Amid all the announcements, hype and “location wars”, this is my favorite observation from this year’s SXSW Interactive festival in Austin, TX.  From CNN:

These aren’t your father’s CEOs

If there was a pinstripe suit in Austin this week, we didn’t see it.

The movers and shakers of the online world are young, casual and come at business from a different angle than their Wall Street forbearers (a fact not lost on SXSW Web Awards host Doug Benson, who joked that acceptance speeches would all be short because the winners weren’t used to being out of their basements).

But there’s nothing like seeing tech’s youthful leaders for yourself — and all in one place.

Once you’ve watched a company founder tossing fuzzy dice into a crowd of screaming fans or doing the backstroke on the floor of the Hilton lobby at 2 a.m., you won’t think of “CEO” the same way ever again.

Microsoft‘s recent bid to acquire Yahoo!, I was looking around to find out where the anti-Microsoft folks from 1998 have ended up. They were witnesses, journalists, economists, congressmen, etc. One was Ed Felten, a professor at Princeton. He has a blog (“Freedom to Tinker“). And he found something interesting recently.

He found two sets of unattended, electronic voting machines at Princeton. It is well documented that these machines can be tinkered with to affect the vote outcome. Proponents of the machines assure they are always well-protected to prevent this from happening. Apparently, not so much.

The default choice for immediate election results is usually CNN, the ever-flashy FOX News, or a website with real-time data. But, who knew the guys over Google Maps have been making their own mashup?

Google Maps has created live primary results by county for Iowa, New Hampshire and Florida! How much more exciting can your election headquarters experience be? Screw Wolf’s New TeeVee. Make your own at home.

Very cool technology that also works in Google Earth. When overlayed with census or GIS data, you can draw some interesting (and valuable!) information about how the election was won.