Obama pitches youth, technology at Google, SF events

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(11-15) 10:18 Pacific Time Mountain Position --
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, buoyed by new polls and what his political campaign sees as growing momentum, highlighted his claim as the generational "change candidate" of the 2008 presidential race on Wednesday by telling a vernal crowd at Google Inc. that "if I waited 10 old age (to run), I'd still be little than most of the other candidates."

"So much is at interest that running for president can't be about just aspiration this time," he told an audience of about 1,000 jammed into an auditorium at Google's Mountain Position campus.

"We have got seen a gridlock where 45 percentage of the state is on one side, 45 percentage of the state is on the other ... (and) political competitions just go whipping down the other side and eking out a victory. And you can't govern," said the 46-year-old first-term senator.

Obama have criticized Democratic front-runner Sen. Edmund Hillary Rodham Bill Clinton of New House Of York as a member of the American Capital constitution that have helped make political deadlock on issues from in-migration to wellness care. He continued that subject Wednesday without naming her, saying, "Washington have been governed by ... who's got the most juice, who's got the most clout - and that have to change."

Obama is the up-to-the-minute 2008 presidential campaigner to utilize Google as a background for a high-tech town hall. Unlike the traditional, more than predictable such as assemblages in the small, early competition states of Ioway and New Hampshire, campaigners at Google human face a immature crowd armed with detailed, sometimes far-out questions.

Democrats Clinton, former North Carolina Sen. Toilet Jonathan Edwards and New United Mexican States Gov. Bill Henry Hobson Richardson and Republicans Sen. Toilet McCain of Grand Canyon State and Lone-Star State Rep. Bokkos Alice Paul visited Google earlier this year, though Obama's crowd was the biggest and most vocally supportive to date.

Obama used his Silicon Valley visit Wednesday - presided over by Google Head Executive Military Officer Eric Helmut Schmidt with the company's laminitises Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the audience - to advance his five-point "innovation agenda."

Later, Obama was in his component Wednesday nighttime when he pulled into San Francisco's Bill Billy Graham Civic Auditorium for a political campaign rally. Thousands of people, most of them young, stood in a line that snaked around the building, waiting to acquire in for a expression at the candidate.

By the clip writer Alice John Walker introduced Obama, the crowd of about 6,000 - the biggest to come up to one of his "change" mass meetings - was roaring.

Obama said small new in his 30-minute speech, but it didn't do a difference to his backers. They cheered every promise he made and every smack he took at President Shrub and the Republicans. The crowd also exploded when he took on Bill Clinton without saying her name, saying that he wasn't running for president "to carry through some long-held plan or because I believe it's owed to me."

"We necessitate to concentrate not just on how we can win, but on why we should win," Obama said.

Obama's angels left the hallway buzzing about his appearance.

"He was really inspiring," said Alice Paul Touris of San Francisco. "He's sincere and definitely talking about the alterations I desire to see happen."

In small more than than 24 hours in the Bay Area, the Prairie State senator also hit four major fundraisers: two Tuesday events in San Francisco, a Wednesday morning time halt in Marin County, and - prior to his mass meeting - a political party for 300 supporters, most of whom donated the upper limit $2,300 to the primary and general election campaign, in the Atherton place of former state Accountant Steve Westly.

Obama answered inquiries at Google about the warfare in Republic Of Iraq and his policy positions toward Iran, and addressed what he termed cardinal differences between himself and his Democratic rivals.

While he said he appreciated President Bill Clinton's ultimately unsuccessful attempt at wellness attention reform in 1993, Obama said his work on the issue will be unfastened rather than developed behind closed doors. He pledged to have got "a large table" with consumers, unions, wellness attention suppliers and pharmaceutical houses weighing in to happen solutions to the issues of rising wellness attention costs and growing Numbers of uninsured.

The senator said his attempt to attain a wellness attention reform program would be so unfastened "it will all be on C-SPAN." And if onslaught advertisements from oppositions start, as they did during Clinton's failing effort, "I'll direct out something on YouTube," he said to cheers from the crowd at Google, which have YouTube. "And (I'll) allow them cognize what the facts are."

Making deft usage of a inquiry about what he have learned from the political successes of former President Clinton, who is tremendously popular among Democrats, Obama appeared to utilize the minute to dig, however gently, at the style of the former first lady.

"One of the things Bill Bill Clinton did was to acknowledge the moment," he said. "He came in and he said, 'You cognize what, I'm a different sort of Democrat and I'm willing to make things in new ways.' "

Now, "we are in this defining minute and we can't maintain doing the same things that we have got got been doing, but haven't been working," he said. "Democrats lose when they are not clear about what they stand up for. Democrats lose when they are attacked, and - because they don't cognize where they stand up - they stop up getting defensive instead of going on the offensive."

Obama political campaign insiders said Wednesday that recent polls and events such as as the senator's well-received speech last weekend in Ioway have got created a displacement that have electrified his protagonists - and boosted his fundraising with everyone pointing toward the gap competition Jan. Three in Iowa.

"The stone star material is back," said Obama's Golden State political campaign manager R. J. Mitchell Schwartz. "We have got the wind at our dorsum ... and it's a different ballgame."

"It was difficult to raise money a calendar month ago," said Westly, noting that the mass media was then talking up Edmund Hillary Clinton's "inevitability" and the New House Of York senator appeared to be making a flawless tally toward the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

But after Bill Clinton stumbled recently in a argument over the issue of illegal immigration, and Obama's address at the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa, "it's been the easiest thing I've ever raised money for," Westly said.

Obama, Bill Bill Clinton and Jonathan Edwards are tightly bunched in public sentiment polls of Ioway Democrats, and Obama have almost halved Clinton's once 20-point lead in polls of expected primary electors in New Hampshire, the 2nd major contest.

Westly said Bill Clinton have increasingly appeared "off her balance," while Jonathan Edwards have gone on a crisp onslaught and Obama have remained "the statesman." Just as electors are beginning to take a expression at the White Person House race in earnest, they are seeing Obama as "the campaigner of change," he said

Obama's decision, however, to tout his "innovation agenda" at Google on Wednesday repeated many of the engineering friendly proposals made earlier by the other Democratic candidates.

Clinton, appearing before the Silicon Valley Leadership Group in June, also proposed an "innovation agenda" including a $50 billion strategical energy monetary monetary fund to develop research on planetary heating - a proposal similar to Obama's phone call for $50 billion in federal finances for a "clean technology" venture working capital fund.

Edwards, too, had used events in Silicon Valley to name for increasing the figure of H-1B visas for highly trained technical foreign workers, more than authorities support of broadband access, and extension of research and development taxation credits.

On Wednesday, Obama proposed creating a national "chief engineering officer" place charged with making authorities more crystalline and accessible to citizens on the Internet. The senator also proposed a "Google for Government" attempt which he said would supply more than Web handiness to authorities records, and called for unrecorded feeds and Webcasts of authorities meetings and public commentary on its work via the Internet.

That proposal isn't groundbreaking in government: For example, California's Republican Gov. Matthew Arnold Schwarzenegger have offered unrecorded feeds and Webcasts of many of his events for years.

Chronicle staff author Toilet Wildermuth contributed to this report. E-mail Carla Marinucci at .

I, Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone

Mountain View, Calif.

A retinene scanner emitting a bluish freshness monitoring devices the entranceway to Andy Rubin's place in the foothills overlooking Silicon Valley. If the scanner acknowledges you, the door unlocks automatically. (The system do it easier to cover with former girlfriends, Mr. Rubin wishes to joke. No messy scenes retrieving keys — it's just a simple database update.)

Those forced to utilize the buzzer are greeted with another technological marvel: a robotic arm inside the glass anteroom clasps a mallet and then hits a big gong. Although Mr. Rubin won't uncover its cost, it may be one of the world's most expensive doorbells.

"It's not about the cost," said Zarko Draganic, a former co-worker of Mr. Rubin's at "It's the classic Rubin thing: You make it for the interest of doing it and because it's cool, and as a consequence there's a childlike artlessness about it."

Mr. Rubin is one of the primary designers behind another merchandise that also thwacks of possible über-coolness — the Phone. As Google's "director of mobile platforms," Mr. Rubin supervises tons of applied scientists who are developing the software system at the company's sprawled campus here. The software system incarnates the promise of extending Google's range at a clip when cellphones let consumers to increasingly untether themselves from their desktop computers, as well as the menace that greater digital mobility presents to Google's domination of Internet search.

The Google Telephone — which, according to respective reports, will be made by Google spouses and will be available by the center of 2008 — is likely to supply a blunt direct contrast to the attacks of both and to the growth marketplace for smartphones. Google, according to respective people with direct cognition of its efforts, will give away its software system system to hand-set makers and then utilize the Google Phone's openness as an invitation for software developers and content distributers to plan applications for it.

If the attempt succeeds, it will be the most drastic challenge to day of the month of the averment by Microsoft — the godfather of the desktop personal computing machine — that Google and other members of the so-called open-source global can copy but not innovate.

And as the cellphone morphs additional into a mobile personal computer, a new software system criterion is likely pickings shape. Whoever takes the Pb in this marketplace may go a technological doorkeeper wielding the same power, and reaping the same profits, that Microsoft makes through its Windows operating system.

As the industry shifts, Google doesn't desire to fall behind, and the Google Telephone reflects its command to stay at the centre of things. It bes after to do that, industry executive directors said, by offering free mobile software system system and then presumably cashing in by providing a bill of fare of services linked to those products, like e-mail, photos, news and other services.

"Instead of making money on software, you have got person who is saying they're trying to make their money on services," said Michael Kleeman, a engineering strategian at the Golden State Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University of Golden State at San Diego. "The interesting inquiry is whether the bearers will authorise the Google hand-sets on their networks."

ALL of these developments and uncertainnesses underline why visitants to Mr. Rubin's business office here acquire an contiguous sense of his project's importance for Google. Large marks in the corridors leading to his research lab warn that lone employees are allowed to pass.

The company declines to notice on the Google Phone, but Mr. Rubin's responsibilities, as well as recent leaks from the as-yet-unannounced confederation that Google is edifice to develop the software, bespeak that the company programs to make more than than merely develop an operating system for cellular phones: it bes after to musculus its manner into the centre of the concern at a clip when people worldwide are searching the Web from just about anywhere they go on to be.

Consumers are using smartphones to happen directions, ran into their friends and turn up nearby stores, eating houses and film theaters. That simple concern and cultural displacement have touched off an information-age gold rush, as Google, its hunt competitors, hand-set makers and cellphone operators all attempt to interest their claims to the mobile Web.

Already this year, Apple have redefined what people anticipate from a cellphone by introducing the , just as it did previously with its Mackintosh computer. Microsoft is making advancement as well, projecting that 20 million telephones will be sold with its Windows Mobile River software system next year. , , and a figure of other hand-set shapers are fashioning ever more than datacentric phones.

With these conflict lines drawn, Google is placing its mobile stakes in the custody of Mr. Rubin, 44, an applied scientist who have proved expert at designing the highly incorporate hardware and software system ensembles that are the trademarks of Silicon Valley companies. 1