Friday, May 16, 2008

Election demand spurs new local blogs, sites

By Brendan Lynch

Two graduate students at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College recently launched Openvote Inc., an online voting and social networking site that joins other local websites with aspirations to affect the 2008 presidential election — or at least use to market the company.

Openvote users can create their own polls, as well as vote in and comment on other polls. The company is targeting college campuses — its polls range from “Should Hillary concede?” to “How many times a week do you get drunk?” — and plans to make money by running ads and performing market research, although it’s still forming its business plan, co-founder Jason Freedman said.

Openvote isn’t the only business looking for a boost from the politics.

Cambridge-based nonprofit Glassbooth, whose online survey shows users which candidates they align with based on research of the candidates’ public statements, is considering a transition to a for-profit company after the election.

“The nonprofit world can be limiting,” co-founder Ian Manheimer said. “It stymies innovation in some ways.”

Glassbooth plans to expand its survey to include vice-presidential candidates when they are announced and to develop new tools after the election. It also is conducting a pilot program for state legislature elections in Wisconsin.

Another company, Lexalytics Inc. of Amherst, has implemented its text analytics technology in a website-as-marketing tool, PoliticalTrends.info, which automatically tracks the blogosphere for the number and tone of blog posts about a candidate.

“We use it to show what you can do with text analytics,” CEO Jeff Catlin said.

Other local sites are in on the act. VoteGopher, founded by Harvard University student Will Ruben, aggregates news, blogs and videos about candidates’ positions. Scoop08 is an online political newspaper run by 400 college and high school students, co-founded by Alexander Heffner, a senior at Phillips Academy in Andover.

And Cambridge-based OnTheIssues.org — of which Glassbooth’s Manheimer is a fan — compiles information on each candidate’s stances. “If you type into Google a candidate and an issue, they’re the first hit,” Manheimer said.

In September, Openvote conducted a poll of the Dartmouth campus after a Democratic debate held at the college. Sen. Hillary Clinton won the poll, but the site’s marketing also made out well — with Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and MSNBC blogs mentioning Openvote. This summer will be spent building the site as well as a Facebook application, Freedman said.

Freedman and co-founder Colin Van Ostern came up with the idea about a year and a half ago, over drinks at Murphy’s on the Green, a Hanover bar near the Dartmouth campus. Freedman said he had mostly used the Internet to read about politics and wanted a more community-oriented experience.

“We were astonished there wasn’t a single way to find out what the campus thought, and we wanted to fix that,” Freedman said.

In March, Openvote closed on $250,000 of angel funding from Michael Horvath, an adjunct professor at Tuck, and Bill Hart, a retired Bay Area venture capitalist. Horvath said he was attracted to the company because the co-founders had already “nickel and dimed” a unique, working prototype. Horvath said the company’s make-or-break period will come after November, when there will be no national event to drive traffic.

“The big tailwind for this company is the election,” he said.