First is a story from Time Magazine with a deep look into President Obama’s data crunching operation: Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win.  Break apart the major successes of the operation and you will see the modern best practices at play: (1) data optimizes effort; (2) the work to aggregate and clean was massive and necessary; (3) testing was a crucial component, and (4) social media works. But to see it all work at such a massive scale is something to behold.

For instance:

The [data] didn’t just tell the campaign how to find voters and get their attention; it also allowed the number crunchers to run tests predicting which types of people would be persuaded by certain kinds of appeals. Call lists in field offices, for instance, didn’t just list names and numbers; they also ranked names in order of their persuadability, with the campaign’s most important priorities first.

The flipside was another familiar story:  Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown.  This one was a story that software veterans have all seen, specifically rushing software development without proper planning, testing and training.  This one was a sad story as it was software that designed to be useful for just one day every four years.  And it failed that one day because of poor execution.

 …Volunteers couldn’t get the system to work from the field in many states—in some cases because they had been given the wrong login information. The system crashed repeatedly. At one point, the network connection to the Romney campaign’s headquarters went down because Internet provider Comcast reportedly thought the traffic was caused by a denial of service attack.

I will continue to study and unravel the techniques and technology behind the campaigns’ success and failures.  After all, there will be some learnings that I can bake into the software and bring these leading edge best practices to customers.

In the meantime, I think you would enjoy these reads.

• Baltimore Orioles: This Is Birdland.
• Boston Red Sox: We Won’t Rest
• Chicago Cubs: It’s A Way Of Life
• Chicago White Sox: All In.
• Cincinnati Reds: This is Reds Country
• Detroit Tigers: Who’s Your Tiger?
• Florida Marlins: Catch Our Moves!
• Houston Astros: We Are Your Astros
• Kansas City Royals: Major League Moments
• Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim: Angels Baseball
• Los Angeles Dodgers: It’s time for Dodger Baseball
• Minnesota Twins: This Is Twins Territory
• Oakland A’s: Green Collar Baseball
• Pittsburgh Pirates: Pride. Passion. Pittsburgh Pirates.
• San Francisco Giants: Together We’re Giant
• St Louis Cardinals: We Are Cardinal Nation
• Texas Rangers: My Texas. My Rangers.
• Toronto Blue Jays: Hustle + Heart 2.0

No tagline found on home page of the web site

• Arizona Diamondbacks
• Atlanta Braves
• Cleveland Indians
• Colorado Rockies
• Milwaukee Brewers
• New York Mets
• New York Yankees
• Philadelphia Phillies
• San Diego Padres
• Seattle Mariners
• Tampa Bay Rays
• Washington Nationals

That led to a nice conversation about “stepping up.” When the stage gets big and the crowd watching gets even bigger, what happens to your performance? Some of the best players in the game shrink; others step up.

The San Francisco Giants won because they were the team that got better and better. They played well in September and just cleared the hurdle to get into the post season. And with each series (NLDS, NLCS, WS), their performance became more inspired and more dominant. That, my son, is stepping up.

Photo via SFGate

Read the whole thing, but here are his bulleted recommendations:

1. Start by selling, yourself
2. Next you need to hire “evangelical” sales people
3. Don’t bring in the big guns yet
4. Do many sales meetings together
5. Don’t confuse your early sales success with a scalable sales process

The first is a terrific video on the New York Times site about Mariano Rivera and his cutter. It shows dramatically how these pitches happen from the hitter’s point of view. It clarity of explanation needs to be commended.

ESPN has a segment from the TV show Sports Science about the difference between running through first and sliding. There’s a bit more fluff in there but it’s still entertaining.

Also trying to get into soccer and found this graphic fun. Not real informative; probably even wrong if you ask hard core information designers. But hey, it’s a minute of a good time.

His lovely wife, Anna, started a business selling attractive reusable bags. Mitch was helping Anna cover a booth at the fair. Anna’s idea for the product and company came two years ago when she saw a need to design a resuable bag that pretty and strong.  EnvBags was born. It’s a great bag and we use it all the time.

It’s always fun to see a family business in action. Good luck, Anna and Mitch.

Do I miss the paper? Yes. I love the seeing the news well layed out.  I like the editor designing the pages so I can easily see what they think is worth reading.  I love the serendipity of finding good stories that I may not have clicked on in the browser.  I love the act of folding the paper over. I even like the ads better.

But then, I do not like the fact that I’ve already read half of the top stories the previous night. I don’t like the idea that someone drove in his car to throw ink drawn on dead trees wrapped in plastic on my driveway. And I don’t think the cost of the paper subscription is worth the marginal value of the paper experience.

If my experience is not uncommon, then the print paper goes away and we need to see a business model that works for the local paper. Finding a new business model is not the subject but I suspect a combination of prominent and useful local ads and inserts (I still want to see if what’s selling locally), high-value ads based on a local specialty with national appeal (say tech for the SJ Mercury News) and premium content subscription may be the answer.  Fleshing that out will have to wait until another morning.

UPDATE: Original video is no longer available. Here’s a substitute one that’s not as good but still gets the point across.

Found through my friend Ian Kennedy

I grew up in NYC and I always find myself drawn to movies where the City goes down.  I still have to watch Cloverfield but I think I got the other recent ones covered.

No link to Amazon here since Max would want you to run down to your local bookseller and buy it there.

I’ve accidentally seen all the major Olympics results before I could watch it.