Rain Rain Go Away

After the wonderful day that we had yesterday I had high expectations for today. I was sadly mistaken. I woke up this morning to gray skies, pouring rain, and possible flooding. Walking to The Washington Center I almost fell several times and there was not a Starbucks in sight, which is strange because it seems that when I am not looking for one, they are on every single block. 

Our first stop was to TechAmerica, which is a trade association that represents the IT industry. Jason Langsner, Vice President of Marketing, and Charlie Greenwald, Vice President of Communication greeted several of us, while we waited for the others to arrive. I’ve noticed a common theme among many of the people we have talked with over the last several days—they are young, savvy, and incredibly knowledgeable. At TechAmerica I learned and began to understand what exactly a trade association does, however it was hard to comprehend everything that Jason was saying because he was talking a million miles an hour.

It was interesting to learn that there are so few people actually representing such a large industry. At TechAmerica they have a budget around $30 million a year and a small number of employees. This forces each employee to have a greater number of roles and to be able to perform a variety of tasks. While it should not have been surprising that Jason agreed that all press is good press because TechAmerica is such a small company, I was still a little taken back by his statement.

I was interested by Jason’s comments about how they try not to demonize technology. He gave the examples of how there was controversy regarding the implanting of chips in people and how they lobbied for it because laws were already in place preventing that from happening. Furthermore, he gave the example of how they lobbied against placing warning labels on the packaging of cell phones that indicated that the cell phone would cause cancer. When Jason gave this example I wanted to ask him more questions about why he did this when there has been new research that has recently been conducted that shows that radiation emitted from cell phones has been linked to brain cancer. As we finished our discussion I was impressed by how much influence TechAmerica has on IT legislation. 

After lunch at The National Press Club we went to mCapitol Management, a private lobbying firm. Overall, we got great advice about our future, but we were not given much information about their firm or what they did. We did not need to ask questions because they were apprehensive about talking about their clients, most likely this was due to the fact that they are a private firm.

The best part of the day was Smith and Wollensky for dinner and taking home our delicious leftovers.