14 DAY TRIAL // Donations to presidential candidates' campaigns have been all over the news in the past months, sums reaching an all-time high online in January, when Illinois Senator Barack Obama was sent 28 million dollars over the Internet. The big names in the web industry, such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, have all joined the race and chose sides. Not up front, that would be an unpardonable mistake in case their candidate didn't win, but its employees have also donated and after polls and measurements have been conducted, you get to know who likes who.
According to Sarah Lai Stirland from Wired's Threat Level, Microsoft went for Hilary Clinton, as the people working at the Redmond-based company donated somewhere around $130,000 to aid her cause, while leaving the other candidates the breadcrumbs from the former-president-with-a-credibility-problem wife's table. That, by the way, is the largest sum donated to a single candidate from one of the three giant corporations mentioned above.
Google chose Barack Obama and pitched in $97,771 for his campaign, while Hilary only got $46,610 out of the Googlers' pockets. That was to be expected, I suppose, as the Illinois Senator was the best received at the Googleplex back in November. That and he's the most tech-savvy of the two and won the engineers there by answering a question asked by CEO Eric Schmidt. To be honest, he did not answer it per se: when asked for the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers, he just excluded the worst variant, namely bubble sort. "You answered the question correctly," Schmidt smiled. I guess it would be best to leave in the shade the fact that bubble sort is one of the first methods of sorting invented and, thus, closer to the time he was studying.
Yahoo!, according to the same source, chose Obama by two thirds, but unfortunately no number was mentioned.
Republicans received few support from the tech sector, the most notable being libertarian Ron Paul, who brought in over $104 grand from the workers in Silicon Valley.