3 Companies That Are Making Politics Cool Again High-tech political junkies are finding new ways to reach voters.

On occasion, we are reminded that politics can be cool--take, for example, MTV's Rock the Vote campaign. But these days, cool is about more than the youth vote--it's about technology. At this year's South by Southwest (SXSW) conference, Al Gore and Sean Parker took to the stage to discuss how the internet is at long last having a quantifiable impact on the political process. Parker even referred to this year's web-driven mass protests of the controversial SOPA and PIPA internet piracy acts as the "Nerd Spring."

"Politics has lagged because it was all about door-knocking and handshaking, but lawn signs and bumper stickers won't do it anymore," says Lou Aronson, founder and CEO of Washington, D.C.-based mobile polling and social networking company Votifi. "And the sooner we start recognizing the power of data, the faster we can unlock our potential as a nation." Here's a look at what he and some fellow high-tech political junkies are up to.