What Is Really In Those Google Barges?

 

Sitting in the San Francisco Bay is a large, unmarked barge, thought to be owned by Google. But no one knows what it’s doing there.

 

What makes things even more interesting is on the opposite side of the country in a Maine sits another uncannily similar vessel.

 

 

Floating near Treasure Island between San Francisco and Oakland, the barge, according to CNET, is called a secret project by locals. People not involved don’t know what going on inside or if/when it could be revealed.

 

CNET, which was first to speculate on the structure, has tracked down what little is known of the barge and is pointing a finger at Google, although the company has not responded to the tech site’s request for comment.

 

Showing the images taken by James Martin for CNET to an expert, some believe it to be a floating data center. Supporting this idea, CNET noted a patent for a “water-based data center” filed by Google in 2009...

 

More at The Blaze

 

When the Nerds Go Marching In

 

 

 

#WTD...How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama’s reelection

 

“The nerds shook up an ossifying Democratic tech structure and the politicos taught the nerds a thing or two about stress, small-p politics, and the significance of elections.”

 

 

YOLO: MEET THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN’S CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

 

 

After Obamacare Fiasco, Call Goes Out to Get Government Up to Digital Speed

 

For many people, one man behind the scenes lay at the heart of Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election victory: Reed Harper, chief technology officer for Obama’s presidential campaign.

That’s because Harper was responsible in large part for the campaign’s digital strategy, credited with effectively identifying and mobilizing voters through a combination of information-sharing, database-building and social media. Those efforts made Harper a bit of a star among many younger and more tech-savvy folks.

Today, Harper waded into the debate over high-profile problems and frustration with signing people up for Obamacare by calling for a more comprehensive digital strategy in the highest reaches of the federal government. Writing in the New York Times, Reed and another political programmer, Clay Johnson, said:

This latest failure is frustrating for us to watch. Our careers have largely been about developing technology that allows more people to participate in the way we finance, support and elect candidates for public office. Together, we’ve done things that transformed elections, but we now need that work to carry into transforming government...The Ward Room

 

What happened to Obama's tech czars?

Why does the White House need a private-sector “tech surge” to repair its wretched Obamacare website failures? Weren’t all of the president’s myriad IT czars and their underlings supposed to ensure that taxpayers got the most effective, innovative, cutting-edge and secure technology for their money?

Now is the perfect time for an update on Obama’s top government titans of information technology. As usual, “screw up, move up” is standard bureaucratic operating procedure...

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