agencies bar employees from even looking at sites like Facebook at work, much less building their own versions.

Progress has been achingly slow. There have been some notable exceptions—like a blog on the Transportation Security Administration Web site, open to comments and manned by five agency staffers, and NASA.gov’s numerous social media initiatives, including Twitter feeds from 20 missions and projects. But the successes are rare and isolated. “We know that there are a lot of people advocating for more open government,” Godwin says. “We’re saying, absolutely, put the data out there. But I think we have to be realistic.”

For example, many of Obama’s online campaign techniques would be impeded by a collection of obscure and well-intentioned rules. Amendments to the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, for example, require that all government Web content be made reasonably accessible—in real time—to disabled users. Also, six months of negotiations between the General Services Administration and Google to establish a federal YouTube channel have stalled over similarly intricate legal issues. Meanwhile, a Clinton-era law called the Paperwork Reduction Act requires that an agency undergo a laborious approval process any time it “surveys” more than 10 people. The result: “Agencies tend to avoid doing these kind of surveys,” Godwin says. Would having users submit information to a social network or wiki count as a survey? Nobody knows.

20.3 million:
The number of visits to Obama’s YouTube channel since its September 2006 launch.

Even triumphs like Obama’s 2006 Google for Government bill, cosponsored with Republican senator Tom Coburn, have been caught up in red tape. The bill led to the creation of FedSpending.org, a site allowing the public to track federal contracts and grants. Instead of building it in-house, the Office of Management and Budget decided to license something similar from a nonprofit watchdog group, OMB Watch—for just 4 percent of what the government had expected to spend. It was a striking victory for government efficiency, but the process behind the scenes “was extremely difficult,” says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch. After floating the idea of donating the system to OMB (“the government can’t take things for free,” Bass quickly learned), the nonprofit had to sign on as a subcontractor and undergo three rounds, and six wasted months, of bidding before the deal was complete.

Changes to what is effectively the president’s homepage, WhiteHouse.gov, will encounter similar obstacles. David Almacy, a PR executive and new media consultant at Waggener Edstrom who served as the Bush administration’s White House Internet director from 2005 to 2007, recalls that following Hurricane Katrina, he posted the transcript of a speech to the site. In the text, where Bush had directed people to Redcross.org, Almacy helpfully inserted a hyperlink. “Within a few hours,” Almacy says, “I got a call from the White House general counsel’s office saying I needed to take out the link.” Some federal government Web pages, it turns out, are virtually barred from linking to nongovernmental sites to avoid the appearance of endorsing one product or organization over another.

The incoming administration is still working to assess the implications of the Presidential Records Act, the post-Nixon legislation requiring the preservation of all White House written communications. But that means that once any page goes up on the White House site, it can’t be altered, only archived and replaced, greatly slowing down the process of modifying and enhancing pages.

The Obama team was able to sidestep these kinds of troublesome rules on Change.gov, in part because, as a quasi-governmental site, it’s not subject to executive-branch restrictions. They were able to post videos on YouTube, link to outside sites, and even publish content under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be freely shared.

24,000 Web sites
are operated by the US government.

When he does arrive at the White House, Obama or his CTO can lift some of the Internet restrictions with the stroke of a pen. Others will require congressional action or clever technology.

Even if Obama’s tech team gets a free hand to rework the federal webosphere, things can still go awry. Take the 2006 race of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. Both David Axelrod, Obama’s top campaign strategist, and David Plouffe, his campaign manager, worked for Patrick, a little-known candidate who used Internet-driven grassroots support to win. In a precursor to My.BarackObama .com, the Patrick campaign placed the state’s voter list on its Web site, allowing its supporters to download phone numbers and call neighbors. “We believed in people’s ability to organize themselves and get involved,” says Charles SteelFisher, who ran the campaign’s Web operation.

No We Can’t

Barack Obama wants to transform the way the White House connects with the public. But there are plenty of obstacles standing in his way. After the election, the governor’s team launched DevalPatrick.com to keep supporters engaged. On a MyIssue page, registered commenters could propose, comment on, and vote for legislative ideas.

But the administration was immediately blasted when a database feature designed to verify Massachusetts residency was alleged (incorrectly) to reveal unlisted phone numbers. The privacy flap lured a collection of trolls and conspiracy theorists to the site, crowding out earnest discussion on gambling bills and income taxes with 9/11 chatter and religious debates. Critics, meanwhile, said that Patrick’s efforts were less about engaging the public than about running a permanent online campaign.

Eventually Patrick’s Web site recovered, developing a more sophisticated way of moderating comments and creating forums around the governor’s plans to reduce property taxes and add public kindergarten programs. The site also allowed people to create grassroots communities to work on issues they cared about. Still, the public isn’t exactly burning up the site: The leading vote-getter, a bill to promote fathers’ custody rights in divorce cases, had just 1,100 tallies as of mid-December. Offshore wind power, meanwhile, was losing, 16 votes to 15.

Obama’s team has moved carefully as it transitions from campaigning to governing. Between two wars and an economy in shambles, building an Oval Office social network has not topped the priority list. “Day one, do we need a White House My.BarackObama? I don’t think so,” says the Obama aide, who was required by the transition press office to speak anonymously. “It’s more important to step back and ask, what are the goals for the White House? And I think that making the government more accountable and transparent is more important than getting people to act.”

To that end, the transition team served up small accountability stuff first. Change .gov supplemented Obama’s weekly YouTube addresses with periodic videos from inside the transition process, everything from staff meetings to vlog-type updates from advisers. In early December, Obama’s public director of liaison and intergovernmental affairs announced—via video—a Change.gov feature called Your Seat at the Table, through which the transition would post every document received from every interest group and outside person throwing it advice. Users were allowed to comment next to the documents, while the Open for Questions feature let them submit and vote on questions for the transition team. The latter experiment illustrated the double-edged nature of feedback when the Senate-seat-selling scandal involving Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich broke. Supporters began flagging related questions “inappropriate,” and then Obama staffers buried the queries. ABCNews.com jumped on the story and the apparent hypocrisy. Obama Transition Web Site ‘Open for Questions’—Except on Blagojevich read the headline.

Change.gov does feature some Slashdot-like issue forums where user rankings send the most popular comments to the top. The first forum, in which two staffers appeared in a short video on health care policy and asked for comments, garnered thousands of horror stories and policy prescriptions. A week later, one of the staffers reappeared with future health and human services secretary Tom Daschle in a rehearsed-looking YouTube video response. “We are just so pleased that so many of you have written in,” Daschle said, appearing extra-pleased. “I spent a lot of the weekend actually reading the comments … We want to make sure that you understand how important those comments and your contributions are.” The comments the pair selected to discuss, however, seemed serendipitously aligned with Obama’s proposed initiatives.

550,000 responses
came in from supporters after Obama adviser David Plouffe requested feedback about the campaign.

In other words, with everything he’s done so far, Obama has been acknowledging feedback but not necessarily heeding it. And that’s what we can expect from Obama’s plan to post all pending nonemergency legislation online and allow the public to comment for five days before he acts on it. By mid-December, technology advisers were still struggling to determine the best way to implement the idea. The bigger question is, what will it accomplish? Even the system’s own architects concede that it’s unlikely that online comments and voting will sway the decision to sign or veto.

Nor should it. The Obama team, for all its Web enthusiasm, recognizes that an online community—no matter how vibrant—doesn’t represent all of the American public. “A lot of people consider online interactions and communications as representative of Americans. But we have a lot more high-speed Internet lines to drop before that’s true,” the Obama aide says. And even with ubiquitous broadband, online voting would remain the ultimate in self-selected polling. There’s no reason to believe that commenters would reflect Americans as a whole or even that they’d be Americans at all. Citizens also may not be as interested in the daily machinery of Obama’s workaday government as they were in his novel campaign. Case in point: By mid-December, views of Obama’s weekly YouTube address had dropped by half.

Still, the new administration wants to be able to marshal its supporters to act. Obama himself suggested as much last April. “Our database has a couple million people on there who are activated and inspired,” he told a small group in Indianapolis. “And so what I want to do is to continue that after the election.” In mid-November, Plouffe sent out a series of emails to supporters. The first directed them to a detailed survey of their campaign experience and policy interests and told them, “It’s up to you to decide how we move forward.” Later, a Plouffe missive declared that “you’ll be instrumental in generating support to pass legislation that puts America on the road to recovery.” At a closed-door meeting with its leading activists in Chicago in December, the Obama team took it a step further and told activists to be ready to pressure Congress on economic stimulus, health care, and energy legislation. A couple of weeks later, the campaign encouraged its supporters to organize “change is coming” get-togethers to discuss the future of the Obama movement, online and off.

Obama doesn’t want his 13 million-name email list to serve as just another political interest group. He needs it to be a tool to keep people engaged with his politics and policies. “Even if you push through the best government programs,” says Michael Cornfield, a political-science professor at George Washington University, “it’s hard to solve the actual problems” without effort from regular people. A national health care plan, for example, will work a whole lot better if former precinct captains are willing to explain it to their neighbors, just as they explained how to get to the polls. And a presidential Twitter feed, Flickr photos, or WhiteHouse.gov video Q&A sessions may not vastly increase transparency or deeply inform policy, but they create a valuable intimacy with citizens. “People who think they are being listened to tend to respect more the person talking,” says Rasiej.

That may not sound like a big deal. But contrary to what Web evangelists and the incoming administration would like to believe, Obama’s campaign was never a bottom-up endeavor. The incoming president didn’t crowdsource his view on the Iraq war or use Digg to determine how to allocate campaign dollars. He ran one of the most tightly controlled, top-down campaigns in modern history, to the point of pressuring outside advocacy groups not to advertise on his behalf. Rather, he asked his supporters for money and inspired them to get involved, giving them the tools to organize themselves and a message to sign on to.

Instead of turning WhiteHouse.gov into a governmental synthesis of Facebook and Wikipedia, or running a permanent campaign off the White House email list, Obama’s best shot at rebooting the government is to remember how he got there: making people feel that they were part of the solution and then enabling them to talk to one another and take action. “There is a relationship between Barack Obama and each individual, and that’s multiplied tens of millions of times over,” says Joe Rospars, the campaign’s director of new media. “But there are also millions and millions of relationships between our supporters. Both of those kinds of relationships didn’t end on Election Day.”

[via WIRED] by Evan Ratliff

Inquiries, Sales and Funding Rise in Anticipation of New Regulations — and Spending — From Obama Administration

While many small businesses continue to struggle with tight credit and declining sales, one fledgling industry is seeing a boom in investment and sales growth: alternative energy.

Alternative-energy firms are reporting an influx of inquiries and business from a wide range of companies looking to increase their energy efficiency, especially from those that believe the Obama administration will impose stricter regulations requiring them to conserve energy. President-elect Obama has spoken often of the importance of alternative energy, also known as clean technology, and his federal stimulus package is expected to include plans to beef up alternative-energy infrastructure and improve energy efficiency in government buildings. In a speech last week, he called for the U.S. to double the production of alternative energy in three years.

So start-ups across a variety of areas — solar power, biofuels and energy conservation among them — are getting increased financing from venture capitalists and lenders at a time when other small companies are cutting back and being turned away by investors. And many are hiring more staff, boosting marketing efforts and expanding geographically.

Alternative energy “has been the brightest sector in venture capital over the last year,” says Brian Fan, research director at Cleantech Group, an industry trade organization in San Francisco. “Everyone is thinking it’s going to be a big priority of the incoming administration.”

While the overall volume of venture-capital deals sank last year, investments in clean-technology companies totaled $8.4 billion, up nearly 40% from 2007, according to Cleantech Group. In the third quarter alone, venture capitalists poured $2.6 billion into clean technology, a quarterly record. In the fourth quarter, they invested $1.7 billion.

Some venture capitalists think clean technology is the next big thing — the innovation that will drive the economy, much as Internet-related ventures did a decade ago. “Anytime big innovation comes along, it brings the chance to build big companies,” says Erik Straser, general partner at venture-capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif., which has investments in several alternative-energy start-ups.

But whether the administration will turn to energy initiatives quickly enough for all these companies to reap the rewards remains to be seen. And unlike with other new types of technology companies, the growth of clean technology “depends on the right kind of government policies and incentives,” Mr. Fan says, because implementation requires a certain amount of infrastructure and tax credits to offset the expense for users.

“The policy side is absolutely critical,” he says. “If [the right policies] don’t get pushed through, we will see a good number of these start-ups suspend operation.”

Just the anticipation of a new administration has been enough to spur interest among companies. Green Panel Inc., a solar technology and installation company in Brighton Mich., is planning to add four employees to the 14-person, two-year-old firm over the next few weeks to handle new business that has come in since the election. Even though no new energy regulations are in place yet, big companies are starting to take a look at alternative-energy options, says Adam Harris, Green Panel’s chief executive. He says one industrial firm held off on an order of solar panels until after the election. And he has heard from other firms whose executives want to have systems in place ahead of any regulations for big companies.

“What’s really changed is the push from the top — the fear of what could happen if they don’t” put plans in place to cut dependence on nonrenewable energy like fossil fuels, Mr. Harris says. The firm expects to double its revenue this year to nearly $4 million.

Executives at venture-capital backed Greenline Industries Inc., a Larkspur, Calif., maker of biodiesel production equipment, believe the Obama administration will create a huge demand for biodiesel and other advanced biofuels. The president-elect has said he’ll require that 60 billion gallons of advanced biofuels are produced by 2030, spurred by tax incentives and government spending. The appointment of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary makes increased demand even more likely, Greenline executives say, because of his commitment to ethanol production in his state.

Greenline, which has 35 employees, declines to offer specific projections but plans to triple its sales staff in the coming weeks. “It’s a reaction to the administration change and to changes we expect as a result of the people [Mr. Obama] has picked — the policies that will be happening and the growth in demand we expect,” says Donn Tice, Greenline’s chief executive. The company’s latest round of venture-capital financing was in March, for $20 million.

Mr. Tice says calls from potential customers have picked up in the weeks since the election, and he expects the pace to accelerate once Mr. Obama takes office. In December, Mesilla Valley Transportation signed a deal with Greenline for a 10 million-gallon processing plant, part of a multistage, $25 million project of a company offshoot called Global Alternative Fuels. The election “expedited things,” says Dean Rigg, chief financial officer of the transportation company in Las Cruces, N.M., which started processing biodiesel fuel with Greenline equipment about 2½ years ago. “We’re all betting” that a push toward new biofuels will come quickly from Washington, he says.

Two weeks after the inauguration, Greenline plans to launch a new corporate logo and a new tagline: “Ask Greenline.” Michael Brown, the firm’s founder, says it’s a response to the idea that more and more people are asking how to develop alternative fuels.

Some small companies are counting on the government itself for new business. Verdiem Corp. sells software that provides centralized control over power consumption, such as remotely turning off computer monitors left on overnight. Over the past year and a half, most of the Seattle-based company’s growth has come from corporate customers. But with Mr. Obama’s declarations that he plans to improve the government’s own energy efficiency, Verdiem Chief Executive Jeremy Jaech sees opportunity. The 60-employee company is planning to add three or four new salespeople to its 20-person sales staff in the weeks ahead to focus specifically on federal operations in Washington, D.C. The company hopes to win the business through the information-technology companies that play a role in managing government buildings.

Mr. Jaech believes Mr. Obama will need to practice what he has preached, reducing energy consumption on the federal government’s estimated 6.5 million personal computers. And Mr. Obama will have to start with his own offices, he believes. For his company, Mr. Jaech adds, “it’s low-hanging fruit.”

But while Mr. Jaech anticipates quick growth from Washington, Verdiem is hiring in stages. “I know the federal government can take a while to do things,” he says.

[via WSJ Small Business] by Simona Covel at simona.covel@wsj.com

The U.S. Small Business Administration is offering Web chats to help small businesses across the country weather the recession.

President-elect wants to computerize the nation’s health care records in five years. But the plan comes with a hefty price tag, and specialized labor is scarce.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — President-elect Barack Obama, as part of the effort to revive the economy, has proposed a massive effort to modernize health care by making all health records standardized and electronic.

Here’s the audacious plan: Computerize all health records within five years. The quality of health care for all Americans gets a big boost, and costs decline.

Sounds good. But it won’t be easy.

In fact, many hurdles stand in the way. Only about 8% of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals and 17% of its 800,000 physicians currently use the kind of common computerized record-keeping systems that Obama envisions for the whole nation. And some experts say that serious concerns about patient privacy must be addressed first. Finally, the country suffers a dearth of skilled workers necessary to build and implement the necessary technology.

“The hard part of this is that we can’t just drop a computer on every doctor’s desk,” said Dr. David Brailer, former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, who served as President Bush’s health information czar from 2004 to 2006. “Getting electronic records up and running is a very technical task.”

It also won’t come cheap. Independent studies from Harvard, RAND and the Commonwealth Fund have shown that such a plan could cost at least $75 billion to $100 billion over the ten years they think the hospitals would need to implement program.

That’s a huge amount of money — since the total cost of the stimulus plan is estimated to cost about $800 billion, the health care initiative would be one of the priciest parts to the plan.

The biggest cost will be paying and training the labor force needed to create the network. Luis Castillo, senior vice president of Siemens Healthcare, a company that designs health care technology, said the laborers will have the extremely difficult task of designing a a system that “thinks like a physician.”

“Doctors cannot spend hours and hours learning a new system,” said Castillo. “It needs to be a ubiquitous, ‘anytime, anywhere’ solution that has easily accessible data in a simple-to-use Web-based application.”

But highly skilled health information technology professionals are as rare as they come, and many IT workers will need to be trained as health technology experts.

Early government estimates showed about 212,000 jobs could be created from this program, but Brailer said there simply aren’t that many Americans who are qualified.

Furthermore, ensuring the privacy of patients’ records in a nationalized computer network will be tricky. There are obvious concerns about hackers and system failures. And new online health record systems, such as Google Health are not currently subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the national health privacy law.

“HIPAA was never intended for the digital age, because the laws never anticipated the emergence of Web-based records,” said Brailer. “Congress can pass one of numerous policy proposals for change, it’s just a question if they have the will to do that.”

The Obama transition operation declined a request to elaborate on Obama’s proposal. The president-elect said Thursday in a speech on the economy thatthe benefits of a modernized national health record system go beyond just cost savings.

“This will cut waste, eliminate red tape, and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests,” said Obama. “It just won’t save billions of dollars and thousands of jobs — it will save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health care system,” he added.

Still, compared to the $2 trillion a year that the industry spends, the$100 billion experts say it may cost to implement Obama’s planis a drop in the bucket.

“We must reduce waste to become more efficient” said Brailer.

The savings of such a plan could be substantial. Brailer estimates that a fully computerized health record system could save the industry $200 billion to $300 billion a year.

That could ultimately slow the rapid rise of health care premiums, which have cut into Americans’ paychecks. While wages are rising at a rate of around 3% a year, health care costs are growing at about three times that rate.

“Obama’s support for electronic medical records is one of the key efforts of health reform that actually will deliver lower costs for hard-working American families,” said Larry McNeely, a health care advocate at U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “Long-term savings can’t happen unless we have 21st century health information technology.”

Massachusetts has developed a plan to fully computerize records at its 14,000 physicians’ offices by 2012 and its 63 hospitals by 2014. After a pilot program, the state legislature estimates it will cost about $340 million to build the statewide computer system, with a cost of about $2 million per hospital.

“[Obama's] timeframe is very ambitious, but there is a need to be able to track data on patients and talk across providers and health care systems,” said Dr. JudyAnn Bigby, Secretary of Health and Human Services for Massachusetts. “The program will allow for greater patient safety.”

Some say some of the hard work has begun. The Bush administration laid much of the groundwork for the program, leading to several pilot programs in a handful of states, as well as a standardization of medical records.

“The whole structure has already been developed,” said Stephen Schoenbaum, executive director of The Commonwealth Fund’s commission on a high performance health system. “It’s feasible to at least make a lot of progress on this in the next five years.”

[via CNN Money] by David Goldman

When Vestas, the world’s largest wind-turbine manufacturer, announced plans for a new U.S. research center, 42 states lined up to make sales pitches. The winning location would be rewarded with hundreds of jobs, millions in tax revenue, and green-business cachet. Finn Strøm Madsen, president of the Danish firm’s tech division, wanted a site near big-name universities, so Massachusetts (MIT) and California (Caltech, Berkeley) seemed obvious choices. Portland, Oregon, was already home to Vestas Americas’ headquarters. But in June, Vestas picked Houston.