President Barack Obama has been spending considerable time on East-West trade agreements while in Asia, but for one chip maker, the negotiations between China and Taiwan are even more important.

The two countries are slowly moving toward a formalized trade agreement, called the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, or ECFA, that will address how their economies relate to each another. Its first iteration isn’t expected until early 2010, but Taiwan-based tech companies are already hoping to gain entry to China’s massive consumer market.

That’s especially true for Via Technologies, a chip maker running a distant third behind industry heavyweights Intel (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The company, founded in 1987, made a name for itself working on an underdeveloped part of the market: small, low-power chips.

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In yet another repudiation of its predecessor, the Obama administration this week migrated the White House Web site to Drupal, the popular open-source Web site management software. By dumping the Bush administration’s proprietary system and embracing software authored by the community and available to everyone, the consensus holds, the White House embodies the very essence of the new politics.

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No one can accuse President Barack Obama of cozying up to corporate America.

From his denunciations of Wall Street greed to his critiques of the auto manufacturers, Obama and his team have done little to disguise their mistrust of big business–except when it comes to one very large, very influential technology company.

In Google (GOOG), the $22-billion-a-year online-advertising Goliath, Obama appears to have found a corporate kindred spirit.

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President Barack Obama took to the online airwaves Wednesday evening, discussing health-care reform with religious leaders on BlogTalkRadio, a Web radio platform.

The talk, called “40 Minutes for Health Reform,” attracted 140,000 live listeners and more than 153,000 downloads as of 12:45 p.m. EST Thursday, a BlogTalkRadio spokesman said. He said the total audience could be as big as 500,000 in the coming days.

The address follows other online efforts by the administration to get their message out. Last week, it launched “Reality Check,” a section of its site that features videos by White House officials such as Christina Romer and Melody Barnes in which they address rumors and concerns about the health initiatives.

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… After taking a pretty careful look at the tech scene, I think the most promising new startup of 2009 is one of the least likely: The executive branch of the federal government of the United States.

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Late last week, a day before the Federal Communications Commission started to investigate the Google (GOOG) Voice App fiasco, I spoke with the new FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski. He managed to carve out a few minutes from what has been a very busy first month on the job.

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Add online video to the places where the battle over health care is playing out. The White House posted an online response to a video that’s been viewed hundreds of thousands of times since it was linked from the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report linked to a YouTube video posted by Naked Emperor News. Titled “Shock Uncovered: Obama in His Own Words Saying His Health Care Plan Will Eliminate Private Insurance,” it includes clips of comments President Barack Obama has made, such as “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care plan.”

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“I think you are going to see a repeat of Microsoft.” Christine Varney’s blunt assessment sent a buzz through the audience at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. Varney, a partner at Hogan & Hartson and one of the country’s foremost experts in online law, was speaking at the ninth annual conference of the American Antitrust Institute, a gathering of top monopoly attorneys and economists.

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In a speech to the NAACP Thursday night, President Barack Obama exhorted parents to play a more active role in raising and educating their children, including “putting away the Xbox” when it’s bedtime.

“We can’t tell our kids to do well in school and then fail to support them when they get home,” he said. “You can’t just contract out parenting. For our kids to excel, we have to accept our responsibility to help them learn. That means putting away the Xbox–putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour. It means attending those parent-teacher conferences and reading to our children and helping them with their homework.”

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President Barack Obama’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced this morning the launch of an “IT dashboard” that allows people to see how the federal government is spending taxpayer dollars on information technology projects.

Announced at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, the IT dashboard, allows users to view data for various federal agencies, including major investments and dollars spent, as well to view the “health” of projects through graphs comparing planned and actual expenditures.

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The Obama administration has called for a $7.1 billion upgrade of the nation’s broadband Internet system as part of the Recovery Act, but it will be a tall order for the FCC to create a plan that satisfies both telecom companies and broadband advocacy groups.

That was the takeaway message at a panel discussion of the broadband initiative at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York on Monday afternoon. While more and more Americans may be getting broadband Internet service in their homes, monthly service prices are shooting up, leaving broadband advocates worried that low-income users could be left in the virtual dust.

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The historic election of President Barack Obama marked a high point for youth involvement in elections. Now, activists are trying to figure out how to bottle youthful Obamania and transport it to other elections. At a panel discussion of the Personal Democracy Forum, author and youth vote activist Mike Conner said that young voter turnout (18-29 year olds) has increased the last three election cycles – marking the first rise in youth voter turnout since the Reagan era.

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Forget the new cyber security czar position that President Barack Obama announced last week.

The real sign that the White House might be finally taking cyber security seriously came in an announcement on Friday that Jeff Moss, aka “Dark Tangent” and the former hacker behind the annual DefCon hacker confab in Las Vegas, has been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council (HSAC).

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Just what, exactly, are all those Hollywood types getting in return for their investment in Barack Obama’s presidential bid? The Justice Department, a steady ally for the entertainment industry on copyright issues during the Bush administration, today opposed the studios in a potentially precedent-setting dispute with Cablevision over TV recording services.

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Rolling Stone magazine’s break with tradition continues.

Seven months after scrapping its iconic oversized format, the biweekly publication will enter the video game business with the May 26 release of Rolling Stone: Drum King, produced by 505 Games for the Nintendo Wii.

Drum King, a rhythm-action game in the same vein as Guitar Hero, is part of an effort by the biweekly magazine to hitch its brand to a growing medium at a time when print is contracting. In the first quarter magazines tracked by Publishers Information Bureau sold nearly 26 percent fewer ad pages than the same period last year. Rolling Stone’s pages fell 22.5 percent for the period.

Lately the Wenner Media title has been pushing its name elsewhere to offset declines in revenue from the magazine. After Barack Obama was elected, the publisher sold some 300,000 “bookazines,” glossy compilations of its coverage of the Presidential race, at $9.95 apiece.

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