What do you say to a group of Georgetown masters’ students studying the future of communications and media? That’s what I had to figure out last week when I spoke at the Gnovis Digital Cultures conference last week (Gnovis is their journal).

Frankly, I never know what to say in such talks when you’re given a time slot and a description of the conference, but no particular directions about what to focus on. So my general rule is, say something interesting, useful, and/or memorable.

I decided to start with a clip from The Merv Griffin Show, because, truly, who do 20-somethings identify more with than him?

Seriously though, I found a really cool old clip of Merv Griffin interviewing a young Michael Crichton about his 1983 book, Electronic Life. Back then, computers in the home were new, remember, so he wrote a whole book about cool stuff you could do with them (this is about a decade before Jurassic Park when he was still “experimental”).

Here’s the clip. Toward the end, Merv asks Michael a final question: What should you know before you go and buy a computer? Shortening his full answer, Michael Crichton says, Have some idea of what you want to do with it.

I think the same concept, having an idea of what you want to do with it, applies to social media too, and technology in general.

Asking a question like, Is using Twitter good for my local business? is the wrong order-of-operations, in my opinion, because the answer depends on a number of unstated parameters. These include: What is your mission? Who is your audience? What is the narrative you want told? Only then can you decide what media might apply to your challenge.

You can think of the decision process as a simplified diagram like the following:

In my view, understanding your goal or mission is the #1 most important thing you need to do in such a scenario. Are you selling retail products? Improving brand engagement? Responding to a crisis? Attacking a competitor? Various answers to these questions set you down certain paths.

Same with audience. Is your audience retail consumers? People who love your brand? People who hate your brand who you wish to convert? The mainstream media? Senior citizens? Teenagers? Similarly to mission, clarifying your audience sets you down certain paths, and not on others.

Finally, narrative. Is this sales? Marketing? A PR gimic? A public alert message? Some stories are better told in certain mediums.

That was my first big point. My second was that, once you have a lot of that straight in your mind, how do you look at social media as an option? There are so many different kinds of social media, and so many things now that aren’t really social media but are close enough to social media to be considered social media that it can all be confusing to managers and vice presidents who may tend to be middle- to late-stage technology adopters, with reports who are in charge of digital outreach and undoubtedly quicker to adopt and experiment.

In a 2009 paper with Dr. Linton Wells of the National Defense University, I wrote about four “quadrants” of social media along two axes. One axis graphs the Familiarity with Participants, and the other is the Directional Focus of your messages. Each lies along a spectrum, but for these purposes we simplified each into a binary: For the first, “Known” and “Unknown”; for the second, “Internal” and “External.”

It looks like this:

Simple, right? Okay, let’s fill in the four quadrants with “four fundamental ways to think about social media” alluded to in the title.

Taking the bottom left quadrant first, let’s look at how social media can help when your misson is internally-focused, i.e., within a small group or within a vertical, organization, or company, and where the participants or the kinds of participants (full-time employees, people with Top Secret clearance, people living in a certain dormitory) are basically known.

Here are a few quick examples:

As I wrote about in Social Software and National Security: An Initial Net Assessment, Company Command and Intelink are good examples of this kind of social media. Intelink is essentially a social framework for Intelligence Community (CIA, DIA, etc.) professionals to share text, video, audio, and photos on platforms that look like Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, and more. On the backend, it’s connected to your identity as an employee and controls your access to things; if you have a Secret clearance for example, you can look at Secret but not Top Secret wiki entries, and so forth. The idea here is to streamline how the IC collects and analyzes and distributes its intelligence products. You can learn more in this helpful video:

Company Command is something similar, except that it was built with an even more specific audience in mind: only people who are ranked as Captain in the U.S. Army, who have a particular level of command and responsibility, yet are young enough and spread out all over the world enough that it was actually very difficult for them to get in touch with each other outside their formal chain-of-command and share tips, and so forth.

Yammer (now owned by Microsoft) is a generalized framework for having such conversations inside a group/organization/enterprise — now with lots more features!

Let’s move to the second quadrant — where for the most part participants are familiar, but the focus is on sharing outside your core group, and with others in other verticals, divisions, agencies, companies, etc.

One example of this is Govloop, originally started on the Ning social media platform by Dept. of Homeland Security IT employee Steve Ressler years ago as a way to — what else? — get in touch with other IT people across his disparate organization and other agencies where people work on similar problems, like the Dept. of Defense and the Dept. of State, perhaps (the government doesn’t always communicate well internally, suffice it to say). Now, Govloop is an independent company bringing together government employees and those who work closely with them, and it has spawned events and related activities beyond social media, but with the same mission.

STAR-TIDES (yes, that’s a military-style acronym: Sharing To Accelerate Research — Transformative Innovation for Development and Emergency Support) is a somewhat-similar idea to Govloop, in that it started as an email list incubated within the Dept. of Defense to connect people within the government and external to it who have skills relevant to emergency situations like hurricane disasters (think: Red Cross, Microsoft, independent inventors working on say solar cooking devices).

Moving on to the third quadrant, when participants are largely unknown, but the focus is internal — the desire to receive information and help your own organization.

Here are two brief examples. One, a 50-person startup based in San Francisco called Crowdflower, headed by CEO  Lukas Biewald, takes on large crowdsourcing jobs for big clients (think: U.S. government, Fortune 500 companies). If a company wants to know, say, the price of every box of cereal in every supermarket in California, classified by address, size, and which shelf it’s on, Crowdflower would take a job like that and crowdsource it to a large number of people who each take on a small task (say, cereals in Irvine, CA), and then report back; a lot of how that is coordinated and executed is via social media in different ways.

A different example is the White House’s “We the People” website, in which individual citizens can propose large things (legalizing pot, building a Death Star, you get the idea) and then vote on them. If a petition gets 100,000 votes (it used to be 25,000), the White House has pledged to officially respond.

And finally, the fourth quadrant, where participants are largely unknown to the originator, and the focus is mainly on external sharing.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away when large corporations barely deigned to use social media, a Comcast customer service rep named Frank Eliason (who now works for Citi) thought it might be useful to actually respond to people complaining about Comcast on Twitter — providing them useful information about local power outages, why service trucks were running late, and the like. He had good instincts: Comcast put him in charge of a unit that grew into well over a dozen people staffing the Twitterverse 24/7.

And at long last, this brings us to Old Spice. Look at the video below. Now back at me. Now back at the video. Now back at me.

Sadly, the man in the video is not me. He is, however, incredibly handsome baritone actor Isaiah Mustafa, who played a campy character in Old Spice men’s body wash television commercials. And what’s interesting about the commercials is not just that they’re great commercials (they are), nor that they were also posted on YouTube, where they got a lot more views (just the one video above has 40+ million views on YouTube), but that they made the commercials and character truly interactive and social.

In a long series of videos, Isaiah (in character) replied personally to lots of social media participants who tweeted comments at the Old Spice brand. These were both famous people (Kevin Rose, entrepreneur, and Ellen DeGeneres, both shown blow, and just regular people).

The commercials were good as-is, but the social media engagement, personalization, and frankly, vulnerability, made this marketing campaign truly epic and unforgettable.

So there you have it — four fundamental ways to look at social media.

Mark Drapeau is the editor of Publiyte. You can tweet him questions about social media, or body wash, at @cheeky_geeky.

Google Glasses may be the nerd’s equivalent to the Tesla Roadster or the Birkin Bag — expensive, hard to get, extremely rare in the wild — but that doesn’t mean everyone yearns to own a pair, or even see them in their immediate vicinity.

In an interesting preemptive strike, a Seattle bar called The 5 Point Cafe has already banned them from the premises.

“If nothing else, we’re saving you from looking like a complete idiot in public. You’ll be thankful in a few years when your kids grow up and don’t have to see photos of you wearing these ridiculous things,” the bar wrote on its Facebook page next to a photo of a celebrity wearing Google Glasses, “But then if you wear these things your chance of having children will go way down.”

Population-control-via-nerdy-habits and fashion commentary aside, it’ll be interesting to see how lawmakers and other elites deal with such technology, once they start popping up in the halls of Congress, in semi-private business meetings, college final exam rooms, TSA security lines, and so forth. Are you cheating? Are you violating someone’s privacy? Are you too connected? These will all be questions that start getting asked with more frequency.

I imagine that Google Glasses will get treated a lot like the first smart phones. People used to ask, is it rude to check my Blackberry during dinner? Now, five or so years later, no one thinks anything of it. Can I use my Blackberry during a final exam? Now, the answer is, almost certainly not. We have identified the issues and struck a balance.

Google Glasses are not exactly the same as the first Blackberries and other smart phones, but they’re probably the best recent equivalent. My guess is, in five years or so people will be much more comfortable with compact, wearable, always-connected technologies. The question is just where along the spectrum of banned—completely acceptable they fall.

Update 1: Gawker almost simultaneously wrote a similar but more “racy” commentary on Google Glasses.

Mark Drapeau is the editor of Publicyte.

Google Glasses photo from Trey Ratcliff.

Mayor Vincent Gray was there. So was Rep. Darrell Issa. And entrepreneur and investor Steve Case. No, not some event in Washington, DC, but rather the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas this past week, talking about all things DC and startup.

There’s a lot of talk about a new wave of small tech startups in Washington, DC these days, and the recent launch of the 1776 startup accelerator space in a building across from the Washington Post has brought that excitement to a fever pitch. And it is exciting, with startups ranging from enterprise and cybersecurity types (Mercury Continuity, a continuity of communications company) to consumer technology (Hinge, a dating app), to fashion (SNOBSWAP, an upscale clothing marketplace) getting some investor love and media attention.

So when I saw that Washington Life magazine’s annual Young and the Guest List for 2013 came out, I was curious to see what tech folks made the list. After all, you might predict that some new people had popped onto their radar.

The Young and the Guest List, or YGL, is touted as “A guide to Washington’s most influential 40-and-under young leaders.”

Full disclosure: I’m on the list. It’s a nice honor. So okay, I work for Microsoft, there’s one tech person on the list. Who else? Well, Jesse Suskin from Google’s communications and public affairs shop made it; he has a background in Republican campaign and staff positions, including a stint in the White House.

And then, well, there’s…um… hmm.

I can’t find any other people from big tech companies on the list. Perhaps they’re hidden deeply among all the Members of Congress, baseball and football players, restaurant and bar owners, and White House staffers, but I can’t find anyone from the Apple’s, IBM’s, Oracle’s and Salesforce’s of the world. I can’t even find anyone from Facebook. Twitter. Tesla. Square. Reddit. Yahoo. Anyone.

What happened?

Well, it’s not like tech’s YGL forces have waned. I went back and quickly checked last year’s YGL from 2012. Not many tech people on there, either. No totally brotastic people from Twitter and the like (there was one from Facebook but he’s since moved to San Francisco). Not even someone like Adam Sharp, who not only used to work for a Senator and at CSPAN but now runs Twitter’s team that acts as “ambassadors” to important government officials and staffers, and also effectively controls the flow of information between Twitter’s databases and the political pundits and professionals who want to know how many tweeple participated in a Twitter roundtable with President Obama, or how many people tweeted with positive sentiment during a political debate, or which way people on Twitter are saying they voted in a national election.

So, if not someone like Adam Sharp and if not larger organizations like Twitter, than surely, some of the hot young startups with their slightly younger founders?

Well, there are a few of them, but less than you might expect. Evan Burfield, co-founder of the aforementioned 1776 startup accelerator is a veteran of the list and still on it, as are Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo who run the TechCocktail media company, and Peter Corbett, the CEO of iStrategyLabs, an experiential marketing firm in Dupont Circle, and Shana Glickfield, a partner in the Beekeeper Group, a tech-savvy public affairs consultancy, and a couple of the co-founders of LivingSocial. Blake Hall the CEO of Troopswap is another returning veteran, as is Navroop Mitter, the CEO of Gryphn. Steve Ressler and Goldy Kamali, founders of government news/media companies Govloop and Fedscoop, respectively too. And who can forget Macon Phillips, the now long-time head of digital strategy and new media for the Obama Administration? In different ways, these are all tech/startup community leaders; no surprises here.

But new, up-and-coming people in the tech and tech/startup space? I could only find three.

One is Matthew Corgan, the CEO of Hotpads.com, a real estate site. Another is Justin Herman, currently the director of Federal social media policy and programs at GSA. And finally, Laura O’Shaughnessy, the CEO of SocialCode, a consultancy to help advertisers leverage Facebook and Twitter better.

That’s it. That’s all I could find. So for all the angel investing and meetups with 1,000 attendees and sojourns to SXSW and mainstream media attention, effectively zero of the founders of new, hot DC-based startups made the list of “Washington’s most influential 40-and-under young leaders.”

This isn’t a criticism of Washington Life’s list. The list is what the list is. And actually, I was kind of impressed with the fact that while the list grew a little (to 300, I believe), but the magazine simultaneously removed quite a number of people I know personally from the list between 2012 and 2013. So, some care on their end was definitely taken with choosing the names.

No, this is not a critique of Washington Life. Perhaps it is a tiny critique of the DC startup community. It’s easy to criticize any given person on the YGL, but overall it’s fairly representative of the most visible young people in the area and the young people most likely to be known in other major cities and therefore the young people most likely to be considered “ambassadors” abroad. It’s also a fairly good indicator of the people you’re likely to find at a Sundance Film Festival, a CES or SXSW, a Summit Series event, a Davos, or a NY Fashion Week (for what it’s worth).

Correlated with that, the tech and tech/startup folks I named above also tend to be those people. Evan Burfield was just with the Mayor in Austin. Peter Corbett was in Davos. I was just at New York Fashion Week helping to run a hackathon. We all have day jobs, but we also tend to take on larger roles of “ambassadors” (for lack of a better term), representatives, storytellers, wider networkers. Next year, I’d love to see some up and coming people from Acceleprise, The Fort, 1776, or other places emerge as the start of a generation of even younger leaders and genuinely start to displace us with new voices and opportunities and leadership.

Update: My eyes must have glazed over looking at all those names. Peter Corbett, who I mentioned above, a YGL veteran, is not on this year’s 2013 list.

Mark Drapeau is the editor of Publicyte.

Cover photo of Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo by Ben Droz for TechCocktail.

Code.org has a great new video out about creativity, collaboration, and education, specifically about coding — what it is, how it works, and why it’s important and exciting.

The video’s language and feel is “adult,” yet simple enough for, say, middle schoolers to understand and possibly get excited about. Appearances by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), and quite a large number of other founders and engineers are eye-catching and inspiring as well.

Throw in some intelligent remarks by NBA star Chris Bosh and music artist will.i.am and you have a winning video. Turns out Chris Bosh was (is) a real nerd. Pretty cool. And according to will.i.am, who is currently learning how to code himself, “Great coders are today’s rock stars. That’s it.” he says with a smirk and a shrug.

Posted yesterday, the video already has 124,000+ views. It concludes with “To start learning a superpower, go to code.org” — catchy.

Code.org is a non-profit foundation founded by Hadi Partovi dedicated to growing computer programming education whose goals include:

• Spreading the word that there is a worldwide shortage of computer programmers, and that it’s much easier to learn to program than you think.
• Building an authoritative database of all programming schools, whether they are online courses, brick+mortar schools or summer camps.

Their vision is that “every student in every school has the opportunity to learn how to code.  We believe computer science and computer programming should be part of the core curriculum in education, alongside other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses, such as biology, physics, chemistry and algebra.”  Code.org’s board of directors include Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith, investor and co-founder of Netscape Marc Andreesen, and Drew Houston the CEO of Dropbox.

Mark Drapeau is the editor of Publicyte.

When I’m visiting New York, I have a bit of a routine I like to perform on weekends. I crave books, and I crave pizza. As it happens, two of my favorite places for doing these two things are around the corner from each other in NoLita: Rubirosa Pizza on Mulberry St. and McNally Jackson Books on Prince St. So I go. I go to the point where the staff at Rubirosa really can’t tell if I live in New York or not.

(To my knowledge, Microsoft has no financial interest in either of these businesses. But if we do, I want some free pizza.)

One thing that’s cool about McNally Jackson which is becoming increasingly popular at high-end independent book stores (such as Washington DC’s Politics and Prose) is the store-as-publisher phenomenon. When you walk into McNally Jackson, you’ll see an entire section on the left between the magazine and the cafe consumed with an “Espresso Book Machine,” a few shelves of books published by authors through the local store, and a full-time staffer sitting on a cute little stool, busily typing away on a laptop.

You see, whether you want to publish 10 copies of your son or daughter’s first book for friends and family, or you’ve written a niche book about, say, the history of Greenwich Village street art, you can simply write McNally Jackson or a similar book store a check, and they’ll print copies of your book right there and sell them. Boom, you’re an author.

Well, it’s not quite that easy. You have to format your book first.

It turns out that McNally Jackson has themselves written and self-published a book called the McNally Jackson D.I.Y. Formatting Guide for the Espresso Book Machine. It’s 61 pages of glorious formatting guidelines about exciting topics like “trim size” and “embedded fonts” and even “colophons” — any of which sound like they could be terms a doctor would use to describe a horrible disease you’ve contracted.

But no, they’re standard things you need to know about if you’re going to format your own prized manuscript for publication.

For some reason, I felt compelled to purchase this handy $5.99 manual and read it while I ate two slices of classic and one slice of vodka sauce with some Italian red wine at Rubirosa. The McNally Jackson D.I.Y. Formatting Guide for the Espresso Book Machine may set the record for the top book I’ve read that mentioned Microsoft Word an ungodly number of times yet still isn’t actually that boring.

You see, over and over and over, instructions for formatting page size, margins, tabs, line space, fonts, book sections, page numbers, and so on are given for Microsoft Word. That’s the trusted platform for writing and editing and formatting your book and converting it into an accurate PDF document for printing and publication.

Not Google Docs. Microsoft Word.

In fact, “Google Docs” wasn’t mentioned in the McNally Jackson D.I.Y. Formatting Guide for the Espresso Book Machine a single time.

Why? Perhaps trust.

Early on, people noticed “document fidelity” issues with transferring Word files to Google Docs and back — problems with formatting, missing watermarks, and so forth. Perhaps that led to a bad taste in people’s mouths.

Here’s a throwback video:

To be sure, Google Docs has gotten better since its debut, and quite a number of businesses and other organizations are using it. And I don’t think Google Docs is all that bad — I even use it from time to time for something quick-and-dirty, or as part of a collaborative project for a fundraiser or other outside group where someone else has chosen the platform on which we’re working.

But no matter how much it improves, Google Docs always seems a few steps behind Microsoft’s suite of products. Here’s an updated video showing students using Office in combination with Microsoft’s Skydrive (cloud storage) working on a group report on Macs and PCs, from a dorm room, a cafe, and a library computer:

And just today, Microsoft announced its new generation of Office, which includes a bunch of new things, including integration with newly acquired social tools Skype and Yammer.

Consistently, good old-fashioned Microsoft Word continues to dominate amongst people who have complicated missions, who trust that things in their documents won’t change, and for whom niche but extremely useful features matter.

Look at professional and technical writers for example. Don’t just take McNally Jackson’s word for it, check out this great Slashdot post from software developer and technical book writer Jeff Cogswell who tried hard to switch to Google Docs and another cloud platform, Zoho Docs, but in the end acquiesced to Microsoft Word’s superiority for professional writers and editors. In part, Jeff writes,

It would be great if I could open Google Docs, write this article, fiddle with tracking and some advanced publishing features, and then click a button to notify the editor that it’s ready. After he edits the piece to his satisfaction, he could send it back to me (again, via a single click), and I could go through his tracked changes, either keeping or rejecting them on a sentence-by-sentence and word-by-word basis. It would be powerful and effective.

But Google Docs can’t do all that. And every day, as a result, thousands of writers and editors opt for Microsoft Word—which was difficult for many to learn in the first place. If they want to switch over to a cloud-based writing and editing platform, they’ll need to learn whole new systems—and they’ll also need a Word-style set of powerful features and tools.

Microsoft Word’s superior feature set isn’t just for professional writers, of course — it’s for anyone with a complicated and critical mission to perform. How many Fortune 500 companies write their quarterly financial reports using Google Docs? No, I think it’s far more likely they track their money in Excel and then write their press releases and other documents in Word; one decimal positioned in the wrong place could mean a stock tanking millions of dollars.

What about Lockheed Martin employees who design, build, and test fighter jets for the U.S. military? Or how about doctors and nurses tracking infectious disease spread around the world and correlating that information with large data sets about global weather or airplane routes?

Maybe simple is beautiful, but I’d argue that complicated is sexy. People with complicated jobs that require the reliability of and somewhat obscure but incredibly useful feature sets in Microsoft Office — Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and more — do a lot of the really important things that make the world run.

They track the money you deposit at your bank.

They edit the bestselling books you love reading.

They design the military gear that keeps you safe.

They conduct research on diseases that inflict people you love.

They create toys that make your kids laugh.

And no matter what you read elsewhere, they tend to do a lot of that creative and business work using their trusty Microsoft Office products.

Technology is always in flux. Google Docs continues to evolve. Microsoft Office continues to evolve, too (for example, check out this blog post about Office 365 University by a pharmacology Ph.D. student). And newer form factors like phones and tablets and everything from watches to wall-sized computer screens will affect what people want to do with their data and information and how they want to interact with it.

But no matter what changes, I believe Office in every version and form factor will remain what it has been for years: “stunning” (The Verge), “feature-rich” (TechMamas), and “game-changing” (Engadget).

So if you feel temped by another software platform, just remember: Complicated is sexy.

Mark Drapeau is the editor of Publicyte.

Photo of McNally Jackson by Jose Nose. Photo of F-35 from Wikipedia.

Last year, David Rothschild of Microsoft Research New York City used a versatile, data-driven model to predict correctly the results of the U.S. presidential election in 50 of 51 jurisdictions—the nation’s 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Now, as the next effort in his quest to make use of big data to reinvent how we think about predictions and forecasting—and, coincidentally, to make potential contributions to enable Microsoft to build better products and services—Rothschild has turned his predictive attention toward another major media event of global proportions: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 85th annual Academy Awards.

You can see his forecasts on his PredictWise blog — he got about 80% of the Oscar winners correct last night.

Mark Drapeau is the editor of Publicyte.

Recently, I had coffee with a long-time fixture of the Federal tech community. I’ve known this person off-and-on for a while but we’ve never done a one-on-one to get to know each other and compare notes.

It was enlightening for me. As we went back and forth talking about different things we had done or were currently working on, one of us would say, “Do you know so-and-so?” and perhaps 70% of the time, the other one didn’t. I knew more people that were up-and-coming, people who are the younger underbelly of the DC Tech community, people who tend to be based in or very close to the District and like hanging out in places like Adams Morgan and Logan Circle.

He, on the other hand, drove into the city from the suburbs to meet me, and is more familiar with traditional Federal-oriented working groups and organizations and bodies and conferences, and large technology and defense firms that operate by-and-large in northern Virginia. These are groups and people that Microsoft in many cases works with, but me, specifically? In many cases I didn’t know them, and I’m not even sure I care too. I just don’t find a lot of it personally interesting. (To each their own.)

Where we shared some views is in our relative negativity about whether these disparate parts of the DC Tech community can and will ever congeal. He’s been in the scene far longer than me and he’s of the view that a lot of the talk that’s happening about tech startups in the region has been said before, and a lot of things like event series and startup accelerators had been tried before. And that they hadn’t had an impact.

I may be slightly more positive in light of the launch of 1776, a new initiative designed to be a co-working space, a startup accelerator, and a general convening, events, and education location for people interested in all things startup. I have no doubt that the new 1776 location, across from the Washington Post building and next to the Loews Madison Hotel near 15th and M St., NW downtown, will be a great force that a lot of people will rally around.

But whether it will be a gravitational force that not only churns out startup companies solving important problems (and creating jobs and revenue) relevant to the government and other public and civic sector issues — education, health, public safety, and the like — but also has such a significant impact that the Beltway Bandits of Virginia are forced to visit to get in touch with innovators certainly remains to be determined.

I know that Evan Burfield, the co-founder of 1776, sees this as a long-term project, and so it’s way too early to judge 1776 in any way (the carpet is literally not even on the floor yet). However, an important milestone will eventually be whether those companies are investing in or subcontracting to the startups.

Another important variable I haven’t yet mentioned is the government itself. Will it truly innovate? Answering this question certainly depends on your definition of the word “innovate,” but there are some basic questions that can be asked. Will innovative government initiatives from (say) the White House CIO and CTO transcend political appointees? Will they transcend administrations? Will the government continue to make it easier and easier for startups to get involved in working on government projects in a sustainable way (i.e., not just participating in panel discussions and apps contests), or will that work continue to go to larger firms better at the requisite paperwork?

I can’t possibly hope to answer these questions here. But I think that the ultimate success of 1776 and any similar initiatives and ultimately, the strength of the DC Tech community depends on it.

This discussion isn’t merely theoretical. Right now, there’s a raging discussion on a private Facebook group I’m a member of about the emigration of two beloved members of the DC Tech community — Justin and Lauren Thorp — to Las Vegas for better opportunities. Now, maybe there’s nothing that could be done about this because their business interests are better aligned to the kinds of businesses and investment opportunities that Vegas has. But it sparked some serious discussion about not only how to avoid unnecessarily losing people from DC to other tech communities — Silicon Valley, Las Vegas, Austin, Boulder… — but also how to attract people to the DC Tech community who would be better suited here.

The latter is the more interesting thing to contemplate. Bigger presence at SXSW and other huge conferences? Advertising? New local success stories with national significance? Making working on cybersecurity or improving education sexier? Probably a combination of all of the above.

Mark Drapeau is the editor of Publicyte.

Cover photo from Mike Miley.

Two events held last week in the Washington, DC region highlighted Microsoft’s strong track record with empowering youth and strengthening the economy.

At Microsoft’s Innovation and Policy Center on K St. in downtown DC, YouthSpark Connection Breakfast keynote speakers Fred Humphries, Microsoft VP of US Government Affairs, and the District of Columbia’s Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development Victor Hoskins welcomed local community leaders to learn about YouthSpark, Microsoft’s newest initiative designed to close the youth achievement gap in education, employment, and entrepreneurship, and serving youth by providing them with enhanced technology and business training to help them pursue additional education, obtain employment or start a new business or social venture.

Deputy Mayor Victor Hoskins (top) and Microsoft’s VP of Government Affairs, Fred Humphries (bottom), addressing the YouthSpark Connection Breakfast.

About 100 attendees then heard Martha Ross, a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, share her research addressing education and workforce strategies to keep the economy competitive. In partnership, Microsoft and Brookings are exploring answers to the question, “What are we doing to address the skills gap and prepare our students to enter and excel in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields?”

Microsoft’s director of east coast public affairs Donna Woodall then moderated a panel of business, education, and community leaders including Jim Dinegar, President and CEO of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, Michelle Didero, a City Year Corps member, Emily Durso, Assistant Superintendent of Post-Secondary and Career Tech Education, and Irasema Salcido, founder of Cesar Chavez Schools and the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative.

Panel discussion at the Microsoft Innovation and Policy Center. Microsoft’s Andrea Taylor, far right.

The event concluded with a presentation about YouthSpark by another Microsoft public affairs director, Andrea Taylor, and Microsoft Education’s Andrew Ko, who cited recent success stories of the YouthSpark initiatives like TEALS currently running in  the greater DC region.

Following the event, Microsoft’s Innovation and Policy Center interviewed Martha Ross of Brookings:

They also spoke with panelist Irasema Salcido, founder of the Cesar Chavez Public Charter Schools for Public Policy and the DC Promise Initiative:

And finally, City Year Corps Member Michelle Didero spoke with my colleagues about the importance of STEM education:

Almost simultaneously, about five miles across town at Microsoft’s building in Chevy Chase, MD, a group named Blacks at Microsoft (a 22-year-old social network within the company) was kicking off the annual Minority Student Day it puts on, with host Rodney Beverly of Microsoft’s public sector platform evangelism group. In attendance were approximately 100 high school students aspiring to learn more about the technology industry and how technology is affecting everyone’s lives.

Washington DC-area students patiently await the Mayor and other speakers at Microsoft’s Chevy Chase office building.

Microsoft’s Rodney Beverly, co-president of Blacks at Microsoft and host of Minority Student Day 2013.

Perhaps the largest theme I picked up on as I sat listening in the back of the room was that no matter what your passion in life is – sales, art, design, marketing, sports – that technology will be a component of it in the future. That may be an obvious point to the readers of this blog, but to a high school student not necessarily from the best part of town that may be a call to action to step it up and learn more.

Mayor Vincent Gray joined the group for a morning keynote talk, in which he sang Microsoft’s praises, not only for being a long-time leader in the technology industry, but also for leadership in its public affairs, and specifically helping to bridge the digital divide in the District and elsewhere around the U.S. and the world. “The day will come when a command of technology will be like using a pencil or a pen,” he said to the students, suggesting that Microsoft and other tech companies have a large role to play in the future of education and society in the years to come.

Washington, DC Mayor Vincent Gray with students at Microsoft’s Minority Student Day, designed to inspire students about technology and their careers.

The Mayor also gave a big shoutout to 1776, the new entrepreneurs hangout, tech startup accelerator, and all-around education and events facility for DC startupland that opened near 15th and M St., NW just a short time ago. He even went so far as to say his office would act as an internal broker to help get students, as part of his Summer Youth Employment Program, summer jobs with tech firms (some of which presumably would be affiliated with 1776).

“The fact that you are here today is a smart decision by everyone in this room,” the Mayor said as he was wrapping up. I couldn’t agree more.

Mark Drapeau is the editor of Publicyte.

The Texas Department of Information Resources is adopting Office 365 for more than 100,000 employees in the largest state-wide deployment of email and collaboration services in the U.S.

The state will consolidate multiple systems in an effort to streamline and improve the state’s communication and collaboration capabilities across agencies and to help better serve the needs of its citizens. The move to the cloud offers significant savings in IT spending due to greater efficiencies and increased capacity, while providing employees with web conferencing, real-time collaboration and document and calendar sharing.

Office 365 also will help maintain the state’s compliance posture and high standards for security and privacy. Several agencies, including the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Alcohol and Beverage Commission, Department of Insurance, Health and Human Services, and many others, require access to data that is subject to complex security and privacy regulations. Microsoft has made a contractual commitment to the Texas Department of Information Resources by signing the CJIS Security Addendum in addition to a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement. As a result of this partnership, jurisdictions at all levels within the State of Texas, including cities and counties, will be able to take advantage of Office 365.

Microsoft is the industry leader in delivering cloud computing solutions with robust security, privacy and compliance features, and has years of experience working with governments at all levels. We’re committed to offering our customers the most flexible, secure and reliable cloud solutions in the industry.

Today, the State of Texas joins a rapidly growing list of state and local government customers that are taking advantage of the cost savings and efficiency of moving to the cloud with Microsoft, including the City of Chicago, City of San Francisco, the State of California and the State of Minnesota. To learn more about today’s news and what it means for the State, read the press announcement.

Michael Donlan is the VP of U.S. State and Local Government for Microsoft. This post originally appeared on the official Microsoft blog.

People in the know know that when Fashion Week models are off-duty, they spend their downtime in the Models Lounge. Yes, there’s a secret models’ lounge, underneath a well-known restaurant in lower Manhattan. You have to be on the list, of course: It’s only for female models from top agencies who are invited.

The Model Lounge is open year-round, but it’s especially full during NY Fashion Week when there’s so much going on, and so many models are in the city all at once. This year, Microsoft sponsored the Model Lounge, so we have some awesome behind-the-scenes perspective for you.

Models in the lounge all got new HTC-made Windows Phone 8 devices, and got access to Surface devices for checking email and browsing the Web, and Xbox and Kinect games like Dance Central. And what kind of model doesn’t like dancing?

The denizens of the Model Lounge love to use social media, of course, some of them from their new Windows Phone 8’s: Twitter and Instagram rule the day. Here are some pics of models loving Microsoft gear…

Josephine Skriver may be one of the top 50 models in the world, making the cover of Elle and modeling for the likes of DKNY and Michael Kors, but she’s definitely not above being silly with her neon-yellow HTC phone:

Nyasha Matonhodze models for Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga and has appeared on the cover of Vogue. Here she models her new HTC phone and Beats by Dre headphones on Instagram.

Some models didn’t take a photo (that’s what they do for a living, after all – maybe they need a break!), but they did tweet thank you’d to Microsoft. Joan Smalls is one of the very top professional models in the world, working with Victoria’s Secret, Estee Lauder, and co-hosting a show on MTV when she’s not giving Microsoft some Twitter love.

You may recognize Genevieve Morton from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Maybe you’ll recognize her on the street with her new Windows Phone 8 sometime, too.

Elza Luijendijk is one of the hottest new models on the circuit, working for Roberto Cavalli and Versace, among others.

Andreea Diaconu, a Ralph Lauren and MaxMara model, has some major kudos for her new HTC phone and her #DreBeats — “Bye bye, iPhone!”

Model Sarah Joffs loves the phone she won at Fashion Week.

And what gallery of models at a private party would be complete without some shots from the step and repeat? Here’s Sarah Joffs again, hamming it up with a friend.

This is model Maxime Vanderhei with her phone on the step-and-repeat.

Model MJ is making a funny fish-face in the Model Lounge X Microsoft. You can fish-face her back on Twitter at @MJ_696.

And model Kelsey Soles is having some fun with her friend and a couple of apples.

And finally, Inga Krohn is definitely the leader of the funny-face-on-the-step-and-repeat competition at Model Lounge X Microsoft!

Thanks to all the models who stopped by the Model Lounge and played with Microsoft stuff and gave us shout-outs — We’re glad you love our stuff!!

Mark Drapeau, Ph.D. is the director of innovative engagement for Microsoft public sector. You can follow him on Twitter at @cheeky_geeky.

Today the Illinois Department of Corrections (DOC) and Microsoft Corp. announced the successful implementation of the Offender-360 project, a cloud-based criminal justice information system built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The solution directly supports legislation signed by Gov. Pat Quinn that aims to improve Illinois public safety and criminal justice for the future.

“This cutting-edge technology will give Illinois one of the most advanced criminal justice information systems in the country,” Quinn said. “It will save Illinois’ taxpayers millions of dollars while increasing public safety throughout the state.”

In 2010, the state evaluated its technology landscape for managing its 49,000 inmates and 28,000 parolees with the goal of transforming the Illinois DOC by improving efficiency, reducing costs and ensuring unwavering corrections operations. As a result of the evaluation, Illinois charted a course toward replacing a large 1980s mainframe system and 41 disparate offender management applications that had become outdated and costly to use and maintain.

After evaluating 20 possible solutions — including an option that would have cost taxpayers upward of $100 million — Illinois DOC selected Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage its statewide criminal justice population as a modern case management solution that will transform DOC business and extend the mission of citizen safety. Illinois DOC is undergoing a phased rollout, anticipating 5,500 users of Offender-360 by the summer of 2013. The solution centralizes all information and intelligence on offenders to help staff make more effective and informed decisions regarding placement, rehabilitation and release.

“The open architecture in Microsoft Dynamics lets us create a solution that enables analysis to more effectively serve our offender population,” said Steven Matthews, chief information officer, Illinois DOC. “Because of budget constraints and a shortfall of infrastructure and personnel resources to support this enterprise-level application, we launched the state’s first cloud initiative. This allows us to cut costs while continuing to achieve the mission with a security-enhanced solution.”

With guidance from Tribridge, 2012 Microsoft Dynamics State and Local Government Partner of the Year, the Illinois DOC was able to configure, develop and deploy the robust and flexible architecture of Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online through trained and certified union members, significantly reducing the Offender-360 solution cost and deployment timeframe. The use of union workers helped Illinois avoid hiring contractors, gave union employees advancement opportunities and drove revenue back to the state by using an Illinois-based union workforce.

“Illinois is leading the nation in adopting a statewide, cloud-based solution that will effectively manage the offender population and ultimately better protect its citizens,” said Amir Capriles, general manager, U.S. Public Sector Dynamics at Microsoft. “Illinois is a leader among its peers, demonstrating that criminal justice programs across the country can be transformed by modernizing legacy systems with cloud-based solutions while supporting necessary security, business processes and legislation.”

Faced with fiscal challenges and resource constraints, federal agencies, state governments, localities and education institutions throughout the U.S. are looking for alternatives to high-cost legacy systems. The Illinois DOC cited the Microsoft Dynamics CRM offering as an application platform that can support modernization initiatives and still achieve impactful, low-cost results.

Adopting a next-generation enterprise-ready application platform is becoming increasingly common among criminal justice agencies seeking to transform and modernize their operations. The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania is following the example of Illinois DOC with a similar modernization approach on behalf of that state’s 67 counties, while INTERPOL Washington is more effectively investigating fugitives, financial fraud, drug violations, terrorism and violent crimes.

More information about Illinois DOC can be found at http://www.illinois.gov/idoc. More information on Microsoft corrections solutions is available at: http://microsoft.com/corrections.

Cover photo from Flickr / Creative Commons here.

Hackers, hustlers, and designers working hard on projects at Hearst Tower in midtown Manhattan.

Hearst invited “geek” and “chic” people alike to learn from each other, collaborate into the wee hours of the night, and present the results of a 24-hour marathon work session to a VIP panel of judges that included David Carey, the President of Hearst Magazines, and Phil Wiser, the Chief Technology Officer of Hearst Corp. Kicking off the event, Carey pointed out that Hearst was “blessed with so much IP” and he was looking forward to seeing what participants in the hackathon could do with it (in 24 hours, no less).

As Hearst evolves into a media, information, entertainment, and services company, they are keen to build stronger relationships with large technology and internet companies, not to mention startups in the technology, fashion, and media verticals. Microsoft, along with numerous other companies including HTC, Amazon, GILT, and Klout, was a proud sponsor of the event, providing technical support about our Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Azure cloud, and Kinect platforms, and offering prizes to the most innovative hacks built on Microsoft platforms: two Lenovo “Yoga” laptop computers, each worth about $2,000. Cheers to my colleagues Hong Choing, Neha Bhaskar, Maria Naggaga Nakanwagi, and Rachel Appel for supporting the event with technical advice, and helping to judge the hackathon participants.

Microsoft’s evangelism team that judged hacks: (l-r) Maria Naggaga Nakanwagi, Rachel Appel, Hong Choing. (not pictured: Neha Bhaskar)

One of the Lenovo “Yoga” computers Microsoft gave away as a prize; next to a Microsoft Surface RT tablet.

The grand prize was $10,000 cash for best use of Hearst’s APIs, giving hackers access to editorial, photo, and other content in their databases.

Despite a delayed start last Saturday morning — and thus less overall time to hack — due to a small blizzard hitting New York and New England the night before (which yours truly braved during his train ride into the Big Apple), some of the hacks were really good. Here is a sampling of some that I really liked:

• Co-Fashion correlates static content from Hearst’s magazines with trending social conversations (on Twitter, etc.), filtered and curated by influence and theme. For example, I could pull up all the Esquire articles about coats from 2012 and cross-reference that with what coats influential people are sharing photos of online; I may find that Esquire recommends bold plaid coats, but that influencers I follow outside of New York City and Boston haven’t bought into the message yet.
• Zine helps you self-publish your own magazine based on Hearst’s content. Their tag line is “Ziners gotta zine.” For example, if I wanted to I could publish a zine that deciphers women’s fashion trends for urban men (I’d call it Mysterious.)
• Shop Up extends the retail experience by empowering you to pull up Hearst content about a specific item of clothing. If you’re like me and one dress shirt looks a bit like the next one, you can actually scan the bar code and learn that Esquire recommends (say) the Ralph Lauren dress shirts but never discusses Hugo Boss ones, and that may influence your purchasing decision (this one would be nice to see on kiosks in in retail stores too, perhaps).
• Hearst Throb uses APIs from HTC to use a Polar H7 heart rate monitor to measure your blood pressure reaction to different kinds of Hearst content. (Maybe Playboy should license this one…)

That should give you the idea. We laughed, we cried, and sometimes we felt like, Why didn’t I think of that? For example, this app that lets you project Hearst content on the inside of your umbrella:

Yes, that’s Hearst magazine content being projected inside an umbrella so you can read while you’re walking in the rain.

Microsoft decided its two winners — one for Windows 8 and one for Windows Phone — from among the 40 or so overall participant teams (some of whom used Microsoft’s platforms, some didn’t — there were plenty to choose from). Our first prize went to Arcadiusz Kazimierski for creating a stylish Windows 8 “tile” interface for sorting Hearst content by various filters, including designer (i.e., you can pull up every Hearst magazine or newspaper photo of a Prabal Gurung dress and then scroll through tiles of dresses vertically or horizontally by touch or by mouse). Arcadiusz also made good use of Windows 8 “charms” (easy-access tools in a secret control menu); the share charm allows you to easily share a single tile with friends via Facebook, Twitter, email and more, and the search charm lets you search within tiles for even more specific options (i.e., within Prabal Gurung dresses you could search for ones tagged with “red” or “Michelle Obama”).

Screenshot of the Microsoft winning app at the Hearst Fashion Hack.

Microsoft’s second prize went to (Gary) Yau Chan for developing Dice Maniac, perhaps the funniest app of the Hearst Fashion Hack. An anti-fashion app of sorts aimed at men who can’t dress themselves, Dice Maniac uses the Windows Phone 8 interface to turn getting dressed into a game during which items of clothing — shirts, pants, shoes — are put on dies which are then rolled to determine in which combination you wear them. It’s so silly, people would probably love playing it with clothes you feature in Esquire, Hearst (better snag it before someone else does…). One of my colleagues asked Gary what his experience at Hearst Fashion Hack was, and he reported the following: “Fantastic! …I never had an experience like this before at a hackathon – being able to talk to so many top designers and learning from them. We wanted to create something fun for us and with a cool design and we made the Dice game.  Me and my buddy are going to launch this in the Windows store after working on it a bit — like adding videos and making it a social party dice game.”

Microsoft also awarded some runner-up prizes, including one very cool one that amounted to hacking Kinect to create something termed a Virtual Mannequin, a 3D representation of clothing.

With startups like ModCloth, StyleSeat, Birchbox and others merging fashion and technology and making Fast Company’s “most innovative companies in technology” list for 2013, it’s more important than ever for fashion brands, media companies, and other entities in the space to be building relationships with tech-savvy idea people, developers, and established entrepreneurs. By that standard, Hearst Fashion Hack was a success for its namesake. I didn’t get a final headcount, but well over 100 people formed about 40 teams that presented projects, and a dozen tech or tech-related companies came in as sponsors and participants themselves.

Phil Wiser, the aforementioned CTO of Hearst, summed it up nicely for me just before the judging: “This event has already exceeded our expectations…Everything is upside from here.” I’m looking forward to seeing if Hearst Fashion Hack becomes a yearly New York Fashion Week staple.

Mark Drapeau, Ph.D. is the director of innovative engagement for public sector at Microsoft, and the founder and producer of the Microsoft-Bloomingdale’s charity fashion show series Geek 2 Chic. You can follow him on Twitter at @cheeky_geeky.

Update: Dice Maniac was co-developed by Ian Flynn.