I spent the workweek in San Francisco–as in, my flight left National Airport at 8 a.m. Monday, and my flight home landed at Dulles around 6:30 p.m. Friday. Next week will also involve a long commute: I’m off to Las Vegas tomorrow for the CTIA 2013 wireless trade show.
I spoke on a panel with Reputation Capital’s Mary Ellen Slayter, the Starr Conspiracy’s Lance Haun and Angles PR’s Ania Kubicki about good and bad ways PR types can deal with the press. (What was I doing at an HR-oriented conference? Mary Ellen’s an old friend from the Post and invited me onto the panel.)
I talked to WTOP about Google’s I/O news on Wednesday, but that interview doesn’t seem to have been preserved on the station’s index for that day. Drat!
The headline for this Google I/O recap popped into my head almost fully formed. I’m glad the editors stuck with that; I’m a little disappointed nobody picked up the Suzanne Vega reference in the excerpt that shows up in search results and on D News’ home page.
I was interviewed again that evening–this time at a press reception, along with USA Today’s Ed Baig, by Thai tech journalist Chatpawee Trichachawanwong. I don’t know if that piece has run, or how insightful Ed and I might sound in it. (We didn’t have much time to prepare.)
Here, I tried to put Google’s developer-focused I/O news in the context of iOS’s continued lead in one important area: profit potential for the average developer.
A question from a relative looking to prune the assortment of photo apps on his laptop led to this column. It also includes a tip about the difficulty you may have sharing some of the neater multimedia-enhanced photos your phone’s camera can take.
My ongoing campaign to prop up the airline industry led me to Denver this weekend, where I moderated one panel and attended others at Free Press’s National Conference for Media Reform, wrote one of the pieces listed below, escaped the conference for a few hours Friday to see the Rockies’ home opener, and caught up with the old friends I stayed with.
I don’t agree with a judge’s ruling that you can’t re-sell digital music you own, but I can see how he reached that ruling. Not everybody thinks I’m correct–witness the debate I had with a reader on my Facebook page afterwards.
I wrote this in part to push back against the blood-feud school of tech journalism, in which every action by Google (or Apple, Facebook, Microsoft or Samsung) must be viewed as a stab at one or all of its rivals. I think Google forking the Apple-driven WebKit browser-engine code shouldn’t be that bad for Apple, may be good for Chrome users–and is certainly helpful for reducing the threat of a Web monoculture.
I led a discussion about the factors that lead people to drop cable or satellite TV service–and make it hard for competing video providers to enter the market–with lawyer and lobbyist Gene Kimmelman, author and activist Susan Crawford, Netflix public-policy director Corie Wright and Free Press research director Derek Turner. If video surfaces of our chat, I’ll add a link here.4/25/2013: The organizers added an audio recording of the panel to the session page linked above.
I screwed up this post by not mentioning Facebook’s good implementation of the security measure I’d lauded last week. The social network had added two-step verification back in May of 2011, but I’d missed the news that day–the start of a long weekend on vacation and mostly offline–and ever since. After two readers set me straight on my Facebook page, I e-mailed corrected sentences to my (capable and forgiving) editor while waiting to board my flight home from Denver, and she had the piece updated before they’d shut the cabin door.
CES week has usually been the single busiest workweek of the year, and this time around did not disappoint. It also featured perhaps my shortest and certainly my highest-profile TV appearance yet.
About eight hours into what became a 14-hour workday, I chatted briefly with the Fool’s Rex Moore for a show-opening video segment about some of the trends I’d seen thus far.
As it did last year, Panasonic ran a series of interviews with tech-industry types, journalists, athletes, politicians and various other guests from its CES exhibit. Here, I discussed the intersection of sports and digital media with the Sports Business Journal’s Eric Fisher and host Jordan Burchette. I trust nobody was surprised to see me rant yet again about the idiocy of regional blackouts for live game coverage.
I evaluated some of the more talked-about CES appearances in terms of whether they might entrench incumbents in a market or offer an opening to their challengers.
This show assessment for the NewsHour’s Rundown blog got a shout-out on that night’s NewsHour broadcast, right after an interview of my old Post cubicle-mate Cecilia Kang. Which makes a certain amount of sense, since the piece’s length and tone made it the closest thing to the CES-recap columns I wrote for the Post for… wow, 14 years in a row.
Note that the first version of this posted had a stupid mistake in the description of 4K resolution; when I was trimming a paragraph on the technology, “million” wound up where “thousand” should have been, and it took a reader’s comment to bring that to my attention. (That’s only one of the reasons why I try to read every comment.)
Larry Magid, a longtime tech journalist I enjoy running into at events like this, saw fit to include a sound bite from me in that day’s one-minute tech update.
My CES recap for Discovery–also, my first in the site’s new design–covered the same trends I tackled in the NewsHour piece but benefited from another day’s worth of soaking in the show.
I did a post like this back in 2011 that critiqued the absence of non-TiVo video recorders (among other things), didn’t think to return to the theme last year, but realized it would fit in well with DisCo’s focus on the ways outside factors distort and limit what the tech business can do.
The Fool’s Chris Hill interviewed me about the show for the Fool’s weekly podcast. He had me on as a guest pretty regularly when I was at the Post; it was good to be back.
An editor at NBC noticed the column I wrote for USA Today about Java security last spring and e-mailed to ask if they could interview me for that evening’s show. They recorded something like 30 minutes’ worth of footage; they asked good questions, didn’t cut off my answers and finished by asking if there was anything else I wanted this piece to say. Maybe 10 seconds of that wound up on the air, with me identified as a ”USA Today Technology Writer.”
(I was worried they wouldn’t use any of it. Between the heat from the studio lights in NBC’s Nebraska Avenue offices and my own don’t-screw-this-up anxiety, I started getting a little flustered and began fumbling some of my answers.)
Anyway, now I can cross “be interviewed as an expert on a national nightly-news show” off the bucket list. And in yet another weird coincidence, that night’s broadcast also featured my friend Daniel Greenberg, one of my best freelance contributors at the Post, talking about video-game violence.
This week’s column looks at the persistence of Adobe Flash on the desktop and recants some of my earlier optimism about a quick sunset for that format. (Though I have to note that Discovery’s new design finally does away with Flash for slide shows, even older ones; I no longer feel guilty about linking out to those.) It also shares a few tips about talking crash-prone browsers out of their sulk.
(With 15 of these 500-to-1,000-character posts a week, I can’t see adding them all to the weekly roundup, any more than I’d inventory my tweets. But maybe calling out a few highlights will work.)
I usually post this on Sundays, but a roughly four-hour delay in Frankfurt stretched my journey home from IFA to 19 hours. On the other hand, one of my regular weekly items got posted a day late as well.
I was delighted not to have my Friday evening wrecked by the need to blog immediately about the $1 billion Apple-Samsung patent verdict; instead, I could take a little time to read up on the case (including some good explanations posted before the verdict that I’d neglected earlier). And once I’d done that, the case looks less damaging to Android and Samsung than the first headlines suggested–even before you factor in the odds of appeals prolonging the case for years.
The gadget-porn trade-show photo gallery is bit of a journalistic cliche, but I like taking pictures and telling stories with them–even though it adds up to more work than cranking out 700 words of blog post and illustrating them with only one or two shots. Here, I picked out 10 highlights from the massive IFA convention in Berlin, including two that speak to key differences between gadget markets in the U.S. and the EU.
Did I mention that I have some gripes with the patent system? This post looks at a recent bill (with the obligatory cutesy acronym) that aims to make patent trolling a riskier proposition, then lists a few other patent-reform ideas from such longtime critics of the patent system as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Techdirt blogger Mike Masnick.
The weekly column, posted this morning instead of its usual Sunday-afternoon timing, covers two browser-specific topics. At the top, I explore the issues involved with using a non-Apple browser in iOS–including how that would be easier if Apple let you set an app besides Safari as your default browser. Then I explain how to selectively disable Flash objects in Google’s Chrome (yes, days after Discovery posted my Flash-required slideshow).
