Weekly output: Game of Thrones, security, augmented reality, T-Mobile, phone insurance

Posted on March 31, 2013 by robpegoraro

Happy Easter!

DisCo Game of Thrones post

3/27/2013: Ethicists Make Lousy Economists, And Other Lessons From the Endless “Game of Thrones” Debate, Disruptive Competition Project

This started life as a draft here a year ago, when I’d gotten fed up by seeing the same old arguments thrown around on Twitter and in blog posts about the HBO series. Then I set it aside, which turned out be a good thing when I had a paying client interested in the topic.

3/29/2013: Social-Media Trend To Watch: Security That Doesn’t Have To Suck, Disruptive Competition Project

With Dropbox, Apple and, soon, Evernote and Twitter following Google’s lead in offering two-step verification as a login option, I’m cautiously optimistic that this competition will yield more usable security than what the efforts of corporate IT have yielded so far. The skeptical comments this post has since gotten have me wondering if I was too optimistic.

3/29/2013: Augmented Reality Doesn’t Need Google Glasses, Discovery News

I revisited a topic I last covered in depth in a 2009 column for the Post. Part of this post recaps how I still use some of the apps I mentioned back then, part suggests some other possible applications, and then I note how Windows Phone 8′s “Lenses” feature could foster “AR” on that platform. I’m not sure all of those parts hold together.

3/31/2013: Q&A: Is T-Mobile’s new math a good deal?, USA Today

The wireless carrier’s no-contract plans may not save you much money if you buy a new smartphone exactly every two years, but if you upgrade less often–or buy an unlocked phone from a third party–they can work well for you. (And if they foster the growth of a carrier-independent market for phones, they would work well for the rest of us.) The post also includes a reminder to watch out for phone-insurance charges on your bill.

Sulia highlights: calculating how much you’d spend on an iPhone 5 and two years of service at the four major wireless carriers; noting the belated arrival of threaded comments on Facebook pages; explaining why Google Maps doesn’t offer real-time arrival estimates for Metro and other transit systems; critiquing the woeful setup experience on a Linksys router.

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Weekly output: Android fragmentation, first-sale doctrine, transparency reports, This Week In Law, iPhoto corruption, geotagging

Posted on March 24, 2013 by robpegoraro

This time of year can bring the potential for serious college-hoops distraction–but not for me, since I was relieved of that worry Friday night. No, I’m not bitter…

3/18/2013: With so much fragmenting, is Android still a single OS?, IT Knowledge Exchange

My friend Ron Miller quoted me at some length in a post about the state of the Android union. Does the linguistic metaphor I chose to describe things work for you?

3/20/2013: Kirtsaeng Dissent Reminds Us Of The Risks Of Foreign Entanglements In Copyright Policy, Disruptive Competition Project

The Supreme Court said the first-sale doctrine–the idea that once you buy a copy of a copyrighted work, you actually own that copy and can loan it, sell it or donate it as you wish–doesn’t evaporate if the copy in question was published overseas. I liked that ruling; in this post, I argued that the dissent to it unintentionally exposed some non-trivial flaws in how we construct copyright policy. I enjoyed this rare chance to dust off my Georgetown education in international relations and law.

3/22/2013: Forget Your Annual Report, Where’s Your Transparency Report?, Disruptive Competition Project

I thought Microsoft was smart to follow Google’s lead in documenting how many inquiries about its users it gets from law enforcement around the world–and that other tech companies should learn from this example.

3/22/2013: #203: Power Hour Pounding, This Week In Law

I was back on this podcast for the first time since last July, and this time the chatter focused heavily on drinking. I assure you that there were serious intellectual-property dimensions to that part of the conversation I had with fellow guest Ali Spagnola and TWiL hosts Denise Howell and Evan Brown.

(Fun fact: Until writing this, I didn’t realize that my phone includes ringtones by Spagnola.)

3/24/2013: Tip: Repair mode in iPhoto will restore thumbnail icons, USA Today

I was a little worried that my Q&A about dealing with iPhoto database corruption was a little esoteric, but then a reader commented on my Facebook page about her substantially-worse experience: “My entire database was corrupted [....] I had masters and edited pics existing in different places.” There’s also a reminder about not letting a phone’s geotagging function expose where you live.

On Sulia, I quoted approvingly from the Supreme Court’s Kirtsaeng ruling, explained why I’m not too interested in Google Keep, gave some early praise to Microsoft’s transparency report (that item got a mention on Slashdot), and commented on the fallacy of complaining about “taxing Internet sales”

Weekly output: SXSW (x2), Google Reader, bookmarks, Galaxy S 4

Posted on March 17, 2013 by robpegoraro

Another travel week ends as it should: me at home, photos from the trip posted, expenses duly categorized in Mint and a flurry of LinkedIn invitations sent.

3/13/2013: SXSW Sights: Silly Robots and Serious Wi-Fi, Discovery News

This year’s SXSW didn’t feature any breakout apps, or even a particular category of app that had people excited. Here, I wrote about the panels, talks and demos that caught my interest instead–and noted the conference’s most pleasant surprise, reliable, fast and free WiFi almost everywhere I went.

3/15/2013: Digging Into A Few Of SXSW 2013′s Disruptive Dreams, Disruptive Competition Project

In this SXSW recap, I focused more closely on a few topics that interested me at the festival: 3-D printing, HTML5 apps, mobile finance and our not-fully-rational responses to transformational technology. I wrote about three-quarters of this on the plane home; the remaining one-fourth took the last three-quarters of the time.

3/15/2013: What’s the big deal about Google Reader’s demise?, USA Today

Google’s surprising (and, to many, infuriating) announcement of the July 1 shutdown of its Google Reader RSS service sparked this column, posted a couple of days early. I thought about linking to the “Hitler finds out Google Reader is shutting down” Downfall parody video, but I wasn’t sure all of the potential audience would be hip to the joke.

3/15/2013: Can the new Samsung Galaxy S4 take on the iPhone?, WTOP

D.C.’s news station had me on the air for a couple of minutes to discuss Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone. (Samsung invited me to what turned out to be a hot mess of a launch event at Radio City Music Hall; I opted not to run up to NYC the day after getting home from Austin, but part of me regrets not going.)

Sulia worked well for sharing my notes from SXSW in something close to real-time: for instance, highlights from Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman’s keynote, details about one startup’s dubious patent filing, and a glitchy demo of Siri’s Eyes Free Mode in a Chevy hatchback on the show floor. I also noted Google’s backpedaling after a stupidly terse post had people thinking the company was ending support for the open CalDAV schedule-syncing standard.

Weekly output: phone unlocking, iOS and Android video, Google Calendar sync, Tim Berners-Lee

Posted on March 10, 2013 by robpegoraro

Work finds me in Austin this weekend for the SXSW Interactive festival. I’ll have more about that over the next few days; for now, here’s what I have to show for myself, professionally speaking.

3/5/2013: Unlock And Load: White House Picks Phone Policy Fight, Disruptive Competition Project

The White House surprised many people with its favorable response to a petition seeking the legalization of unlocking cell phones without carrier permission–it said “yes” and then endorsed the idea that carriers shouldn’t be denying service to unlocked phones from other operators. The latter is a somewhat novel idea in wireless but has been been the law in wired since the FCC’s underappreciated “Carterfone” ruling of 1968. But there are important caveats to the White House’s statement, and noting them helped push this post past 1,000 words.

3/9/2013: Work around video playback issues on your mobile device, USA Today

Like many of my USAT columns, this one started with a question from one of my relatives–my mother-in-law couldn’t watch a video of her grandson in her Yahoo Mail account on our iPad’s copy of Safari. The piece also has a tip updating advice I gave in November about sychronizing Google Calendar with an iOS device.

3/9/2013: Tim Berners-Lee: The Web needs to stay open, and Gopher’s still not cool., Boing Boing

The inventor of the Web had some interesting things to say in his talk at SXSW; after tweeting out highlights of the keynote, I pitched my editor at Boing Boing via Twitter direct message (making this my fastest salesmanship ever) and wrote up this recap later that afternoon.

On Sulia, you could have read me noting the White House’s phone-unlocking petition response (and, in retrospect, reading a little too much out of it) drawing a lesson for tech journalists from the outrage over EA’s botched SimCity launch, called out two still-absent features in Google’s updated Maps apps for iOS, and applaud the seemingly-impossible success of the free WiFi at SXSW.

Weekly output: WebKit, Mobile World Congress (x3), Tech Night Owl, Facebook scams, e-mail nags

Posted on March 3, 2013 by robpegoraro

This has been a really good week. Tiring (courtesy of a few days of walking around Barcelona for Mobile World Congress and well over 24 hours spent in airplanes and airports), but good.

2/25/2013: In Mobile, It’s A WebKit World And We Just Browse In It. Is That Okay?, Disruptive Competition Project

I wrote a long, wonky piece on the state of competition in mobile-browser layout engines, in which the open-source WebKit code used by Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome has pretty much locked up the market. Is an open-source monopoly okay? At first, I thought it might be–then I changed my mind.

2/27/2013: Plus-sized phones dominate wireless trade show, USA Today

I like filing from a new dateline. Here, circumstances found me writing this Android-centric overview of Mobile World Congress for USAT’s site. Note the inevitable Android-versus-iPhone flame war in the comments–and a couple of futile attempts by me to restore some perspective there.

2/27/2013: My Fellow Americans, We Really Do Have A Strange Wireless Market, Disruptive Competition Project

Ten years ago, I was tired of hearing people yammer on about how the U.S. should have called it a day and adopted the same GSM wireless standard as Europe and most of the rest of the world. Here, I explain how I got that wrong–and how the peculiarly carrier-driven market here does not serve customers well. Big oversight in the piece: not mentioning the controversy over the recriminalization of phone unlocking in the States.

2/28/2013: The Wide, Wild World Of Phones, Discovery News

A higher-level recap of MWC for Discovery News that objects to some of the more dubious trends the show spotlighted in the wireless industry. I really don’t know where some Android vendors are coming from these days.

3/2/2013: March 2, 2013 — Chrysta Olson, Rob Griffiths, Jeff Erwin, Lysa Myers, and Rob Pegoraro Tech Night Owl Live

Tune in to hear me discuss the state of the wireless business as seen before, during and after MWC. Bonus: host Gene Steinberg’s confused silence after my lame attempt at dropping a comedic reference to the Gadsden Purchase.

3/3/2013: Q&A: How to avoid Facebook scams? Be a skeptic, USA Today

A friend fell for an old Facebook scam, then made up for spamming me with a bogus ad by documenting how it seemed to work. My column wraps up with a tip about minimizing noisy notifications from social networks that I might have credited to Clay Johnson’s book The Information Diet, except that my own info-diet has not yet granted me the time to read it.

I used most of this week’s updates on Sulia to share observations from MWC, many of which wound up being ingredients in later stories about the show–for instance, first impressions of the enormous Asus Fonepad and the open-source Firefox and Ubuntu mobile operating systems. I also related PayPal president David Marcus’s skeptical view of Near Field Communication smartphone payments and how the Washington Nationals are blowing off NFC with their new electronic season-ticketing system.

Weekly output: Jawbone Up, Google Voice, international phone use

Posted on February 24, 2013 by robpegoraro

It was another week that ended with a couple of stories filed but not yet posted (look for a long item on the Disruptive Competition Project in the next day or two about the state of competition in browser layout engines). But it’s not every week that sees me finishing it on the other side of the Atlantic–I’m spending the next four days in Barcelona to cover the Mobile World Congress show.

2/21/2013: Jawbone Up Logs Your Days and Nights, Discovery News

I took an unusually long time to try this activity-monitoring wristband–starting after CES. That leisurely pace allowed me to note the recent arrival of a similar background exercise-tracking option in Android’s Google Now app. Something like that won’t replace this wristband’s scrutiny of your sleep, but it could prove good enough for reporting whether you get off your duff often enough.

There are some other devices like this coming out over the next few months–the Fitbit Flex and Withings’ Smart Activity Tracker come to mind–so hopefully I can do a follow-up review of them.

2/24/2012: How do I place a call from my Google Voice number?, USA Today

My annoyance at having two Google Voice calls via Gmail leave the other person sitting there in puzzled silence led to this cheat-sheet guide to dialing out from your GV number. The column concludes with a tip based on a reader’s query on my Facebook page–yes, I really do read the comments there.

On Sulia, I mocked HTC’s new One smartphone for including more resolution than people can see, then shipping an outdated version of Android; called out MBL’s At Bat app for once again not letting fans pay to watch their local teams online; questioned the price of Google’s new Chromebook Pixel laptop; and wondered if news publishers aren’t delighted about all the ink and pixels spent on Sony’s substance-starved introduction of the PlayStation 4

Weekly output: When tech reviews go wrong (x2), TV show streams, Lightning cables

Posted on February 17, 2013 by robpegoraro

In addition to the stories below, I was on the local news this week–but not for anything related to my work. A WJLA correspondent and cameraman were looking for quotes from passerby in Ballston about the possible sequestration budget cuts, and an optimistic sentence or two from me showed up on Monday’s broadcast.

2/13/2013: When The Gadget You Review Can Also Review Your Work, Disruptive Competition Project

In the first of two posts about Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk’s attack on a negative review of the Model S by New York Times reporter John Broder, I looked at how the rise of social media and the ability of connected devices and apps to log a journalist’s use change the dynamic between reviewer and review. For more thoughts along those lines, see Dan Frommer and Mathew Ingram.

2/15/2013: How Breakthrough Technology Can Get Beaten Up In The Press, Disruptive Competition Project

After reading enough comments accusing Broder of being a liar, a shill or worse (as opposed to placing too much trust in tech support from Tesla executives that normal drivers wouldn’t get anyway), I followed up by unpacking some real reasons why the media can misread disruptive technology so badly. One example: my first review of the iPad.

2/17/2013: Why are some TV show streams web-only?, USA Today

Months ago, my column briefly mentioned the uselessness of ESPN’s WatchESPN app: Unlike its site of the same name, that program doesn’t let us watch ESPN3. I exchanged a few e-mails with PR reps for the sports network about that, then had an excuse to revisit the gap between Web and app availability of online video after getting annoyed by 30 Rock’s absence from Hulu’s mobile and connected-TV apps.

The column also shares advice (hat tip, MacRumors and Lifehacker) about getting non-Apple Lightning cables for less at Amazon and Monoprice. Why so few alternatives so long after the debut of that connector? Apple engineered Lightning to enforce a sort of DRM on the accessories market, as the New York Times’ Brian X. Chen explained this week.

On Sulia, I shared my skepticism about the latest connected-watch fad (now with more Apple rumors!), discussed the unsettling but unavoidable PR trend of enticing reporters with all the Web traffic the agency or the client’s social-media channels can send to a post, and noted how Microsoft’s checkbook hasn’t been able to buy enough updates to the Windows Phone Foursquare client it hired an outside developer to write. You also would have gotten a preview of Wednesday’s post on Monday; Sulia’s more generous character count made it a better place than Twitter to sketch out that story idea.

Weekly output: “free WiFi” (x2), 1776, Facebook Graph Search, Facebook and Twitter apps

Posted on February 10, 2013 by robpegoraro

My former employer collided with my current work this week, courtesy of the Post’s front-page story Monday heralding the Federal Communications Commission’s proposal to open some broadband-friendly frequencies to unlicensed use. My former cubicle-mate Cecilia Kang’s piece phrased things much more expansively than that, especially before the jump, and then things got out of control as people spun the story as “free WiFi for everyone!”

(If you want to hate tech journalism, there’s your reason: Competing sites couldn’t spend 10 minutes reading the FCC filings to understand the story for themselves and instead rushed to post their own breathless interpretations of Kang’s piece. Worse yet, most of them haven’t bothered to correct the errant results of this game of telephone.)

2/4/2013: FCC Plan to Provide Free Wireless a Long “Complicated” Process, Voice of Russia American Edition

This AM station in D.C. (a friend works as a producer there) had me on Monday to talk about the Post’s story; I did what I could to explain that there is no actual FCC plan for free WiFi, just a framework that could, maybe, make it easier for some companies to offer no-charge wireless access in certain locations.

2/5/2013: Free As In Unlicensed: Why The FCC Isn’t Giving Away Wireless Service To Anybody, Disruptive Competition Project

After spending much of Monday on the phone and in e-mail with various tech-policy types to make sure I hadn’t missed some fundamental shift in the FCC’s positions, I explained what the FCC actually is proposing and how it ties into a larger problem in telecom: the lack of competition in residential broadband.

2/8/2013: Older City ISO Hot Young Tech Startups, Disruptive Competition Project

On Wednesday, I attended an open-house event for a startup incubator, 1776, that’s scheduled to open its doors next month with backing from the District government. Under that clickbait headline (my fault!), I put this in the context of how other cities and regions have tried to make themselves into startup hubs but have neglected to follow California’s practice of making almost all noncompete clauses unenforceable. Ending an employer’s veto power over an employee’s next job makes it vastly easier for talent to chase interesting problems, and I’d like to see other states follow that example.

2/10/2013: Tip: Control Facebook exposure by friending folks you know, USA Today

I held off writing much about Facebook’s Graph Search until I sat down with Facebook’s product manager in the social network’s D.C. office to learn what this tool does and does not index–and how people’s selective disclosure can further skew its results. (Appropriately enough, this discussion about unsent signals happened on the one day I forgot to put on my wedding ring before leaving the house.) The column wraps up with a reminder to clean out old and unused Facebook and Twitter apps.

On Sulia, my week included a recap of my experience attending a screening at the Motion Picture Association of America’s offices, two gripes about dumb car-stereo design trends seen at the Washington Auto Show, a report about Facebook asking if I knew new friends offline, and a reader’s assessment of the Mohu and WallTenna TV antennas at a less reception-friendly location.

Weekly output: e-mail privacy, 3-D printing, TV antennas, smartphone competition, sports networks, bargaining over TV bills

Posted on February 3, 2013 by robpegoraro

It’s not a total coincidence that I wrote as much about TV as I did in the week running up to one of the biggest televised events of the year.

1/28/2013: Why Can’t Web Services Compete To Protect My Data From The Feds?, Disruptive Competition Project

Reporting this one made me feel a little dumb when I realized that I could have had a nice little scoop weeks or months earlier if I’d just asked Google, Microsoft and Yahoo what they require before turning over a user’s e-mail data to the government. It turns out that all three go beyond the strict requirements of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in requiring a warrant–but that none seemed to think this was something worth bragging about.

1/29/2013: Hold Your Fire Before Freaking Out Over 3-D Printed Guns, Disruptive Competition Project

I started writing this post in December, then decided I didn’t like the last third of it and set it aside. I finally picked it up again after CES. Somewhat to my surprise, it only got one “you want to ban all guns” reply.

1/30/2013: Two Flat, Stick-On Antennas Tune In Free TV, Discovery News

I revisited the subject of over-the-air TV for the first time in over a year to review a couple of flat, lightweight antennas. Somewhat to my surprise, they worked better than the old set of rabbit ears I had plugged into the set downstairs (and unlike that antenna, I could put each one high enough on the wall to avoid becoming a plaything for our toddler). So I bought one of these models, the Mohu, and am now trying to figure out exactly where on the wall it will get the best reception of the three trickier network affiliates: ABC’s WJLA, CBS’s WUSA and PBS’s WETA.

2/1/2013: Will A Two-Party System Adequately Represent Smartphone Users?, Disruptive Competition Project

BlackBerry has a new operating system, but will it do any better than Microsoft’s Windows Phone? (I’ve been testing Windows Phone 8 on an HTC 8X; there are things I like about it, but the app selection really holds it back.) In this post, I express the possibly-futile hope that either BlackBerry or Microsoft can become a viable alternative to the increasingly entrenched duo of Apple and Google.

2/3/2013: How sports networks inflate your TV bill, USA Today

One of the people on my neighborhood’s mailing list asked about a new fee that Verizon was going to put on her bill to cover regional sports networks. I told her I’d see what else I could find out. The column also includes a reminder that TV rate hikes can, at least sometimes, be negotiable if your service thinks you’ll leave.

Sulia highlights this week included two more rants about the TV business–one on Verizon’s extortionate CableCard rate hike and another about the stupidity of making some Hulu content “Web-only”–and a post noting that the “Apple tax” is real when you look at what it costs to get more storage on an iPad.

Weekly output: Neil deGrasse Tyson, iCloud files, Mountain Lion notifications

Posted on January 27, 2013 by robpegoraro

This was not a good week for productivity. The inauguration took out Monday, and a couple of late nights for inaugural festivities made the cold I was already feeling a lot worse. Then caught a glancing blow from some kind of stomach bug that left me uninterested in eating for 20 hours or so.

I could take notes and socialize at the events I went to Tuesday and Wednesday–washing my hands all the time to try to avoid sharing my illness–but I didn’t have the strength to write anything once I got home. And while I did file two things I’d been working on for the Disruptive Competition Project blog Friday afternoon, neither was posted. Hence the total of two headlines on this week’s list.

1/24/2013: Neil deGrasse Tyson: science funding can “guarantee your economic future”, Ars Technica

My NASA Tweetup connections led to an invitation to a talk by one of America’s favorite astrophysicists to mark the launch of a new House Science and National Labs Caucus; then I wrote up his lecture and Q&A for one of my favorite tech-news sites. I tried to put his talking points into the political context of how hard it can be justify government funding of any new projects.

In the process, I had to leave out some notes about the sense of humor Tyson displayed, such as a comment about the compatibility of astrophysics’ shorter words with hip-hop lyrics (“I can’t rhyme with orthoclase feldspar or deoxyribonucleic acid”). So if the post makes him sound like a scold, that’s on me.

1/27/2013: How do I move files from iCloud to Mac?, USA Today

I knew iCloud didn’t act like other Web-based file-storage services, but I didn’t realize how much it departed from OS X’s traditions until I stumbled across the one easy way to move multiple files from iCloud back to a Mac–using iCloud file dialogs. The column also includes a tip on making Mountain Lion’s Notification Center less intrusive.

On Sulia, this week’s highlights included my first impressions of Facebook’s Graph Search, continued excoriation of CBS Interactive’s interference with CNET’s reviews, context about smartphone unlocking becoming illegal (again) this weekend, and some snarky comments about Twitter’s new Vine six-second-video-clip service.

Rob Pegoraro

Occasional shop talk about journalism, technology and a few other things

Category Archives: Weekly output