Instagram photos were flying fast and furious as soon as news networks called the 2012 presidential election for Barack Obama.

The Facebook-owned app said Wednesday night that the rate of photos uploaded each second to the service spiked to 2.1 times the normal rate immediately following the pronouncement that Obama had been elected to a second term.

What the 2.1x spike corresponds to in terms of the actual number of photos uploaded per second, we don’t really know — because Facebook wouldn’t tell me (of course I asked).

“People from around the United States tagged more than 100,000 photos with #IVoted, and 150,000 photos with #election2012, allowing folks to share their own — and tune into others’ — election night experience in real-time,” the Instagram team said in a postmortem blog post.

For comparison purposes, members of the mobile photo-sharing network inundated Instagram with as much as 10 photos per second related to superstorm Sandy on Monday, October 29.

The surge in Instagram activity should shock no one. The photo phenom has proven to be a platform were the masses go to not only post filtered shots of their surroundings but to also capture and react to major events.

Instagram spikes aside, Twitter proved to be the most electric social network on election night. Tweets peaked at nearly 875,000 messages per minute, an all-time record for the company.

Photo credit: LizNemmers/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

CNN has come up with several goofy ways of displaying information about the 2012 presidential election, but none that are as gimmicky and dumb as its latest stunt.

The news organization has decided to display electoral voting results from the election as they come in tonight by lighting up the spire of New York City’s Empire State Building. (See photo above.)

I’m undecided on whether this is a cool idea, or just something noisy to draw attention to CNN’s coverage via cable TV and online. If it works, it could bring in lots of new viewers that otherwise may have tuned in using one of several other methods.

And if it doesn’t work, then the Empire State Building electoral results will joint the long list of dumb election coverage stunts, which include human holograms, weird facial recognition technology, and more.

At the very least, this election seems pretty evenly split — so at least the city will be showing patriotic colors all night.

What do you think of CNN’s electoral results gimmick? Let us know in the comment section below.

Voters are bombarded with political emails this fall. But it is those who are “undecided” about how to detect a phishing scam who stand to most lose before November 6th.

Phishing emails, intended to trick consumers by driving them to websites where they enter credit card and other confidential information, continue to be lucrative for cyber criminals around the world. According to security company RSA, for the first half of 2012, estimated worldwide losses from phishing attacks alone amounted to more than $687 million. Attack numbers averaged 32,581 per month — a 19 percent jump compared to the second half of 2011.

During the Presidential election season, scammers can’t wait to cast their nets. With campaign contributions becoming most critical this final week, fundraising emails are being sent with double the frequency. For instance, in the first three weeks of October, Obama for sent out over 50 different emails to all of its supporters asking for donations. The sheer volume of emails make voters more vulnerable and more susceptible to scams.

The Better Business Bureau (BBB) is calling on all voters to be aware of the number of scams that are likely to continue leading up to the Presidential election. According to the BBB, “Scammers use incentives based on what they think voters want to hear. Hot topics such as health care, economic recovery and unemployment, are alluring topics this election season.”

“Website reviewers” on SiteJapper recently discovered two scam sites called DemocraticNationalCommittee.org and RepublicanNationalCommittee.org. They are fraudulent donation sites made to appear as if they were created by the Democratic and Republican parties. Once visitors click on the “donate” link, they are taken directly to a PayPal account “not connected with any Federal elections.”

So, how can you avoid being a victim of phishing as we lead up to Election Day?

First, it’s important to know the signs of fraud and be able to identify the difference between a legitimate email or website from a fraudulent one. Here are three ways to identify a potentially counterfeit email or website:

Scrutinize Email Subject Lines

Watch out for scare tactics and threats. Successful phishing email subject lines are security related and suggest suspicious activity with your account to prompt you to click on a link. If you have a user account on a Presidential candidate’s site through which you make donations, be skeptical of emails entitled “account suspended” or “information compromised” or “account accessed by third party.”

Be even more suspicious if you receive an email with this subject line on a Friday or Monday. According to Websense, Fridays and Mondays are the top phishing days of the week.

Triple Check URLs

If you receive an email from an unknown sender, resist clicking on any links. However, if you think the sender is legitimate, you should first review the URL without even clicking on it. For those who don’t already know, you can hover over the link and you should see the URL in the status bar (usually on the bottom of screen). Review the name of the site before you click on it.

Once you do click on a link in an email, you can double check the URL again in the address bar. Look closely at it before you enter any private information or credit card details. Examples of fake URLs are an “@” symbol in the middle of the address or typos or spelling mistakes. It’s also a good idea to look for typos within the actual website to which you’re taken. Because phishing sites need to go up very quickly (97 percent are taken down in 48 hours by organizations protecting their brand), the scammers spend little time proofing content, so sites are usually rife with typos and errors.

If you do not trust the URL, and you know where you’d like to go, then it’s a good idea to simply type the correct web address into the address bar directly.

Green Means Go

Once you’re on a campaign donation site, look again to the address bar for clues. A properly authenticated site will have a green address bar (or a green padlock icon) and https (vs. http) preceding the site name in the URL. These three indicators signify a safe and legitimate site that has undergone a rigorous authentication test. It is fortunately not easy for scammers to fake these trust marks.

Counterfeit activity not only diverts coveted donations from legitimate campaigns, but can damage voter trust. To protect yourself, do not provide your social security number, banking information, or credit card number if you come across any of the above fraud indicators. If you’ve been a subscriber of a particular campaign email list for some time it’s still a good idea to go through the checks anyway.

Obama website image via Shutterstock.com

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

While major TV news networks are almost entirely devoted to discussion of the 2012 presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, a handful of online streaming services are offering coverage of the fringe candidates — aka the people who have no chance of actually winning the election in November.

Iconic broadcast news host Larry King is moderating a debate tomorrow (6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET) that features Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, Constitution Party candidate Virgil Goode, and Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson. King solicited questions for the debate from several online communities, with Reddit being the most popular.

The Third-Party debate is unlikely to bring in even a fraction of the viewership of the Obama/Romney debate, which is exactly why you won’t find a live stream from any of the major cable and broadcast news organizations. You will, however, be able to watch the fringe party debate live on Ora.tv (via its YouTube Channel), Al Jazeera English, and a few other news sites (like, oddly enough, The Hollywood Reporter) using Ora.tv’s livestream player.

“The audience for third-party candidates is under served,” Ora.tv CEO Jon Housman told VentureBeat in an interview. That gives Ora.tv an opportunity to step-up, which the streaming video news site is more than happy to do.

“We think (the fringe party candidate debate) is important, and it plays to Larry’s strengths.” He added that King, who currently hosts Ora.tv’s Larry King Now news program, does have a history of highlighting diverse opinions. Perhaps the best example of this is King’s introduction of third-party candidate Ross Perot to the 1992 presidential election.

Housman admitted that the debate isn’t “a goldmine for us,” but said it made perfect sense for Larry to cover it for the streaming video news site. Ora.tv is also producing a pre-debate show, also hosted by King, that will give some background on each of the four candidates and offer up some background on what viewers can expect.

King also covered each of the three Romney/Obama debates, but went with a post-debate show that drilled into the candidate’s responses. By comparison, King’s Third-Party debate show serves a different purpose and works better before.

“Third-Party candidates usually answer questions more directly, maybe because they have nothing to lose and nothing to hide. You don’t have to parse (their responses) as finely as you do with Romney and Obama,” Housman said.

Since this sounds like a far higher quality debate than the three Romney/Obama debates, I’d expect it would make for interesting television. Housman said he wasn’t sure why broadcast and cable networks weren’t covering it for that reason alone. My guess is that it’s purely a business decision, since anything that doesn’t include the two major party candidates won’t generate enough revenue to justify the resources.

The entertainment and financial industries aren’t the only sections of the business world hoping to impact political change through donations.

According to a list of 325 top “bundlers” (people who assemble donations) obtained by the New York Times, Obama raised $180 million in 2011-2012, and about $27 million of that came from 43 people in technology.

While the list is littered with venture capitalists and other funding greats, some of the more notable bundlers include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff with $640,175, Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer with $112,400, and LegalZoom founder Brian Lee with $680,200.

Buzzfeed was able to assemble a full list of tech bundlers that donated to Obama, which we’ve embedded below.

Having the leaders in technology get more involved with political fundraising is hardly a surprise. In addition to the boost in presidential election campaign donations, big tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Netflix are stepping up their donations to PACs — (and Netflix actually has its own PAC).

Obama photo via The White House

The unwritten rule says that you don’t discuss religion or politics with anyone if you hope to remain their friend. But nobody told this to the developers of Party Politics (which just launched on Facebook), a new campaign debate-themed free-to-play puzzle game in which you can declare your position on big issues…while fighting for a high score.

Party Politics comes from the same California-based developer that recently tried to stand up against the “virtual chores” of other Facebook games when it launched AviNation, a history-based airport management sim. According to a release by the studio, it hopes that Party Politics will maintain its history of creating products with “clever, diverse, and socially relevant game themes” by being a “bipartisan game that is fun and intuitive for all levels of players, and gives players a voice to engage their social network.”

Thankfully, Party Politics is about more than bothering your Facebook friends with messages about where you stand on all the hot-button issues. The gameplay itself is like a competitive version of Bejeweled, with you taking turns against an opponent to match colorful balls into groups of three. Of course it’s all cast in a political-debate framework, so the colorful balls actually represent things like the economy, the environment, and foreign policy. The more you collect, the better you do against whomever you’re debating.

It also has special icons, like one that represents campaign funds, that tie into the game’s free-to-play angle. You can spend these campaign funds (and real money) on items like new podiums or backgrounds that grant you specific bonuses during the debates. A giant banner with the words “These colors don’t run” buffs your defense against attacks on your foreign policy platform, while the classic “Hang in there, baby” cat poster protects you against attacks on social issues. It’s all metaphorical interpretations of current affairs, as viewed through a lens of cartoonish satire.

Speaking of cartoonish satire, the game also features dozens of avatars based on modern political figures, with some of the choices skewing slightly less obvious than GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama (though they are also included, of course). If you’ve ever wanted to see Michael Moore or Arianna Huffington take on Chuck Norris or Ted Nugent in a political debate (and who hasn’t?), now you can … sort of.

You can act out your bizarre political fantasies in a few different modes, including a single-player campaign (get it?) and asynchronous multiplayer against a friend or random opponent. It’s a lot like when you post an antagonizing Facebook status about whichever party you think is full of horrible monsters that will ruin this country, but less likely to inspire people to block you from their News Feed. Probably.

Party Politics is playable now on Facebook and is coming soon to iOS, Android, Kongregate, and Kindle Fire. When it does, it will feature Checkpoint’s Boomerang technology, which lets you play across multiple devices.

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Not to be outdone by Twitter, Facebook has partnered with CNN to create a digital home where the politically curious can follow the buzz surrounding the candidates in the 2012 presidential election.

“Election Insights,” as the destination site is called, visualizes the volume of Facebook activity involving Democratic candidates President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and his veep choice, Paul Ryan.

Visitors can find a line graph showing the volume of activity, color-coded for each candidate, spanning various time periods, and can segment data by state, gender, and age group.

CNN will use the tool in its presidential election coverage, Facebook said.

Twitter, as you may recall, is also attempting to measure the mood of the nation in the run-up to election day. In early August, the information network, which has called this year’s election the “Twitter election,” released a political index that pivots on Twitter data.

Both Twitter and Facebook have a continued interest in being seen as the primary source of public discourse; this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the companies’ put forth overlapping strategies around major events. Most recently, the companies attempted to establish their respective networks as the home of Olympic Games athletes, conversations, and pictures.

Ballot box image via Shutterstock

Political ads can be deceiving, hiding behind the glitz of their presentations the motives of the groups that run them.

Identifying those groups is the idea behind Ad Hawk, an app for Android and iOS that listens to political ads and gives users the scoop on who spent the money to get them on air.

In addition to identifying advertisements, Ad Hawk also tells users where they’ve been aired and how much money candidates have spent on the campaigns surrounding them.

In that sense, Ad Hawk is similar to apps like Shazam and SoundHound, which identify songs based on their audio fingerprints.

Ad Hawk comes via the Sunlight Foundation, an educational organization that also created Realtime Congress, an app that offers up-to-date information about (you guessed it) Congress. The organization says that the idea for Ad Hawk came about at a Philadelphia Hackers meetup last December. It’s sure to come in handy this fall.

Below is a somewhat corny video giving an explanation of how Ad Hawk works.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Say hello to the future of political fundraising.

Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and U.S. Cellular have all agreed to allow their subscribers to make campaign donations by text, signaling the beginning of a whole new way for political candidates to raise money from their supporters.

Absent from the agreement was AT&T, though Reuters reports that campaign officials for President Barack Obama expect to reach an agreement with the carrier soon.

The deal, which was supposed to launch in June, was held up when carriers said they wanted legal protections in the event of fraudulent donations. A court case last week gave them that protection with the assurance that it would be campaigns, not carriers, who will be responsible for the donations they receive.

We speculated that carrier hesitation to adopt campaign donations by text would mean that the measures would come too late for use in this fall’s election. Fortunately for the presidential candidates, that didn’t end up being the case.

But the carriers aren’t supporting the texting plan out of kindness: They get a cut out of every donation made via their services, which could turn out to be a pretty lucrative arrangement if things go right.

Obama’s campaign has been the biggest supporter of donation texting, which will allow it to receive donations from his young, tech-savvy cadre of supporters.

Photo: Flickr/Nick Knupffer

Want to tell all your Facebook friends that you’re voting this year? CNN and the social network want to make that easy for you with the “I’m Voting” Facebook app.

While the partnership between Facebook and CNN was announced last month, it’s only today that Facebook and CNN have gotten around to launching the new app.

“I’m Voting” taps into Facebook’s Open Graph, enabling users to broadcast to their Facebook friends what political matters they care about and for whom they plan on voting. Users can then compare their responses to those of their friends.

CNN plans to use all of this data as a sort of “second screen” for its news segments. With the Facebook user base, the network will be able to offer poll questions and get well-sampled responses relatively quickly.

While user participation in the app is low so far, some numbers have already come in: 46 percent of participating users have declared themselves  as Democrats, while 28 percent say they are Republicans. Sixty-one percent of users said they will vote for President Barack Obama during the upcoming election, compared to 30 percent who plan to vote for presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney. 

Nowadays, most big political announcements come via the wire or Twitter, but the Romney presidential campaign aims to do things a bit differently.

The campaign announced an app for Android and iOS  today called Mitt’s VP that will unveil the identity of the presidential hopeful’s as-yet-unnamed running mate.

More interesting is that the app also promises its users that they’ll be the first to get the announcement, which is a lofty claim in the era of social media.

There’s also one big caveat:  The app requires that users either sign in through Facebook or create a MyMitt account, the latter of which will add you to the Romney campaign’s contact list.

Romney, however, isn’t breaking new ground here. President Obama tried a similar experiment during the 2008 presidential election when he used text messaging to announce then-Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his running mate. That news, however, was leaked hours before by intrepid reporters, proving that not even push notifications can beat a good scoop.

The Romney campaign has had a mixed record when it comes to app execution. Its most high-profile tech blunder came in May when news spread that its “With Mitt” app had somehow misspelled the word “America.“ Hopefully Mitt’s VP avoids a similarly embarrassing fate.

Not to be outdone by its competition, the Obama campaign also announced today its new Obama for America app, making Tuesday a big day for political app announcements.

Photo: Maria Dryfhout/ Shutterstock.com

The Obama campaign is employing a digital strategy like no other, betting more aggressively on Facebook, display ads, and paid search than Republican candidates seeking the nomination, according to new data from analytics firm comScore.

In fact, the Obama for America campaign delivered 835 million display ads in February, representing 86 percent share of voice for all presidential candidate display ads in that month, according to comScore.

“The Obama campaign outnumbered the combined effort of the four leading Republican campaigns with any notable online ad presence by a ratio of 10 to 1 in the past six months, reflecting a significant difference in advertising strategy between Obama and the rest of the candidates,” comScore said in a report entitled, “5 Ways Digital Media is Shaping the 2012 Presidential Election.”

The report, published earlier this week, looks at the digital media practices of presidential hopefuls. Obama’s approach — blanketing the web with display ads — resulted in 777.5 million paid ad impressions in January. Compare that to just 32.6 million paid ad impressions for Mitt Romney in the same month and you’ll see the disparity in display advertising strategies.

The digital exposure disparity between Obama and the Republican candidates carries over to social channels including Facebook. The Obama campaign delivered 22 percent of its display ads for a six month period on Facebook, where his more than 26 million Facebook fans went on to do the dirty work of social promotion for the campaign. In January alone, Obama’s flock of Facebook followers and their friends contributed nearly 66 million earned media impressions.

click to enlarge

“It is fair to say that on sheer volume of exposure, the Obama campaign is far outpacing Republicans in leveraging social media,” comScore concluded.

That’s not to say the Republicans aren’t trying to compete in social exposure. Likely nominee Mitt Romney, for instance, has invested heavily in Facebook, running 58.2 percent of campaign display ads on the social network during the past six moths, which is the highest percentage for any candidate so far. And Ron Paul is organically popular with Facebookers. The candidate attracted more than twice as many earned impressions on Facebook (30 million) than on paid display ad impressions (12.7 million) in January.

comScore also found a correlation between social supporters and actual campaign donors. Obama’s Facebook fans and their friends donated at a rate 2.5 times that of other donors, though fans donated less on average, according to the report.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Stitcher, the iOS and Android radio app that is trying improve the state of non-music streaming content, has added an Election Center section to its app to keep people in the loop on the contentious 2012 U.S. elections.

Stitcher’s in-app programming already includes high-profile shows like NPR’s Fresh Air, Rush Limbaugh, CNN News, Chelsea Lately, Marc Maron, and Fox Sports. But now the application will have a section dedicated purely to the election that can keep political watchers up-to-the-minute with news and updates. News and updates will mostly come from media outlets, but there’s also a section for candidates themselves.

Notably, only the Obama campaign has signed up to issue direct updates. That said, the Romney campaign’s messages and updates will be coming soon, according to Colin Billings, Stitcher’s Director of Product.

Billings said this update shows the direction Stitcher will take in quest to make audio programming better. He said the app only offers on-demand streaming now, but the company is working on a way to let people save content for later listening, for when they don’t have access to wireless data or want to conserve battery.

“We’re trying to innovate the radio and audio space and evolve the medium,” Billings told us.

San Francisco-based Stitcher has raised about $20 million to date, with its last round totaling $10 million. Investors include New Enterprise Associates, Benchmark Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, and Ron Conway.

Take a better look at the new Election Center below:

Pres. Obama photo: Becky Fiedler/Flickr