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Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel launched an interactive dialogue on government mobile policy on Wednesday that he said would be the first step toward a governmentwide mobile roadmap due out in March. That roadmap, VanRoekel said, will address a range of issues from ways the government can save money -- such as by buying smartphones in larger quantities -- to serving citizens more effectively through public-facing apps

It also will include information about building internal mobile applications to help federal field officers, such as U.S. Forest Service workers and Border Patrol agents, do their jobs more efficiently. As things stand now, too many agencies and bureaus are putting time and effort into mobile projects without leveraging each other's gains, he said.

The dialogue will be open for 10 days and the mobile strategy should be out about two months later, VanRoekel said. Within six months, he hopes to introduce new procurement vehicles so agencies can buy smartphones and tablets more efficiently and cheaply

In the Business901 podcast, What Political Campaigns can teach business, part 1 of 2 we looked at a more strategic view. In today's podcast, we looked at the more tactical practices and how they related not only to a political campaign but to a typical marketing campaign. Derek A. Pillie has served public and political candidates for over 15 years. He has served on the staff of Indiana’s Third Congressional District, most recently as District Director for just over a decade. In that role, he oversaw Indiana operations of the office; including constituent outreach and helping taxpayers solve problems with federal agencies. He also worked on crucial economic development projects and was heavily involved with advising the office on online media and marketing decisions. After his federal service expired Derek started working at Cirrus ABS, an online marketing and technology development company. He currently manages their business development efforts. Cirrus ABS has added political campaigns to the portfolio of industries they serve since Derek joined the team, and he continues volunteer efforts on behalf of candidates he supports. Related Information: Preview of Political Campaign Marketing Podcast Political Campaigning – Strategy Update What political campaigns can teach business Lean Six Sigma for Government

Before the American people were protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, the president managed to sign an international treaty which would permit foreign companies to demand that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remove web content in the United States without any legal oversight. Entitled the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the treaty was signed by Obama on October 1, 2011, but it is currently a subject of discussion because the White House is circulating a petition demanding that senators ratify the treaty.

the White House has done some maneuvering — characterizing the treaty as an "executive agreement" — thereby bypassing approval by members of Congress. Concerned by this action of the administration, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore., above left) sent a letter to President Obama in which he declared: It may be possible for the U.S. to implement ACTA or any other trade agreement, once validly entered, without legislation if the agreement requires no change in U.S. law. But regardless of whether the agreement requires changes in U.S. law ... the executive branch lacks constitutional authority to enter a binding international agreement covering issues delegated by the Constitution to Congress' authority, absent congressional approval.

Similarly, TechDirt observes: ... [E]ven if Obama has declared ACTA an executive agreement (while those in Europe insist that it’s a binding treaty), there is a very real Constitutional question here: can it actually be an executive agreement? The law is clear that the only things that can be covered by executive agreements are things that involve items that are solely under the President’s mandate. That is, you can’t sign an executive agreement that impacts the things Congress has control over. But here’s the thing: intellectual property, in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, is an issue given to Congress, not the President. Thus, there’s a pretty strong argument that the President legally cannot sign any intellectual property agreements as an executive agreement and, instead, must submit them to the Senate.

Colorado, defending Yahoo against attempts by the federal government to obtain the contents of Yahoo Mail messages without first obtaining a warrant. One month earlier, the Justice Department filed a 17-page brief arguing that Yahoo Mail messages do not fall under current statutory protection because, once opened, those messages are not considered to be in “electronic storage.” The privacy coalition—which included Google—came to Yahoo’s defense, arguing that users with e-mail stored in the cloud have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of that e-mail, and should thus be protected from warrantless searches by the government. (Hopefully the irony of Google opposing robust searches is not lost on Google’s attorneys.) Unfortunately, the protections afforded by the warrant requirement have not yet been fully extended to the digital “cloud.” This handy metaphor for the ethereal Internet as a storage and access hub is coming to have other implications: can we really conceal our data inside this cloud, shielding it from government intrusion? Read more at arstechnica.com

Since 2007, the US federal minimum wage has been set at $7.15 an hour, yet workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—many of whom live in the US—make an average of $2 (according to the estimates of Mechanical Turk researcher Alex Quinn).  As illustrated in the above image, Amazon, itself, encourages businesses (at least implicitly) to pay workers (or “turkers” as they are called) less-than-minimum wages.  Moreover, to even qualify for these low-paying tasks called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), turkers are often expected to complete unpaid training sessions that can last for up to an hour.  Also, because turkers receive micro-payments for each task and because the time to completion for each task is rationalized to the second, turkers receive no pay during normal periods of rest during the workday.

Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing platform that allow anyone to recruit laborers for short online tasks, which cannot be effectively completed by computers.  For examples, turkers might compile contact information for various businesses, sort through images and tag offensive ones, or participate in university research experiments.  Because of the piecemeal and spatially-disembedded nature of the work, it is virtually unregulated. Can we simply dismiss this subversion of labor laws—as some commentators have—on the grounds that “$2 an hour is a decent wage in India?”  Even if we are angered by this exploitation of turkers, is it even possible to regulate an international platform of this sort?

"What would be your first guess about what an app store sells? Don't be fooled, Apple warns, the phrase 'app store' is not generic and can only be used to describe Cupertino's... um, app store? 'Apple denies that, based on their common meaning, the words "app store" together denote a store for apps,' Apple said in a Thursday filing with a California district court. All this notwithstanding that Jobs himself used the phrase generically while referring to Android app stores. We've previously discussed this ongoing legal battle."

"Steve Green reports that one of the website operators accused of copyright infringement by Righthaven has retaliated, hitting the Las Vegas company with a class-action counterclaim, charging that defendants in all 57 Righthaven cases in Colorado 'are victims of extortion litigation by Righthaven, which has made such extortion litigation a part of its, if not its entire, business model.' The counterclaim says Righthaven has victimized defendants by failing to send takedown notices prior to suing, by threatening to take their website domain names when that's not provided for under the federal Copyright Act, by falsely claiming it owns the copyrights at issue and by failing to investigate jurisdictional and fair use issues before suing, among other things. The claim seeks an adjudication that Righthaven's copyright infringement lawsuits amount to unfair and deceptive trade practices under Colorado law, an injunction permanently enjoining Righthaven from continuing the alleged unfair and deceptive trade practices, an unspecified financial award to the class-action plaintiffs for damages as well as their costs and attorney's fees."

Banjo has three main goals. One is to connect you to your social networking friends you didn’t know were nearby – for example, a friend from Facebook or Twitter, killing time at the airport, only a few gates away from you. It also wants to hep you find out what’s going on nearby by providing access to status updates and tweets from everyone around you, in a radius you specify. And it provides you with a way to virtually visit other locations, even when you’re far away, to see what’s going on with the people there.

The people Banjo finds don’t necessarily have to have “checked in” using a location-based networking service like Gowalla, Foursquare or Facebook Places. While that helps, of course, Banjo is designed to also pull in locations from geotagged tweets, uploaded photos, and other media from all social networking services. Wait – all? Yes, that’s the plan. Patton says they have 22 services they’re focused on integrating now, but the company’s goal is to become a federation of all social networks, big and small, from around the world.