Quick as a wink, I got in my tux and hailed a cab for midtown Manhattan. That message from a friend who shall not be named was how I ended up crashing the 2012 Inner Circle Show, an annual New York ritual where members of the city’s press corps put on an impressive musical roast of the local, regional and national political elite since 1922. It’s a big black-tie affair, and an invite is not easy to get.

The highlight of the night is always the Mayor’s Rebuttal. Last year, Mayor Mike Bloomberg flew around the stage as Spider-Man, taking advantage of the infamous buzz that plagued that Broadway show back then.

As you’ve probably figured out, Mayor Mike doesn’t do anything small. Being the 20th-richest person the world — worth some $22 billion via his majority ownership of the financial data and media company that bears his name — has its perks. One of them is the ability to hire the cast of a hit Broadway show to help make you look good on stage. (Full disclosure: I worked for that company for about a year before taking this job.)

This year, Bloomberg hired what must have been the majority of the cast of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” including its current headliner, Nick Jonas, a.k.a. “the cute Jonas Brother,” and also longtime Hollywood actor Beau Bridges.

Naturally, there were a lot of references to local political chatter. In the skit, Bloomberg bans coffee at City Hall — a reference to his administration’s war on nasty food ingredients like trans fats and salt — touching off a drama among city employees. He also quizzes the presidents of Cornell and Stanford University on their knowledge of New York — a quiz Stanford fails, prompting her to walk out. It’s a reference to a real-world competition between the two to develop a technology hub on Roosevelt Island, and yes, Stanford really did walk away. And of course there were plenty of references to Lady Gaga, whom Bloomberg famously kissed on New Year’s Eve.

Below is a six-minute highlight reel of Bloomberg’s production, which ran a good 30 minutes or more. The fun lasted well into the wee hours this morning. Hilton security guards shut down a crowded after-party in a penthouse suite at about 2:30 am. (I crashed that, too, again with the help of the friend who shall not be named.) One wonders if Bloomberg can be coaxed into a reprise when he hits the stage at our D10 conference in May. We can at least hope!

(See: the SOPA and PIPA online protests, the Planned Parenthood-Susan G. Komen dustup, the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring.)

Investors, including Internet impresario Sean Parker, think that sounds like an opportunity for disruption. “Politics is one of the few remaining large-scale consumer-facing opportunities on the Internet,” he said in an interview with AllThingsD. “It’s a very interesting moment, where politics is a bit behind the rest of the economy in embracing these new technologies.”

Sean Parker

Parker — who played crucial roles at Facebook, Spotify and Napster, and also co-founded the lesser-known nonprofit fundraising app, Causes — is now hoping to make an impact on politics with an investment in Votizen, a company founded by tech geeks with political stripes.

Votizen spent much of the last two years digitizing 200 million U.S. voting records from magnetic tape, computer databases and spreadsheets. Though it only has tens of thousand of members who have registered and connected to their voter profiles, it is trying to push out products and attract users in time to get involved with this year’s general election.

Parker first invested in Votizen with his venture capital firm Founders Fund in 2010, and also just personally took part in a new $750,000 convertible round with a set of celebrity investors who can raise Votizen’s profile with the push of a tweet button.

They are Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary and Ron Burkle’s A-Grade Investments, and Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter.

Votizen co-founders David Binetti and Jason Putorti

The latest round, which also included venture debt investor Hercules Technology Growth Capital, just closed last week. It brings Votizen to $2.25 million in total funding.

Votizen CEO David Binetti, who formerly founded USA.gov, says he’s aiming to capitalize on peer pressure — in a good way. Instead of money buying votes, Votizen will help friends persuade friends.

People who join Votizen can see voters from their own Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn networks. Then, Votizen will do things like highlight which friends are in swing states or certain political parties, and help users contact them to plead their case.

“Today, people feel rich people and lobbyists get in the way of their interests,” Binetti said. “We’re disrupting the currency of politics with ‘friendraising’ over fundraising. The goal is to make it harder for money to have an effect.”

According to various estimates, online spending in the 2012 election will be somewhere between $1 and $1.5 billion, up from $177 million in 2008.

While voter registration is a matter of public record, personal politics might not necessarily be something everyone will feel comfortable discussing online.

Votizen co-founder Jason Putorti — who was formerly lead designer at the personal finance site Mint.com — said he thinks that people will become more transparent about politics over time. “The new generation knows sharing leads to benefits,” he said.

Outside of election cycles, Votizen intends to help users get involved in ongoing public policy by writing officials and mobilizing groups around issues. Users can also create personal “cabinets” of advisors built from politically savvy people in their friend networks.

Eventually, Votizen hopes politicians and activists will pay to reach people in certain regions or interest groups, similar to the way LinkedIn makes money by charging users to contact people they don’t know.

On my way, I ran into a group of Koreans who were line dancing for what appeared to be no reason at all. I’m told it had to do with the local mayoral election, which at that time was just a couple of days away.

I’m not sure what it was meant to signify, but I will say it was a lot more fun than getting handed a pamphlet. In any case, it seems to have worked, as the party being backed by the dancers — the liberal opposition party — saw its candidate, Park Won-soon, win the election.

Han and his company, Perceptive Pixel, are best known for creating the giant touch wall that John King and others at CNN use to break down elections.

While Apple, Microsoft and others have targeted consumers, Perceptive Pixel has focused on niche professional markets, especially the defense and government sector.

But, after years of watching the small touchscreen device market from the sidelines, Han said he thinks he is pretty close to creating his first products that will run on those devices.

“Mobile is interesting,” he said in an interview last month at his New York offices (in the Manhattan building that Google is buying, with the amazing roof view seen below). “How can you ignore a billion devices being sold every year?”

Han said there is a reason he has stayed focused on the high end of the market.

“I have a personal bias,” he told Mobilized. “I want computers to be functional, not just playful.”

The modern tablet, he said, is the first consumer device that has enough pixels and the precision sensors to potentially be of interest to Perceptive Pixel. In particular, Han said he is intrigued by the idea of using tablets to allow meeting participants to interact with a nearby larger touchscreen that might be in use by someone leading a meeting.

“We’re looking at mobile and slate devices as a way to tie into this family of collaboration [products],” he said, noting that’s where Perceptive Pixel is spending its energy when it comes to mobile, as opposed to coming up with some killer app that works only on smaller screens. “There are a lot of smart people creating mobile apps.”

Han said his first mobile efforts should come out early next year–in the first quarter or early in the second quarter, though he wouldn’t give more specifics.

Whatever Perceptive Pixel ends up doing in the tablet space, Han said his plan is to eventually have it support multiple operating systems, though Han said the company will probably only qualify certain devices. So far, he said, Apple’s iOS and the iPad seem best suited to the applications he has in mind, while the real-time touch performance on Android has certain issues.

“We’re not going to just let it run on anything out there,” he said. “Some of them just can’t guarantee a good user interface.”

Here is the video interview Mobilized did with Han:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101213/multitouch-pioneer-jeff-han-starts-to-think-small-devices/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101103/election-2010-facebook-fan-favorites-fare-well/ http://allthingsd.com/20101103/election-2010-facebook-fan-favorites-fare-well/#comments Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:12:38 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31994 Well, what do you know–in elections, the most popular candidate usually wins. True in the real world, and apparently true in the virtual world. Plumbing its community sentiment for political insights (as it did all Election Night on ABC), Facebook today noted that in 98 key U.S. House races, the candidate with the most Facebook fans won 74 percent of the time. In 34 Senate races, the figure was 82 percent. Lots more fun facts on the site.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101103/election-2010-facebook-fan-favorites-fare-well/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091028/changing-the-world-through-the-web-video-interviews-with-zuckerberg-kutcher-shah-and-rospars/ http://allthingsd.com/20091028/changing-the-world-through-the-web-video-interviews-with-zuckerberg-kutcher-shah-and-rospars/#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:19:34 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=20002

Yesterday, BoomTown moderated a panel at California First Lady Maria Shriver’s well-known Women’s Conference in Long Beach, titled “Changing the World Through the Web” for a crowd of several thousand people.

The panelists for my session at what has become one of the top forums for women’s issues included Hollywood actor/producer, Katalyst co-founder and Twitter demigod Ashton Kutcher; Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg, who leads the social networking site’s elections, breaking news and social change initiatives; Premal Shah, president of online microloan site Kiva.org; and Joe Rospars, founder and creative director of Blue State Digital and new media director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

It turned out to be a lively session with the sharp digitally-focused group, which was the first tech panel at the six-year-old conference.

Here are video interviews I did with each of them (and you can see other video scenes from the conference here):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091028/changing-the-world-through-the-web-video-interviews-with-zuckerberg-kutcher-shah-and-rospars/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080619/icahn-haz-blog/ http://allthingsd.com/20080619/icahn-haz-blog/#comments Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:05:27 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=2579
Carl Icahn’s a busy guy–busier than usual lately penning broadsides against Yahoo (YHOO). So he can be forgiven the 138-day delay in lauching “Icahn Report,” the blog he announced back in February, and subsequently failed to debut in April.

Earlier today the blog offered nothing more than a placeholder page, but a few moments ago it went live with Icahn’s promised anecdotes on “the desultory state of corporate governance in America.”

And, specifically, Yahoo.

Which seems to figure in many of Icahn’s first few posts–though the company is never mentioned by name.

• Absurdity of Corporate Board Elections
• About CEOs–Anti Darwinian Metaphor–Survival of the Unfittest
• Absurdity of the Poison Pill
• Corporate Democracy is a Myth

Unfit CEOs. Absurd poison pills. Absurd board elections. It’s pretty clear to whom Icahn is referring, isn’t it? Presumably he’s had his site admins ban Yahoo’s IP address from the blog. I’m told comment spam can be a real nightmare.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080619/icahn-haz-blog/feed/ 0