ANN ARBOR ? Michigan businessman Rick Snyder, one of several Republican candidates running for Michigan Governor, says he is using his high-tech background to “leverage technology better than President Obama did in the 2008 elections.”

Snyder, who is running in the Republican primary in August 2010, has created Rick?s Innovation Network ? an open source platform that encourages software developers to build a better database and tools to reach out through technology to likely Republican voters, as well as the huge base of independents and Democrats he thinks could be attracted to his standard.

He beta tested his new Innovation Network in late September on Mackinac Island during the Republican Party’s conference ? and garnered 31 percent of the votes in a straw poll, good enough to finish first in a field of five.

Snyder, an Ann Arbor Venture Capitalist, and former CEO of Gateway Computers, is a newcomer to the political scene. So far, he has been in the low single digits in polls of likely Republican voters. To help change that, he brought hundreds of supporters to the Mackinac conference, adorned in neon green T-shirts bearing his “Rick for Michigan” logo, to test his new technology.

“On Mackinac Island, we let people use their cell phone cameras to register for events around the island and see who does what and when they did it,” Snyder said in an interview with MITechNews.Com.

“We have a good opportunity to take if from there,” he said. “A lot of the get-out-the-vote campaigns are manually intensive. We’ll continue to develop off the core database, by logging in information through cell phones and laptops. The Network will be accessed through PCs and phones so we can look at high level metrics and see how we?re doing.”

John Patrick Yob, CEO of Strategic National Campaign Management of Grand Rapids, who is serving as Snyder’s senior advisor, said the technology tested on Mackinac Island “has never been used in a political campaign before and helped lead us to a dramatic victory in the straw poll.”

He added: “Rick is putting his emphasis and ability on building the strongest online organizational capacity of any candidate who has run in Michigan, and quite possibly across the country.”

Yob was the primary national political director for former Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain and also ran both of current Michigan Secretary of State Terry Land’s campaigns. He also is advising former University of Michigan and National Football League star Jay Riemersma, a Republican candidate for Michigan’s 2nd Congressional District along the West Coast of the state.

Also working behind the scenes building the technology is Josh Gelen of RightAngle Campaigns of Arlington, Va. Gelen said the open source platform uses a combination of Customer Relationship Management and Customer Management software as a basis for keeping field representatives up to speed on what conversations have been held with perspective voters to help identify first if they are likely to vote for Snyder, and second whether they actually did on election day.

“The challenge for us is to determine which pieces work best together,” Gelen said.

And once this sophisticated computer network is ready to launch, in six to eight weeks, it will be used to thoroughly organize the state’s 6000 precincts and 83 counties well before the August primaries.

“We know how many voters we need,” Yob said. “The technology’s job is to turn them out to vote, whether that is through text messaging, emails, phone calls or just plain door-to-door canvassing. We believe we are light years ahead of all the other campaigns, and I’m confident Rick will have the most innovative campaign in Michigan history.?

For more information, click on RickForMichigan.Com

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