Republicans to whip up support with Blackberry app

October 29, 2009 House Minority Whip Eric Cantor

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia speaks on Capitol Hill in June 2009. The Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives unveiled a free application for the Blackberry on Thursday to keep users up to date on the latest in Congress through their cellphones.

The Republican leadership in the US House of Representatives unveiled a free application for the Blackberry on Thursday to keep users up to date on the latest in Congress through their cellphones.

The Blackberry application called "WhipCast" comes slightly more than two weeks after the Republican Party rolled out a new website that embraces the social media tools used by Democrat Barack Obama to win the presidency.

"Whipcast" was launched by Republican representatives Eric Cantor of Virginia and Kevin McCarthy of California.

Cantor and McCarthy are responsible for shepherding legislation through the House in their positions of "whip" and "chief deputy whip" respectively.

"Today's launch of the WhipCast BlackBerry app is the latest demonstration of our commitment to modernize the way we communicate with Americans from coast-to-coast," Cantor said.

"The WhipCast enables the Whip Team to communicate with the public in a faster, smarter, and more effective way," he said.

McCarthy said "WhipCast is more than just the House Republicans gaining technological ground -- it's a new and better way of communicating."

The WhipCast provides news alerts, audio updates, video features, and other content and is the latest attempt by the Republican Party to chip away at the Democrats on the technology and social media front.

Obama relied heavily on the Internet during his presidential campaign for organizing, fundraising and communicating and has created MySpace, Facebook and Flickr pages and a Twitter feed since entering the White House.

Having lost the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives, the Republican Party is gearing up for the 2010 mid-term elections.

Rate this story - 1 /5 (1 vote)

rank
1
2
3
4
5

view popular

Other News

Hackers leak e-mails, stoke climate debate

Technology / Internet

5 hours ago | 4.3 / 5 (12) | 5

(AP) -- Computer hackers have broken into a server at a well-respected climate change research center in Britain and posted hundreds of private e-mails and documents online - stoking debate over whether some scientists have ...

Pulling the plug on hybrid myths

Technology / Energy

Nov 19, 2009 | 3.8 / 5 (12) | 17

(PhysOrg.com) -- Whether you call them myths, urban legends, fables or old wives' tales, there's a lot of misinformation out there about plug-in electric hybrid vehicles. These vehicles, abbreviated PHEVs, ...

UK police make 2 Trojan computer virus arrests

Technology / Internet

Nov 18, 2009 | 5 / 5 (1) | 10

(AP) -- A couple suspected of helping spread some of the Internet's most aggressive computer viruses has been arrested in the English city of Manchester, police said Wednesday.

A sign marks the entrance to IBM Corporate Headquarters

IBM makes Big Blue cloud

Technology / Software

Nov 16, 2009 | 2.9 / 5 (8) | 8

IBM on Monday announced it has created the world's largest business computing "cloud" capable of holding an amount of digital data on a par with 250 billion iTunes songs.

Google's SPDY will speed up downloads

Technology / Internet

Nov 16, 2009 | 4.4 / 5 (16) | 7

(PhysOrg.com) -- As part of its effort to speed up the Web, Google is experimenting with SPDY, a new application layer protocol, that it hopes will speed up the conversation between browsers and Web servers ...