Rob PegoraroLast week featured my first trip to cover Google I/O since 2019. It was great to spend a few days in a pleasant part of the Bay Area, and it was outright lovely to catch up with tech-journalism friends that I had not seen IRL since four or five years ago.
Another good part of this trip, as noted earlier for Patreon members: staying in the same Airbnb room that I’d booked in 2018 and 2019.
5/14/2024: T-Mobile’s Metro Adds Flex Plans With Free Phone Upgrades, Amazon Prime, PCMag
By taking up T-Mobile on its offer of a conversation last Friday with Jon Freier, president of the company’s consumer group, about this embargoed news from one of its prepaid brands, I was able to have this story filed by Monday evening instead of having to write it in the middle of I/O.
5/14/2024: Google Play Upgrades Allow Developers to Know if Your Phone’s Been Hacked, PCMag
My editors thought that the phone-malware angle of this story about an array of Google Play updates would be most interesting to readers, and I think they were right.
5/14/2024: Putting Gemini to the Test: First Look at Google’s Project Astra, PCMag
The hands-on reporting for this piece from the AI Sandbox exhibit at I/O involved my feet (in the form of a penalty-kick challenge graded by a version of Google’s Gemini family of AI tools), and my fingers (which I used to draw a map of D.C. that included the Anacostia River, a cartographic detail that apparently confounded Google’s Project Astra AI assistant).
5/15/2024: Uber App Adds Features for Caregivers, AARP
Uber offered me an advance on this story, and then I broadened my reporting beyond its embargoed press release by interviewing my Georgetown Voice friend Kate Washington, author of the brilliant Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America.
5/15/2024: Google Takes a Page From Apple With Android Theft Protection, PCMag
Jet lag helped me write this piece, in the form of my waking up annoyingly early Wednesday and therefore giving me a couple of hours of uninterrupted (but uncaffeinated) time to write the thing.
#AISandbox #AndroidTheftProtection #caregivers #GoogleGemini #GoogleIO #GooglePlay #IO #KateWashington #MetroByTMobile #onDeviceAI #ProjectAstra #stolenPhone #stolenPhonePasscode #subsidizedPhones
