This week involved four airports, three flights, two hotels and an alarm set on my phone for 1 a.m. Thursday–and the lost sleep was more than justified by being able to witness the sight and sound of a Falcon 9 launch from about six miles away.

9/10/2024: Demo Day 2024, Vention

I flew to Chicago Tuesday morning to lead the panel discussion with Vention founder and CEO Etienne Lacroix and Nvidia vice present and robotics and edge computing general manager Deepu Talla that closed out this robotics firm’s programming at the IMTS convention there. I got the gig because somebody at Vention thought I’d done a good enough job quizzing Lacroix on a panel I moderated at the Collision conference in Toronto three months ago.

9/12/2024: AST SpaceMobile’s first five BlueBird satellites reach orbit, Light Reading

I flew from Chicago to Orlando the evening before–making this yet another year in which I’ve flown on Sept. 11–and checked into my hotel around 11 p.m. Two AST publicists picked me up at 1:30 a.m. to run me over to another Space Coast hotel from which a bus took me and dozens of AST shareholders to the Kennedy Space Center, from where another bus took us to KSC’s Apollo/Saturn V center to watch the launch. I filed this story at 11:30 a.m. after returning to my room and passing out for an hour or so. Being able to start the piece with a Cape Canaveral dateline put a smile on my face.

9/13/2024: United Airlines Will Add Free Starlink Wi-Fi Across Entire Fleet, PCMag

Many other journalists covered United’s massive deal with Starlink, but I will bet that most of them have not spent as much time with UA as I have.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/09/15/weekly-output-vention-demo-day-ast-spacemobile-launch-united-airlines-starlink/

#ASTSpaceMobile #BlueBird #Chicago #Falcon9 #IMTS #inflightWiFi #Nvidia #Starlink #UA #UnitedAirlines #Vention

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