Unlike his former competitor John McCain, Barack Obama has embraced technology in his personal life and has plans to embrace it for the entire country. An avid BlackBerry user, he’s probably going to have to give it up for legal and security reasons when he enters the White House. An unfortunate turn of events for President-Elect Obama and Research in Motion (RIM), manufacturers of the BlackBerry device. Maybe Secret Service will let him get a brand new Palm Pre.
According to The New York Times, experts estimate the Obama endorsement of any product to be somewhere between $25 to $50 million dollars. As we’re seeing the tech industry make a massive slide, could Obama’s simple unfettered use of technology reignite the industry?
Nintendo is also feeling some of that Obama endorsement action, and unlike RIM, it’ll be traveling to the White House. Obama said he’s a big fan of the Wii, a gift he gave to his daughters for Christmas. He admits to playing virtual bowling. Let’s hope that virtual bowling is a lot more forgiving than real bowling for the President-elect.
The other technology that’s received a lot of publicity during the campaign is Obama’s Twitter account which hasn’t been updated since November 5th, 2008. He is the leading Twitter user with 165,000+ followers. What will become of all those followers? Will there be any more updates? Will he have to give up his Twitter account like his BlackBerry account for security reasons?
A tip of the hat to John Murrell over at Good Morning Silicon Valley, my favorite tech news source for this story and all the links.
This news item is for the Spark Minute week of 1/12/09 which can be heard daily on Green 960 and 910 KNEW in San Francisco, CA.
