Category: Tech

Exclusive: Biden appoints Clare Martorana to lead the White House’s digital efforts

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President Joe Biden is appointing Clare Martorana, a veteran of the U.S. Digital Service and a former health tech executive, to oversee White House efforts to upgrade the government’s creaky tech infrastructure. As Chief Information Officer for the United States, Martorana will be in charge of bolstering the federal government’s cybersecurity, modernizing IT systems, and making government websites more accessible for all citizens. Martorana, the nation’s first openly lesbian U.S. CIO, has also been tasked with ensuring that digital election information and online voter registration are accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities and people with limited understanding of English. This part of the role is particularly important for Biden, who recently issued an executive order that aims to strengthen voting access. [Photo: OPM] Martorana, who previously held the same position at the Office of Personnel Management, has more than a decade of experience as an executive at health technology companies, include WebMD and Everyday Health. In October 2016, she joined the USDS’s team at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, where she led an effort to modernize the agency’s digital infrastructure and make it easier for veterans to access and manage their benefits online. At the VA, Martorana used the principles of human-centered design to bring veterans into the process of designing and developing technology. “From rebuilding Veteran-facing applications to creating a personalized dashboard where Veterans can see their benefits in one place, our approach was the same: Veterans were at the center of every decision we made,” wrote Martorana and USDS design director Kat Jurick about their work at the agency in 2019 . She and her team received feedback from more than 2,000 veterans leading up to the 2018 launch of a new centralized website through which vets can access services. The Veteran Affairs Digital Services team later won a Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal for the site. Read More …

Why software legend Ray Ozzie wants to monitor your home’s air quality

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“I don’t know you’ve seen this thing yet, but it’s light enough, and it’s got Velcro mounting, so if you have a sunny window somewhere in the house, you can just open the window, reach out, and—after you turn it on—just stick it out there, and it’ll be solar-charged and run autonomously.” Ray Ozzie is on the other end of a Zoom call showing off Airnote, the new air quality monitor from his latest startup, Blues Wireless . As he talks, he brandishes the device—a palm-sized white box with a small LCD display, a built-in AT&T data connection, and an angled top that sports a solar panel. I am at least mildly surprised to find myself in the position of having Ray Ozzie explain a new gadget to me. Since the 1980s, after all, he has been known as one of the biggest brains in software—the mastermind behind pioneering “groupware” application Lotus Notes (still extant as HCL Notes ) and then Groove and Talko , two intriguing collaboration startups he ended up selling to Microsoft. In between Groove and Talko, he  served as Microsoft’s chief software architect , succeeding a fellow named Bill Gates and bootstrapping Azure , the portfolio of cloud-based services that eventually turned out to be the future of the company. Ray Ozzie [Photo: courtesy of Blues Wireless] Then again, Ozzie’s intellect has always been focused on the future of communications and collaboration, and that connects some of the dots between his past lives and Blues. Since 2019, the startup has been quietly working on Internet of Things (IoT) hardware and services designed to make it much easier to give just about anything a wireless internet connection. Its pilot customers—whom Blues isn’t ready to talk about yet—have built its Notecard system-on-module board into their own creations. With Airnote, Blues has become its own customer, embedding Notecard in a $149 air quality monitor intended for outdoor use and aimed at both consumers and businesses. It goes on sale on Blues’ site today and is scheduled to ship in early April. To Ozzie, the way Blues shuttles data across the net is still a form of collaboration, even if it’s not human-to-human. “The opportunity here is really to collaborate with machines, not just with people,” he says. The company, which employs around 30 people, is also a personal opportunity for him to go back to basics, getting his hands dirty in ways he’d left behind decades ago: “I haven’t done hardware since the seventies or coded since ’96, and it’s been an amazing journey.” A failure to communicate The ideas that became Blues Wireless have their roots in natural disaster and the challenges of disseminating essential information in its wake—another fact that links the company to Ozzie’s bona fides in communications. Ten years ago this week, Japan suffered the most powerful earthquake in its history , which spawned a  massive tsunami . Those catastrophes in turn led to the meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant , which—just by themselves—required the evacuation of 154,000 people. To complicate matters further, the Japanese government and the power plant’s managers were soon criticized for their inadequate communications about the nuclear accident and its implications to the country’s residents Read More …

Chrome OS did lots of growing up in its first decade—and there’s more to come

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It’s downright astounding how much difference a decade can make. In May 2011, Google’s defiantly minimalist new computing platform—a little something the company called Chrome OS—shipped to consumers for the first time, on laptops from Samsung and Acer. That was the culmination of a journey that began when Google unveiled Chrome OS in the summer of 2009 and continued with an experimental prototype called the Cr-48 in December 2010. It’s easy to forget now, but Chrome OS got its name because at the beginning, it was quite literally the Chrome operating system . The earliest versions of Chrome OS revolved entirely around the browser, with a deliberate omission of any traditional operating system elements. And boy, were those early versions jarring to use. When you signed into the original Chrome OS system on the decidedly understated CR-48 laptop, which was provided to a small pool of journalists and testers, all you were greeted with was a full-screen Chrome browser window. There was no desktop, no taskbar, and not much of anything else in sight. Heck, you couldn’t even close the browser window, as there was nothing beneath it. It was “quite a different type of computing environment,” as I put it in my own first impressions , and it felt “very foreign” to use. In 2010, Google’s experimental CR-48 was the first Chromebook—but you couldn’t buy it. [Photo: courtesy of Google] Unusual as the arrangement may have seemed, you’d better believe it was that way by design. In its initial introduction of Chrome OS, Google described the software as “a natural extension of Google Chrome”—with an interface that was “minimal to stay out of your way.” The Chromebook was meant to be a pure, unadulterated window to the web—no apps, no distractions, and no typical computing hassles to slow your tab-based wandering down. Power up a Chromebook today, and you’d hardly even know it’s an evolution of the same platform Read More …

How Biden is using internal government startups to lure tech talent to D.C.

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As the Biden years begin, there are hopeful signs that the new administration is serious about using technology to streamline the work of the government. The U.S. Digital Service and 18F —tech-forward “startups” that formed within the government during the Obama years—may get renewed attention and funding. While those groups were successful within government agencies, much work needs to be done to better coordinate federal programs with states and counties, work that was largely ignored during the Trump years. Read More …

The startup that saved the restaurant industry in the nick of time

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Nick Kokonas, CEO of the restaurant reservations platform Tock, is meeting a handful of new employees over Zoom for the first time. The latest hires of his rapidly growing Chicago-based company are tuning in from their apartments. He’s logging in from a house in Lake Tahoe that he’s rented for a few weeks in January in an attempt to take a vacation after an extraordinarily busy year.  The plan is to welcome his employees to the company with an introductory pep talk. He’ll explain how his 6-year-old reservation system is designed to help chefs manage both their dining rooms and kitchens more efficiently. He’ll go on to tell them about the way it threw a lifeline to independent restaurants during the pandemic by allowing their kitchens to offer take out and delivery service on better terms than other platforms. And then he’ll explain how the 140-person company is now taking on some of the biggest industry players with a tech platform that gives more control to chefs and restaurateurs. He is, after all, co-owner of Chicago’s renowned Alinea restaurant, along with several other eateries in the city, and has spent the past decade and a half thinking about what a restaurant needs to survive and even thrive.  But before he begins, Kokonas wants to set one thing straight: He did not purchase the large wooden yin-yang that hangs above his head. “This is not my house. This is not my yin-yang,” he tells his new hires. “This is T. Read More …