Obama Names His Right-Hand Geek

The White House attempted to shed at least some light on the role in a recent memo published in the Federal Register, explaining that the CTO, the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Administrator of General Services will make recommendations for an "open government directive" within 120 days of the tech chief's appointment.

The directive, which will lay the foundations for making information more readily available to the public, will be issued by the director of the OMB, according to Obama's note.

U.S. tech firms are also keen to see how the CTO will help their businesses by boosting the country's Internet infrastructure.

"I would like to see Obama's CTO focus their attention on increasing the upload capacity of broadband links," Ethan Oberman, CEO of cloud storage company Spider Oak told TheStreet.com. "That would be very helpful to companies like us because it would allow data uploads to occur with much greater speeds."