As the battleground states results started to trickle in on Election Day, I went to nytimes.com and study the county maps and try to determine where the state would fall.  Call me a geek; it was fun.  But I wanted to know more.  In my reading this weekend, I caught up with two great articles about the election.  These tales are familiar and worth reading for those of us who live at the corner of technology and marketing:

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.

Here is your collection of taglines from the major league baseball teams.  I understand and appreciate the sentiment, but they look hokey in a list. Lots of declarative statements (“We Are …”).  Most baffling? Toronto Blue Jays.  Most classic: LA Dodgers. Personal Favorites: the Chicago teams.

• 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

My nine-year-old son and I were having breakfast this morning and talking about how our home-town San Francisco Giants just won the World Series. He said he remembered how the Series MVP Edgar Renteria struck out a lot during the regular season and that he couldn’t believe the important home runs he was hitting in the World Series.

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

When I talk to fellow entrepreneurs about sales success and sales failures, I generally focus on the evolution of the sales process and personnel. Well, Mark Suster, a VC and very good blogger, lays out my view almost exactly in his latest post on Startup Sales.

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

I am a big baseball fan and metrics guy. Maybe they’re related somehow. Anyway, I got a real kick of some of the work that was done by the New York Times and ESPN.

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.

The town’s farmers’ market has a green fair today and I bumped into my old friend and colleage Mitch.

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.

This morning, I read the local daily paper on newsprint over breakfast. This should be no big deal since I’ve gotten the local paper delivered to me since my sophomore year of high school.  But in an experiment that started last summer and accelerated this fall and spring, I’ve moved my most of breakfast reading online.  I still get the local paper on Thurs and Sunday (don’t ask me why the SFChronicle offers this combo), but otherwise, I bring my laptop to the kitchen and scan a half-dozen sites (including the Chron) while drinking my coffee.

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.

I work from my home office a lot and I think this will play in the background if I ever feel like I need to be part of a crowd.  It’s a sublime slice of life.

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

My friend Max Page has just written a book on popular culture’s obsession with the destruction of New York City. It’s called “The City’s End” and you can get a peek and what it is all about in the video below.

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.

With Tivo, always-on web access and the delayed Olympic broadcasts, I think every site needs to implement a spoiler alert feature.  I’ve mocked it up below.

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