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With election day less than two weeks away, politically focused websites are being lifted on the rising tide of the race’s publicity, and their developers are planning for the ebb that’s sure to follow the closing of the polls on Nov. 4.
For polling web application company Openvote Inc., momentum includes a new partnership with IBM Corp., an office move from New Hampshire to Boston’s South End and the development of its application exclusively for Facebook.
Meanwhile, Glassbooth.org landed a $10,000 grant from Google Inc. two weeks ago while planning a post-election consumer review site. And a third startup, VoteGopher, has launched out of Harvard University and plans to expand its scope beyond the presidential election.
The trio of sites are competing to get young people engaged in the political process online, and companies such as Google and IBM, who are hoping to attract young talent, are taking notice of the stockpiles of “millennial” eyes the sites draw.
Openvote spun out of Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., last spring as a website designed to let users poll college campuses. This summer, Openvote partnered with IBM, which taught the startup’s programmers the Ruby on Rails programming language. For IBM, it was an opportunity to learn how to target millennials, or Generation Y, for itself and its customers, said IBM business development executive Christopher Perrien.
“(Openvote) can teach IBM something, frankly,” Perrien said.
Openvote’s application now resides entirely on Facebook.com, where users can create, vote on and comment on polls with text, photos and video. Using Facebook for the Openvote application allows it to use the social network’s newsfeed feature to create a multiplier effect — the feed drives 95 percent of the application’s traffic, Openvote co-founder Jason Freedman said. Openvote has attracted more than 50,000 votes on more than 1,000 polls, Freedman said.
“That’s the secret sauce of using Facebook,” he said.
Politics dominates about 25 percent of Openvote’s use, Freedman said. He’s talking to both Sen. Barack Obama’s and Sen. John McCain’s campaigns, which could use Openvote on election night to tell members where to vote, for example. The company is using events and outreach to political groups in 22 swing states to achieve a critical mass of users, Freedman said.
Freedman hopes companies will see Openvote as a tool to communicate with college kids. He hasn’t worked out the pricing but plans to make money charging companies for posting targeted advertising messages in the user’s Openvote wall — similar to, but separate from their Facebook wall.
Across the river, in Cambridge, the nonprofit Glassbooth.org has attracted about 2 million unique visitors since launching on election day last year, according to co-founder Ian Manheimer. Glassbooth had considered becoming a for-profit enterprise after the election, but the startup now plans to launch a separate, for-profit version of its candidate-choosing quiz geared toward helping users make better shopping decisions, rather than policy decisions. The new, yet-to-be-named site will feature quizzes matching customers with the best, cheapest products. Manheimer said he expects the site to launch within six months.
“The idea is the same (as Glassbooth)” Manheimer said.
Glassbooth has partnered with a LaCrosse, Wis.-based television station, WKTB, to apply its polling technology to Wisconsin U.S. House and U.S. Senate races. The company has also gone international, launching this week for elections in New Zealand, according to Manheimer. Glassbooth has also partnered with CBS on a mobile phone-based application, and with satellite company Dish Network on a TV-based application.
Nearby, a site started by Harvard University juniors, VoteGopher.com, is looking to become an aggregator of non-partisan election information, according to its COO, Alex Lavoie. The site was redesigned over the summer and now features video, a news blog and a quiz that matches a user’s political views to a particular candidate. The site receives thousands of hits a day from about 100 countries, and traffic is increasing as the election draws closer, Lavoie said.
Lavoie said VoteGopher, which won $10,000 in the 2008 I-3 Harvard College Innovation Challenge, said post-Nov. 4 plans are still being formulated, but the site will likely expand to cover other elections after election day and will cover the job performance of the eventual presidential winner. The site is also reaching out to teachers to use VoteGopher as a teaching tool in the classroom, Lavoie said.
The site, which Lavoie called “sort of” for profit, runs ads, but those bring in just enough to cover costs.
“The goal wasn’t to make money,” he said.
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