If you put yourself out there for a band or a cause, you should get something for it. And Steve Martocci has the technology to make that happen. The Sympact CEO has developed personalized email platforms that will allow bands – and nonprofit organizations – the ability to identify and reward their most faithful and generous advocates, perhaps by moving them to the front of the ticket line. Martocci is also a longtime friend of The Disco Biscuits, for whom he has developed an elegantly simple program for writing setlists.

Martocci, who grew up on Long Island, attended Carnegie Mellon University. While working for Cadence Video, he helped produce the Biscuits Progressions DVD and developed value-added merchandise. Martocci launched Sympact (as in "sympathetic impact") in 2006 with an online version of the Lance Armstrong-style charity bracelet. Using this widget, which could be embedded into an email signature or into any website, donors could track how much money had been donated to a charity and read up-to-the minute news. Sympact expanded this into a dynamic Flash technology that could target interested recipients through location and other characteristics. His company has developed dynamic email solutions for Starbucks, Thrillist, and 1-800-FLOWERS. Martocci's main passion, of course, remained music, and you can see his most recent work on the pre-order page for The Disco Biscuits' upcoming Planet Anthem album. (That's Steve and the Biscuits' Marc Brownstein sweating out a Caribbean Holidaze setlist.)

HeadCount: How did you start adapting your email personalization tech to our HeadCount partners through your Bandwith ticket-allocation technology?

Steve Martocci: Dan Berkowitz contacted me about about doing friends-and-family ticketing for the Grateful Dead. Ever since college I’ve had this vision of building a platform for rewarding fan contributions that would really let the band know who their biggest contributors were in terms of both money and time. This would allow the band to allot tickets and music to their biggest supporters, the people who helped grow their band from the bottom up. Read more »

Dating back to HeadCount’s 2004 launch, we viewed the organization’s ultimate purpose as stretching well beyond voter registration. Our very first action plan called for HeadCount to serve as a “grassroots organizing arm of the live music community.” Our purpose, in the broadest sense, was to foster civic participation among fans of live music and to create an “infrastructure for action.” These are words I remember writing with great anticipation six years ago.

Now, with the launch of two initiatives - Bisco Power Mission and our Best of Bonnaroo climate change campaign (more info next week) – a key part of that vision is becoming reality.

Bisco Power Mission, specifically, is a model for the sort of activity we’d like to share with other bands or organizations. It all starts with a simple question: “What do you believe in?” For members of The Disco Biscuits, one answer is clean and sustainable energy. So HeadCount conceived, organized, and executed a plan with the band to fund a solar panel installation at a Philadelphia public school. We’ll do this by staging a special benefit concert on March 21 at Brooklyn Bowl, the nation’s largest LEED Certified (environmentally friendly) concert venue.

From the early planning stages right up to today’s official announcement, this has epitomized what we envisioned when we envisioned serving as the grassroots organizing arm of the live-music community. First we got a group of Biscuits fans together to work on the project. That group included several skilled artists, some experts on solar and sustainable energy, and a bunch of other really smart, creative people. Then we collectively created an application procedure for potential BPM grant recipients and figured out how to attract applicants. The band was heavily involved in this process. All four members participated in multiple conference calls and reached out to friends and family in search of a school to work with. Read more »

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes...the ones who see things differently – they're not fond of rules."

So sayeth Steve Jobs, the innovator affectionately parodied in this terrific video preview for this summer's High Sierra Music Festival taking place July 1-4 in Quincy, California.

High Sierra producer Dave Margulies dons Jobs's iconic black long-sleeved T-shirt tucked into his jeans to introduce the iSierra. "Do you want soul-shaking, politically informed afrobeat? There's an act for that," says Margulies, running down Femi Kuti & The Positive Force, the Avett Brothers, Railroad Earth, and Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe, some of the more than 50 acts performing at iSierra.

“And did I mention real bathrooms and hot showers?” he concludes.

As part of HeadCount’s “What’s Your Issue?” campaign, we publish regular updates on each of six issues. The following is our latest Personal Liberty update.

What does the New Year have in store for personal liberty issues?

So far, we've seen the approval of an airport security measure that not only wants to see you naked, but can keep the picture and send it electronically. Google won't be G-chatting with China at the moment and unfortunately for Willie Nelson, smoking pot is still against the law.

* A landmark decision by the Supreme Court has some cheering free speech and others waving goodbye to campaign finance reform. The Supreme Court's decision to allow corporations to spend freely in political campaigns has overturned nearly a century of policies prohibiting such spending. Interestingly, the decision claims that corporations and special interests have the same right to free speech as any other American, putting the U.S. Constitution in the way of any reforms congress may want to make. Think of the saying, "put your money where your mouth is." The difference is corporations have much bigger mouths.

* Google is one company that is certainly putting its money where its mouth is. After Chinese hackers tried to access the Gmail accounts of human rights activists working in China, Google decided to stop censoring search engine results on Google.cn and possibly pull out of China entirely. It's a move that makes a strong free speech statement at the expense of possibly losing the largest cell phone market in the world and harming ties between the U.S. and China. Read more »

We're all about music interacting with politics but this is ridiculous.

Rapper Sky Blu of rap group LMFAO takes to YouTube to explain his side the Air Canada altercation with Mitt Romney that galvanized America. It's cool that Skyler Gordy – grandson of Motown founder Barry Gordy! – took six minutes out of his day to wake up and address the issue in his hotel room. Wearing red and white briefs. Good career move, too.

According to drummer Dave Brogan, ALO's music is their politics. And that personal-is-political sensibility comes through loud and clear on the group's fourth album, Man of the World. Produced by ALO friend Jack Johnson, Man of the World is an tuneful reckoning with changing lives in a changing world. An uncertain nostalgia wends through "The Country Electro," which suggests balancing the old and the new. Likewise, "Let's put away the past and let the future set us free," sings drummer Dave Brogan in "Put Away the Past." Recorded mostly in loose-limbed first takes after a three-year-break between albums, Man of the World reflects a refreshed band ready to roll into the future.

We spoke with Dave as he took a break from loading the truck for ALO's annual California tour, folowing which they'll head north with Galactic.

HeadCount: Would you say Man of the World has a theme?

Dave Brogan: I would. There’s a lot of questioning going on in the lyrics. The characters are looking at their lives in a different way for the first time. They're wondering what in the past has led up to this point, and how they might move forward. There are a lot of story lyrics. It’s an introspective, soul-searching kind of album, lyrically. We’re all getting a little older, so maybe it’s a midlife-crisis album. I wrote “Put Away the Past,” which is representative of what I was just talking about. The lyrics are usually written by one of us for music we compose collectively. Beginning with our prior album, we've been taking the best parts of our jams and fleshing them out into songs.

What political or social causes does ALO support?

I think most bands are political by definition. Every band has a platform. It might be an artistic or musical platform, but you're usually putting a belief system out there and trying to get like-minded people to join you and create a strength-in-numbers situation. So I think our music alone is kind of a political statement. Read more »

Even as the snow-topped peaks of beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia melt before our eyes during the Winter Olympics, the coal industry wants to remind us how important "clean coal" is for creating affordable energy and future jobs.

The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) is running TV ads during the games to champion coal as an abundant and affordable solution to America's clean-energy needs. As one blogger notes:

The ad campaign talks about all of the investments that the coal industry has made to produce ever cleaner electricity from coal, it talks about the 200 year supply of the material (at current consumption rates), and it talks about the fact that coal provides half of all electricity used in America. The intended effect is clear: while Americans are rooting for their favorites in winter sports where we are often underdogs or "also rans", we can root for an energy choice where America is a recognized world leader; we are the world's best endowed country when it comes to coal.

The ACCCE has spent millions of dollars lobbying for the fossil fuel industry. It's fighting tooth and nail to prevent any climate change bill containing greenhouse gas emission mandates from passing through either chamber of Congress, as well as supporting any legislation funding carbon capture-and-storage programs. The group has also spent millions on clean-coal PR campaigns that have successfully changed public opinion regarding climate change and coal's effect on the environment. Read more »

The mushroom world couldn't have a better friend than Paul Stamets – and I assure you the feeling is mutual.

Stamets has been growing and studying fungi for about three decades. His family-run company, Fungi Perfecti, is the country's leading Certified Organic source for gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. But Stamets believes that fungi is more than a great source of food and health. In his most recent book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, Stamets argues that mycelium, the cellular web from which mushrooms emerge, forms nature's neurological network – its very own Internet. And with creditable scientists more than a little concerned about the ecological sustainability of our relationship to the planet, Stamets argues that mushrooms, fungi, and mycelia can be used to break down toxic wastes, deliver new medicines, and, most important, restore nature's equiblibrium by filtering water, reforesting landscapes, and enhancing our gardens.

How? Stamets, who already holds many patents in the field, has come up with a remarkably elegant solution. The Life Box is nothing more – nor less – than a cardboard box containing some 100 various tree seeds. These have been dusted with mycorrhizal fungal spores that symbiotically "protect and nurture" the seedlings. Instead of simply recycling the box, which you could also do, Stamets wants you to soak it, sprout its seedlings, and then replant them someplace where they can flourish and grow into mycelium-friendly forests. The competitively priced Life Box can also, of course. be used to hold or ship anything we already use cardboard boxes for.

The whole concept is so simple, you'd almost think the mushrooms wanted Paul Stamets to invent the Life Box. And perhaps they do.

HeadCount: So tell me the Life Box story. How did bring this brilliant idea to fruition?

Paul Stamets: It's been in development for more than twelve years, but I’ve been growing mycelium on cardboard for much longer. My books contain a lot of great photographs showing how fungal friendly cardboard is. Dusty, my wife, mulches the garden over cardboard, and we had a fabulous fruiting of mushrooms with it. So it dawned on me that we all have too many cardboard boxes in our lives and, because I know cardboard is fungally friendly, I started playing around and combining it with different vegetables and other plants. I used a mangler, which is this giant ironing board with a big cylinder rotator that can take off your fingers, to glue together cardboard sheets with seeds, spores, and fungi in the middle. The beginning was a comedy of errors. Read more »

"Hey," you may be asking yourself. "Where's the United States on this National Geographic graph comparing health care spending per person and average life expectancy at birth?"

See way up there in the upper left corner? That's the US, spending $7,290 per person, each of whom lives about 78 years – less than just about any country in the Western world. And not even getting that many trips to doctor to show for it.

But that's how it goes when your country's one of the world's few developed nations without universal health coverage. (And look out below, Mexico.)

The United States spends more on medical care per person than any country, yet life expectancy is shorter than in most other developed nations and many developing ones. Lack of health insurance is a factor in life span and contributes to an estimated 45,000 deaths a year. Why the high cost? The U.S. has a fee-for-service system—paying medical providers piecemeal for appointments, surgery, and the like. That can lead to unneeded treatment that doesn’t reliably improve a patient’s health. Says Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies health insurance worldwide, “More care does not necessarily mean better care.” —Michelle Andrews

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Although it would drive us insane to be completely conscious of it, our daily lives are saturated with countless advertisements and brand interactions. It's a corporate world, as a majority of the Supreme Court reminded us recently when it decided that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to making political contributions – only with more money!

Which is why this short film made by Keiichi Matsuda for his postgraduate architecture degree should both thrill and horrify you. Matsuda makes explicit what is usually implicit. Namely, that as consumers we are merely part of an extremely complex matrix. And that when technology inevitably makes computerlike eyewear available to us at a price you can afford, the world will look a lot like this hyperreal meeting of "The Girl From Ipanema" and Robocop in the kitchen of the future.

See you at the virtual show, dude.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.