News Byte

Todd Park Takes Over as U.S. CTO

The White House today named Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the Department of Health and Human Services, to fill that role on a national level, replacing the departed Aneesh Chopra. Park comes in with an entrepreneurial background, good press on his three years at HHS and, as the son of Korean immigrants, a compelling personal story.

Anti-Merger Congresswoman, U.S. CTO Tour AT&T’s New Silicon Valley Office

AT&T on Monday showed off a recently opened facility in Palo Alto to U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra and U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Democrat who has opposed the T-Mobile deal.
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Tweet the People: Twitter VC Wilson and Federal CTO Chopra Talk Policy in D.C.

Ms. BoomTown went to Washington, D.C., this week to moderate a panel that looked at the future of the digital arena for an event marking the 25th anniversary of the .com domain. Surprisingly, the panelists did not talk about geo-location jet packs and augmented reality for everyone. Instead, due to their proximity to pols and government bureaucrats, they went wonkish.

BoomTown in D.C. to Say Happy 25th Birthday to .Com and Wary Hello to Broadband Plan

Last night, I jetted east to Washington, D.C., for an unusual confluence of events: The 25th anniversary of the .com Internet domain name and the Federal Communications Commission’s release of the National Broadband Plan. Both are set for tomorrow in the nation’s capital and both concern the impact of the Web on the United States in the past and the future. And after a quarter-century, let’s hope the federal government finally starts to take the Internet seriously.

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App Watch: The Official White House App Debuts

Calling all political news junkies who want to watch President Obama’s speeches live on their iPhones: now there’s an app for that. On Jan. 20, the White House recently launched its first official iTunes app, which brings key features of WhiteHouse.gov to mobile platforms.

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Federal Government Mulls Web 2.0

The country’s technology chief said that he would push the government to embrace blogs, wikis and social networking sites to achieve both greater efficiency and transparency.

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Ex-Googler's New White House Job Rankles Some

Andrew McLaughlin’s departure from Google to the Obama administration has prompted a little grumbling among some consumer advocates and the search giant’s corporate foes. Mr. McLaughlin, who was Google’s head of global public policy and government affairs, is leaving Silicon Valley for Washington, D.C., to become a deputy to Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, who’s in charge of advancing the president’s tech agenda.

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Tech Industry Cheers as Obama Taps Aneesh Chopra for CTO

It may not be the Cabinet-level post that some were hoping for, but President Obama finally named the U.S.’s first chief technology officer on Saturday morning during his weekly radio and Internet address. Aneesh Chopra, currently Virginia’s secretary of technology, got the nod and will soon join his former colleague, Vivek Kundra, the national chief information officer, on a team tasked with using technology to make government more efficient.