Weekly output: LocalSend, Mark Vena podcast, AST SpaceMobile launch

I hope you all are enjoying the liminal time between Christmas and New Year’s–or, as I’ve come to think of it over the last 25-plus years, my last moments of occupational tranquility before work returns with force in the form of CES.

(I’ve used some of that semi-idle time to write an extra post for Patreon readers about the free trips that I didn’t take in the last quarter of this year.)

12/22/2025: This Free App Makes Transferring Files Between Devices Ridiculously Easy, PCMag

Quizzing LocalSend’s developer via e-mail taught me a lesson in how namespaces and nations can mix. As in: He goes by Tien Do Nam, in Vietnam last names come first, he lives in Berlin, so I thought to ask for his surname. He replied that the correct full name is Do Nam Tien, while his German documents list him as Tien Do Nam.

12/24/2025: Ep 117 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Trump’s impact on tech, AI data centers and energy, FCC and Google, Mark Vena

As the token Washingtonian on this podcast, I took up the first item on the agenda. My take on President Trump’s tech policy wasn’t all bad–it looks like the government is in line to save tens of billions of dollars in broadband-buildout costs, assuming that Amazon Leo satellite broadband comes online on schedule–but I can’t call it anything close to good overall.

12/24/2025: AST SpaceMobile Launches Its Most Powerful Direct-to-Cell Satellite Yet, PCMag

Was I going to use this post as an opportunity to remind PCMag readers about India’s impressive spaceflight ambitions? Absolutely.

#AirDrop #ASTSpaceMobile #BEAD #BlueBird #broadbandBuildout #D2D #directToDevice #directToCell #IndiaSpaceProgram #LocalSend #lowEarthOrbitBroadband #LVM3 #MarkVena #QuickShare #satelliteBroadband #Starlink #TienDoNam

Weekly output: AI data centers, Stasi Museum, Sneakers, Brendan Carr on censorship, Mark Vena podcast

After a week at home, I’m back on a plane early Monday morning for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. That company is covering my airfare and lodging, its usual arrangement for the event it hosts at a high-end resort, and I’ll include a disclosure about that in all the copy I file about the summit.

In other business-travel news, Patreon readers got a bonus post this week from a trip that they helped underwrite: a recap of the Online News Association’s conference in New Orleans.

9/15/2025: AI’s Dirty Secret Lies in Fossil Fuels Powering the Future of Artificial Intelligence, Worth

I missed this story when it was published because (ahem…) an editor spelled my last name wrong in the byline, leading to it not showing up on my author page. But anyway: Even if you’re as late to discovering this online as I was, I encourage you to read it and remember two questions to ask about any new data-center project: Will its electricity come from burning polluting fossil fuels, and are its owners paying for new generation capacity to avoid stressing the existing power grid?

9/15/2025: Berlin’s Stasi Museum Offers Uncomfortable Lessons About Surveillance, State Coercion, PCMag

Even though my previous visit in 2018 happened with the same president in the White House, the museum’s exhibits hit in a much different way this time.

9/16/2025: Why the Robert Redford Classic ‘Sneakers’ Is a Favorite in Cybersecurity Circles, PCMag

I had borrowed a DVD of this 1992 flick from my local library in March, which turned out to be good timing for the piece that I realized I needed to write the day after Redford’s death.

9/19/2025: The FCC Chairman Was Against Censorship Before He Was for It, PCMag

As I’ve written more than once here before, I hate abuse of power, and the chance to call it out gets me awake in the morning.

9/19/2025: EP 115 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Apple’s Awe Dropping Event, new iPhones and IFA 2025 takeaways, Mark Vena

My major contribution to this episode was discussing the popularity of balcony solar power in Germany–and its absence in the U.S.

12/11/2015: Updated the post to add a post that had escaped my attention in a particularly embarrassing manner. 

#balconySolar #BrendanCarr #EastGermany #hackerMovies #JimmyKimmel #MarkVena #Qualcomm #RobertRedford #SnapdragonSummit #Sneakers #StasiMuseum #surveillance #TooManySecrets

Weekly output: Mark Vena podcast, Verizon customer service, AI fair use, Comcast ditches data caps, Aurora’s autonomous trucks, age verification for porn sites, Universal Service Fund, Trump tariffs

The first half of this year is almost in the books, which means I’m thinking of a few longer pieces that I’d meant to have seen published and paid for by now but instead have yet to start writing.

Patreon readers got an extra post from me this week: a recap of how Uber rides in Mexico City helped me realize how much trouble cheap Chinese EVs are going to cause for Tesla.

6/23/2025: Ep 112 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Apple WWDC 25, Apple Intelligence, OpenAI device, Trump phone, Mark Vena

I suggested that this podcast cover the exercise in commercialized cult worship that is Trump Mobile. Two days after we recorded the show, that site’s description of the T1 phone that it plans to sell changed from “proudly made right here in the USA” to “brought to life right here in the USA.”

6/24/2025: Verizon Touts Upgraded Customer Service Push: Will It Make a Difference?, PCMag

Put me down as a skeptic of the difference that customer service can make in broadband: I can’t remember when I last called either my wireless carrier or my Internet provider for help.

6/24/2025: Judge: It’s Fair Use to Train AI on Books You Bought, But Not Ones You Pirated, PCMag

I found this case interesting for two reasons: It did not involve any claims of AI plagiarism and it allowed for a distinction between training AI models on purchased content and training it on pirated material. That last point should have Silicon Valley nervious, since so many large firms–hi, Meta–could not resist taking that copyright-infringing shortcut.

6/26/2025: Comcast’s New Plans Dump the Data Caps, PCMag

This is a post I have wanted to be able to write for years. I guess seeing enough subscribers flee for unlimited-data offerings of fiber and fixed-wireless services had a persuasive effect on Comcast’s management that my own posts denouncing this exercise in abuse of market power did not.

6/27/2025: Aurora hits a self-driving trucking milestone, Fast Company

One of my editors suggested that Aurora launching commercial deliveries via its self-driving trucks meant it was time to revisit the company I’d profiled for Fast Co. last summer. Conveniently enough, Aurora’s president Ossa Fisher was one of the speakers at Web Summit Vancouver, allowing me to interview her IRL during that conference.

6/27/2025: Sorry, Pornhub Fans: Supreme Court Upholds Texas Age-Verification Law, PCMag

I had this case on my list of opinions to look for on the Supreme Court’s site Friday morning, with an idea that my lede would have to reference Avenue Q’s “The Internet Is For Porn” regardless of the outcome. I’m surprised nobody else seems to have gone with that. After publication, my editor added statements about the decision from a few interested parties.

6/27/2025: That ‘Universal Service Charge’ on Your Phone Bill Isn’t Going Away, PCMag

As I was working on a post about the Texas case, I saw this opinion pop up and realized that I should write about that as well. In the hours that passed, my inbox accumulated comments from a variety of groups–including telecom trade associations that in other scenarios want the government to butt out–applauding this decision.

6/28/2025: For Electronics Makers in Latin America, the Roller-Coaster Ride Is Worse Than Just Paying a High Tariff, PCMag

I started writing this piece from my hotel in Mexico City hours before my departure and then needed another week to check with NielsenIQ to see if they had any stats about the effects of tariffs on the country and then find time to finish and file the thing.

#ageVerification #AITraining #Anthropic #Aurora #autonomousTrucks #autonomousVehicles #Comcast #ComcastDataCaps #copyright #dataCaps #ElectronicsHomeMexico #FirstAmendment #LLMs #MarkVena #podcast #SupremeCourt #tariffs #UniversalServiceFund #USF #VerizonCustomerService #VerizonSupport #Vz #Xfinity

Weekly output: broadband satisfaction, Google I/O announcements (x2), Mark Vena podcast, Android XR, Google Beam

I got back from one part of the West Coast Thursday night and I’m heading to another part Tuesday morning. But while my travel plans have included Google I/O since 2010, Web Summit moving its Collision conference to Vancouver and rebranding it as Web Summit Vancouver has put that city in my schedule for the first time since an epic ski trip to Whistler in 2004.

5/20/2025: In the ISP Race, Fiber Is Still Tough to Beat, But Don’t Discount These Upstarts, PCMag

My first post of the week, written Monday off an embargoed copy of the American Customer Satisfaction Index‘s latest survey results and filed from my flight to SFO that evening, unpacked more bad news for cable broadband.

5/21/2025: Google’s ‘AI Mode’ Is Coming for Us All, PCMag

I wrote part of this, based on Google’s embargoed announcements, on Monday’s flight, part from my Airbnb after jet lag had me awake before 6 a.m., and part from my seat at Shoreline Amphitheatre before the start of Google’s keynote.

5/21/2025: Google’s New Flow Moviemaking Tool Can Turn You Into AI Scorsese for $250/Month, PCMag

I finished writing this after the keynote had begun, so the copy I filed had quotes from Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s keynote remarks.

5/21/2025: Ep 110 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Apple’s upcoming WWDC 25, Google I/O and “Apple in China”, Mark Vena

I made a rare outdoors appearance on my industry-analyst friend’s podcast, logging on from a picnic table in between I/O exhibits in Shoreline’s parking lot.

5/22/2025: Google Glass Reborn? I Tried Android XR Smart Glasses, and One Thing Stood Out, PCMag

Waiting out a lengthy queue to try Google’s new connected eyewear proved to be an excellent use of my time Tuesday afternoon.

5/23/2025: Google’s Futuristic Beam Tech Almost Made Me Forget I Was on a Video Call, PCMag

I missed some press-specific previews of this holodeck-esque video-conferencing system Tuesday but was able to squeeze in a demo Wednesday afternoon.

#ACSI #android #AndroidXR #broadband #GoogleAI #GoogleBeam #GoogleIO #IO #MarkVena #MountainView #WebSummitVancouver #YVR

Weekly output: Most Innovative Companies (x2), Simbe Robotics, Starlink at the White House, T-Mobile’s 5G speed record, Trump tries to fire FTC Dems, Verizon satellite messaging, Mark Vena podcast, Tools for Humanity

Months of on-and-off work for one of Fast Company’s most involved projects, the annual Most Innovative Companies list, finally yielded published copy this week. You can imagine my relief at that. This coming week should not feature nearly as many bylines for me, in part because I will be out of the office Thursday afternoon for one of the most important rites of spring: the Washington Nationals’ home opener.

3/18/2025: The most innovative companies in manufacturing for 2025, Fast Company

Some of the companies honored in this part of the MIC list were obvious calls, but more involved a lot of back-and-forth deliberation between me and my editors.

3/18/2025: The most innovative companies in robotics and engineering for 2025, Fast Company

I don’t cover the robotics industry all the time, but I spend enough time covering it to feel a little more at home judging what ranks as innovative in that sector.

3/18/2025: These retail robots travel through store aisles, scanning shelves for inventory and insights, Fast Company

Simbe Robotics earned a nod in last year’s MIC list, and this time around we elected to run a separate story about this startup’s work optimizing retail.

3/18/2025: Report: Starlink Tries to Fix White House’s Wi-Fi Woes, PCMag

The New York Times report about a deployment of Starlink broadband at the White House–which should neither be remotely necessary nor provide fiber-competitive speeds–didn’t mention how often Elon Musk has described Starlink as a rural-first solution. But I have those notes and made sure to surface quotes from them in this piece.

3/19/2025: T-Mobile Claims New 5G Download Speed Record, PCMag

My conversation with T-Mobile’s tech president Ulf Ewaldsson at MWC two weeks earlier helped me put this speed test in context.

3/19/2025: Trump Attempts to Fire the FTC’s Democratic Commissioners, PCMag

After I’d filed this report about Trump ignoring established law and a 90-year-old Supreme Court ruling to try to fire Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission, my editor improved it by suggesting I remind readers of the chapter in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 that suggests curbing the FTC’s statutory independence.

3/20/2025: Verizon Opens Non-Emergency Satellite Messaging to Galaxy S25, Pixel 9 Users, PCMag

Because I was swamped Wednesday covering the FTC news, I didn’t get to this news until Thursday–by which time Charter and Comcast had announced that their wireless services, based on resold Verizon capacity, were also getting Skylo satellite roaming for customers with Galaxy S25 and Pixel 9 series phones.

3/20/2025: Ep 108 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Skype, NVIDIA GTC, MWC, BYD “fast charging”, Mark Vena

I spent most of my time in this episode of the podcast talking about what I saw at MWC, but the closing discussion of EV charging let me drop in a reference to The Cannonball Run that amused my fellow cinephiles.

3/21/2025: Bot or Not? To Prove You’re Human, Look Into This 8-Inch Orb, PCMag

Almost a month after I talked to Tools for Humanity’s chief architect Adrian Ludwig at Web Summit Qatar–during which that startup signed up a notable new partner and I developed a deeper understanding of what it’s trying to do with this identity scheme–the piece finally made it online.

#AlvaroBedoya #carrierAggregation #DOGE #ElonMusk #FTC #GalaxyS25 #MarkVena #MIC #MostInnovativeCompanies #Orb #Pixel9 #RebeccaSlaughter #satelliteMessaging #SimbeRobotics #Skylo #Starlink #TMobile #TallyRobot #ToolsForHumanity #verizon #WorldID #WorldNetwork #WorldCoin

Weekly output: Arc Boats, data brokers, Mark Vena podcast, New Glenn, Starship, TikTok

Ideally, the week after CES would be a relaxing time with at least one day spent entirely disconnected from work. Because we don’t live in an ideal world, my week instead featured the Supreme Court blowing up TikTok and SpaceX blowing up the second stage of its giant Starship rocket.

And on top of that, I wrote a post Wednesday for Patreon readers sharing further observations from CES.

1/13/2025: This Speedy Electric Sport Boat Leaves Internal Combustion in Its Wake, PCMag

My CES coverage almost wrapped up with this report of a fun outing on Lake Mead on a battery-electric boat–“almost” as in I have a couple of other stories that began with notes and quotes from that trade show, but which can’t be finished without additional reporting.

1/13/2025: Even the Experts Have Trouble Getting Data Brokers to Stop Tracking Them, PCMag

After covering ShmooCon Saturday, I spent part of Sunday watching that hacker conference’s closing panels remotely and part of it writing a recap of Yael Grauer’s talk about the futility of trying to opt out of data brokers without any help from the federal privacy law that Congress keeps failing to pass.

1/15/2026: Ep 106 SmartTechCheck Podcast — CES recap, TikTok, Zoox, TSMC, Apple, Mark Vena

I joined my industry analyst friend Mark and my fellow tech journalists Stewart Wolpin and John Quain for this CES recap.

1/16/2025: Blue Origin’s Giant New Glenn Rocket Reaches Orbit on Its First Try, PCMag

The 1 to 4 a.m. launch window that Blue Origin apparently picked to minimize interference with air traffic maximized interference with my sleep–especially when the first attempt on Monday morning saw five resets of the countdown clock before finally getting scrubbed a little after 3 a.m. The second one resulted in a successful launch at 2:03 a.m., but then writing the post (and eyeing my bleary-eyed copy carefully before pasting it into the CMS) had me up until after 3 a.m. anyway.

1/16/2025: SpaceX Catches a Booster But Loses an Upper Stage on Starship’s Seventh Flight, PCMag

About 17 hours after watching one rocket launch Thursday, I watched a second one that was not so successful–and not in the way that I’d thought Starship’s seventh test might go awry, a failed booster catch.

1/17/2025: Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban, Finds No First Amendment Violations, PCMag

I wrote more than 500 words of background material in advance, plus ledes and closing sentences that would go with a court opinion against TikTok or for it. That let me get a completed story filed within half an hour of the court’s mercifully brief opinion getting posted at 10 a.m. Friday. That afternoon, I added another section with reactions from various parties, including two of my favorite tech-policy experts who also happen to be among two of the fastest sources I know to answer an e-mail request for comment.

#ArcBoats #BlueOrigin #ces #dataBrokers #electricBoat #FirstAmendment #LasVegas #MarkVena #NewGlenn #Shmoocon #SpaceX #Starship #SupremeCourt #TikTok #YaelGrauer

Weekly output: Snapdragon Windows software compatibility, Qualcomm’s connected-car ambitions, Snap Spectacles ’24, Mark Vena podcast, Bluesky business plans, Qualcomm 8-core Snapdragon X Plus benchmarking, election security

Before I get to my usual list of what got published under my name this week, I need to vent about what did not get published by the Washington Post this week: the endorsement of Kamala Harris that, by multiple accounts, was quashed by imported-from-London publisher Will Lewis at the direction of owner Jeff Bezos. The insultingly vapid explanation by Lewis can only be read as Bezos attempting to grovel for a lesser spot for his businesses on Donald Trump’s enemies list.

This is a craven betrayal of the legacy of Katharine Graham, who defied the threats of Richard Nixon and his lackeys while the Post published the Pentagon Papers and documented Nixon’s Watergate crimes.

Jeff Bezos, you are no Kay Graham.

10/22/2024: Qualcomm Moves to Ease Windows on Snapdragon Compatibility Concerns, PCMag

My first post from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit covered a series of moves to address one lingering concern of that company’s rollout of fast and battery-friendly laptop processors: compatibility with existing Windows apps and peripherals. Reminder: Qualcomm covered my airfare and lodging on this trip.

10/24/2024: Qualcomm Revs Up Connected-Car Ambitions at Snapdragon Summit, PCMag

Then I filed a much longer post unpacking Qualcomm’s pitch to automakers to use its connected-car platforms. It was weird to see the only in-person endorsements from automakers in Qualcomm’s day-two keynote come from Chinese manufacturers.

10/25/2024: Snap Spectacles ’24 First Look: AR Glasses That Aren’t Vaporware, PCMag

I tried out these augmented-reality glasses Monday afternoon but didn’t have time to write about them until Thursday morning–the first-world problem of being at a conference with a packed schedule six time zones to the left of my editors.

10/25/2024: Ep 70 SmartTechCheck Moment — Ruminations on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2024 in Hawaii, Mark Vena

I joined my industry-analyst pal Mark Vena and other analysts Mike Feibus, Francis Sideco and Dave Altavilla to record a podcast from a lawn at the Wailea Beach Resort, Qualcomm’s venue for the summit.

10/25/2024: Bluesky Readies Subscription Option, Says It Won’t Be Like X Premium, PCMag

I hustled to write this short post from Maui’s airport before a flight to Los Angeles that I didn’t even realize would have no WiFi for most of the flight over the Pacific.

10/27/2024: Qualcomm’s 8-Core Snapdragon X Plus, Tested: A Competitive, Cheaper Chip, PCMag

The research for this post began with a benchmarking session Qualcomm hosted at IFA about seven weeks ago, after which my editor and I were respectively slammed with travel and other schedule conflicts–while, conveniently enough, laptops with these new processors had not yet shipped.

10/27/2024: Election security, Alaraby

I appeared via Zoom on this Arabic-language news channel to share some details from my experience as an Arlington County poll worker.

Updated 10/28/2024 to add a link to my TV hit.

#benchmarks #Bluesky #connectedCars #electionSecurity #Hawaii #MarkVena #Maui #pollWorker #Qualcomm #SnapSpectacles #SnapChat #SnapdragonSummit #SnapdragonX #X #Xitter

Almost two weeks in Pacific time, starting with Black Hat and ending with some family time in the Bay Area, should have ended at around 9 p.m. Sunday. But the line of thunderstorms that swept through the D.C. area and shut down ramp operations at Dulles for a chunk of the evening had other ideas, which is why we got a free tour of IAD during a two-hour wait for a gate and why I’m now typing this sentence from baggage claim after midnight Monday.

8/13/2024: How Hughes Network Systems could bring satellite terminal manufacturing down to Earth, Light Reading

I visited Hughes’ new factory the day before I flew out to Vegas for Black Hat two weeks ago, then wrote this piece on Monday to include some news about Hughes’ contract to manufacture terminals for the low-Earth-orbit satellite-broadband firm OneWeb that Hughes PR gave me in advance.

8/13/2024: Patreon to Creators: Sorry, We Have to Let Apple Take a Cut of In-App Support, PCMag

I could not have written this story the way I did had I not set up shop on Patreon over five years ago and supported other creators on that platform. Some definitions of journalistic ethics would call that being too close to the story, but sometimes there’s no replacement for lived experience in a subject.

Later that day, I followed up by writing a post for Patreon readers explaining that I was not going to eat Apple’s cut, which meant that they could choose between paying about 43 percent extra (an increase Patreon calculated to ensure that creators would earn the same from a patron regardless of where they signed up) or following my advice to sign up on the Web.

8/15/2024: Come Out and Play: An Oral History of the HFStival, Washingtonian

I enjoyed the hell out of revisiting some of my favorite RFK memories with Washingtonian’s Andrew Beaujon over a long phone interview in May. I also enjoyed seeing my one quote from that conversation follow extended testimony from musicians in some of my favorite D.C. indie-rock bands of that era: the Dismemberment Plan, Jawbox, Tuscadero and Velocity Girl.

8/15/2024: Ep 104 SmartTechCheck Podcast — HEB and Apple Pay, Google news, desktop PC thoughts, BlackHat, Mark Vena

I joined my industry-analyst friend’s podcast to share my thoughts on Black Hat and to compare notes with fellow tech scribes John Quain and Dwight Silverman.

8/16/2024: Court: Calif. Child-Safety Bill Turns Businesses Into ‘Censors for the State’, PCMag

One state’s law about online child safety getting blocked by a federal appeals court might not seem like national news, but California is a very large state and the California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act has already inspired similar laws in other states and a bill that passed the Senate last month.

8/17/2024: Court Stops Disney-Fox-WBD ‘Venu’ Live Sports Service on Antitrust Grounds, PCMag

Friday gave me a second opportunity to digest a fairly lengthy court ruling and explain it to readers, this time one that halted the rollout of a sports streaming service on antitrust grounds.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/08/19/weekly-output-hughes-network-systems-manufactures-in-maryland-apples-app-store-tax-hits-patreon-creators-hfstival-mark-vena-podcast-calfornia-online-child-safety-law-stayed-venu-sports-streami/

#AgeAppropriateDesignCode #AppStore #AppStore30_ #BlackHat #Fubo #FuboTV #HughesNetworkSystems #MarkVena #NetChoice #OneWeb #Patreon #sportsStreaming #Venu

Sunday started with Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and is ending with Kamala Harris as the increasingly likely Democratic presidential nominee. I am struck by the selflessness involved in somebody at the apex of political power assessing the circumstances and the stakes and deciding that they require taking himself out of contention–and how well that grace, however grudgingly it may have come, compares to Donald Trump’s incessant self-worship. As Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic: “Biden’s decision reflected a determination to put the fate of his country ahead of his personal vanity, a choice Trump is inherently incapable of making.”

7/15/2024: Automation Lessens Zombie Account Risks, FedTech

I last wrote for this publication in 2017, but I must have left a decent reputation there for an editor to e-mail me in April to ask if I could do a story about how government-IT types can ease staff transitions between administrations.

7/17/2024: Boost Mobile Unwraps New Plans As 5G Network Buildout Chugs Along, PCMag

We had to correct this post because I had missed how Boost’s most expensive plan does not include mobile hotspot use, even though two of its three cheaper options include it. Which is a dumb pricing game for any wireless carrier to play, but especially one that touts “simplified pricing” in its pitch for its new plans.

7/17/2024: On Speed, T-Mobile Is First in Mobile Broadband, AT&T in Home Internet, PCMag

Ookla, the company behind the Speedtest family of apps, offered me an advance on their latest connectivity report. I’m still confused by how they assessed only AT&T’s fiber service next to all of Verizon’s broadband options.

7/18/2024: Google Ships Fourth And (We Hope) Last Android 15 Beta, PCMag

This was the fifth time this year that I’ve written a short post about an incremental step in Android 15’s development cycle for PCMag.

7/19/2024: Prior to Microsoft Meltdown, CrowdStrike Exec Warned of ‘Single Point of Failure’, PCMag

As I read about the worldwide IT meltdown sparked by CrowdStrike’s epic failure of a driver update, I remembered seeing a CrowdStrike executive declaring at a Washington Post event in early June that “A resilient digital architecture should be able to weather a storm.” Awkward!

Patreon readers got a bonus post related to this story, in which I recounted the continuing utility of keeping notes in a searchable digital format but also revealed that I still have paper notepads from more than 25 years ago–and recently got some unexpected use out of one.

7/19/2024: Ep 103 SmartTechCheck Podcast–CrowdStrike, innovation drought, foldable phones and robotaxis, Mark Vena

I joined my industry-analyst friend’s podcast to talk about a grab-bag of tech topics, one of them being Waymo’s robotaxis as I experienced them in Los Angeles a few weeks ago.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/07/21/weekly-output-zombie-accounts-boost-mobile-broadband-isp-ratings-android-15-beta-crowdstrike-mark-vena-podcast/

#5G #Android15 #ATTFiber #BoostMobile #CrowdStrike #federalIT #MarkVena #Ookla #Speedtest #TMobile #wirelessCarriers #zombieAccounts

After a weekend spent mostly indoors to avoid temperatures that hit or neared triple digits Saturday and Sunday, I’m flying to Los Angeles Tuesday for a grab-bag of reasons that include trying out Waymo’s robotaxi service there (which may make me feel like I’m living in the future), covering VidCon Anaheim (which is all but assured to make me feel old).

Patreon readers got an extra post from me Friday: my thoughts on reading Siddharth Kara’s brutal report on cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, and then comparing that to Apple and Tesla’s supply-chain transparency reports.

6/18/2024: Google’s Third Beta of Android 15 Is Out, and It Has Some Handy New Security Features, PCMag

The fourth piece I’ve writen about the next version of Android had the least news about new features, because at this point in the development cycle Google is basically done announcing new features.

6/19/2024: Billionaire Frank McCourt Shares His Vision for a Decentralized, User-Owned TikTok, PCMag

I had thought this session could yield a good post, and it did not disappoint–even if McCourt’s answers onstage glossed over large parts of his “Project Liberty” proposal.

6/19/2024: What does AI mean for remote work?, Collision

My first panel at Collision–featuring Bhavin Shah, founder and CEO of Moveworks, and Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures–was the last one added to my schedule and featured the largest audience, thanks to its spot on the event’s center stage.

6/20/2024: 1Password Adds New Account Recovery and Device Addition Options, PCMag

I need to revise this post with some extra details about the new device-addition user experience that 1Password’s PR folks provided Friday afternoon.

6/20/2024: Robots and humans: Partners in progress, Collision

Clock management can be tricky with three other speakers on stage (Erik Nieves, CEO of Plus One Robotics; Tessa Lau, co-founder of Dusty Robotics; and Etienne Lacroix, founder and CEO of Vention), but I managed to end this thing within 10 seconds of schedule. My fellow speakers helped immensely by sharing some enlightening anecdotes (for instance, Lau noting that Dusty’s construction-site-markup robots often get nicknamed “WALL-E” by human co-workers) and not stepping on each other’s lines.

6/20/2024: Revolutionizing email collaboration, Collision

At 25 minutes, this session was unusually long by Web Summit standards. And Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra was unusually poised and on-message in his answers to my questions about this paid e-mail service’s new AI features.

6/21/2024: Ep 101 SmartTechCheck Podcast — Qualcomm, Surgeon General warning, Apple WWDC recap, TikTok, Mark Vena

I had just enough time after getting home from Dulles to get lunch and get in a nap before joining this podcast recording.

6/22/2024: Rob Pegoraro Visits Washington Apple Pi, Washington Apple Pi

I had expected this would be an in-person talk like the one I did last June, but instead I spoke to the members of this longtime computer user group via Zoom. That meant I could not give away any tech-event swag but did allow me to share links to the stories I mentioned in Zoom’s chat window.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/06/23/weekly-output-android-15-project-liberty-and-tiktok-ai-and-remote-work-1password-robots-and-humans-superhuman-e-mail-mark-vena-podcast-washington-apple-pi/

#1Password #Android15 #Collision #DustyRobotics #EverywhereVentures #FrankMcCourt #MarkVena #Moveworks #PlusOneRobotics #ProjectLiberty #remoteWork #Superhuman #TikTok #Toronto #userGroups #Vention #WAP #WashingtonApplePi #Waymo #WebSummit