Power of Mobile

If you want to do something to help the people of Haiti-- or do more-- then text the word Haiti to 90999 today. Your action will immediately donate $10 to the Red Cross. Using this method will ensure that all $10 go directly to the Red Cross, and the major US wireless carriers won't even charge you for the text itself. It is the most efficient means to get your money to those who need it most.

In any crisis, the response in the early days is the most important and will save the most lives. Acting now could literally save a life-- today, this weekend, or next week. So please don't wait.

If you can send this message on to others through the web, e-mail, Facebook or Twitter, please do. We just sent it to more than 25,000 on the NDN list. This method has already raised $8 million from over 700,000 people. Our hope is that we double that in the next few days.  Taking this step and asking others to do so will help us reach our next important goal.

Thank you,

Simon & the NDN team

Mon Jan 18, 5pm Update: 90999 has now raised more than $21m, almost triple where we were when we sent this message out on Friday.  Thanks to everyone who has taken part in this inspiring effort.  But lets keep going my friends. We can do more.

And thanks to Arianna Huffington for putting this message from me on the front page of the Huffington Post all day on Friday.  Huff Po has really stepped up.  Been exciting to watch.

Perhaps it is more relief than elation this morning, but however we sort this all out right now the pick of Joe Biden is looking shrewd, smart, sure-footed. Experienced, deep knowledge of foreign policy and the ways of Washington, strong connections to the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, Catholic, working class, son to be deployed to Iraq in October. This morning this feels like a good pick, Obama's pick, one that will help Senator Obama not only win but govern in turbulent times. It just feels right.

The buzz around the mobile announcement of the pick has also been highly successful. Reinforces the openness and people-oriented nature of the campaign. I offered some thoughts on the rollout in a SF Chronicle piece today, and Travis weighed in here too a few days ago.

For a deeper discussion on the power of new media be sure to join us for a special panel at the Convention, 2 Million Strong, which will feature Senator Obama's Director of New Media Joe Rospars, Joe Trippi and Google's Peter Greenberger. It runs from 2 to 4pm, Tuesday, at the Westin Tabor Center.

Finally, it is astonishing that in the next 8 weeks we will have the 2 VP picks, the 2 Conventions, and all 4 debates. And another 3 weeks after that to the election itself. In what has been an incredible political year we just experienced a lull. With his 3am text the Obama campaign launched the next and very intense round of what is going to be quite a general election campaign.

For those looking for more on Biden Daily Kos already has quite a bit up, and very well worth visiting.

Update 8am: Here's the text Travis received:

Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3pm ET on www.BarackObama.com. Spread the word!

Note the encouragement to watch it live on the Obama site and not on TV. The day of the always on Presidential campaign continues to evolve.

Update 6pm - Added some additonal thoughts in this Reuters piece by John Whitesides.

Update 630pm - Our good friend Joe Trippi offers these observations on Biden in a new post on Daily Kos.

Update 645pm - Via Huff Post, this is one powerful and well crafted line from the speech today:"

"these times require more than a good soldier, they require a wise leader."

This is simply one of the most powerful lines of any speech in this remarkable year.

I just watched the video of Steve Jobs' keynote presentation at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. In it, he unveiled Apple's widely anticipated iPhone G3. Now while I am an unabashed Apple fan, unlike Tim Chambers and Jed Alpert I'm not an expert on mobile media. So some of the specifics of the presentation flew over my head.

But what was obvious was that the product on display is very likely to continue a theme we at NDN and NPI have thoroughly discussed. As Simon recently described in his post, aptly titled "The power of mobile", the role of mobile media in the global communications network cannot be ignored.

Surely that point was on display in San Francisco this afternoon.

Now the iPhone will not have the ability to impact everyone as the price of it alone is a barrier. But after seeing some of the initial applications developed for it, it's obvious that it has extraordinary capability to impact many sectors. Politics is of course no exception. Take for example the applications by TypePad, which allows seamless blogging from your iPhone, and the Associated Press, which lets you both consume and report news.

Pair that potential with the fact that the iPhone 3G will be available in seventy countries and you'll understand why Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers helped launch the iFund. If only every country was able to become connected - through the iPhone or some other device - imagine what that would look like. If nothing else, it would give former Vice President Gore, who was in the audience, another reason to be a proud Board member of Apple.