I wrapped up the tech-journalism hell week that is CES with a red-eye flight out of Vegas last night, as if I wasn’t tired enough after writing close to 6,000 words of copy and doing two panels, one radio interview and one on-stage intro. So if you’re hoping for typo-free prose, this may not be the post for you.
1/3/2017: The biggest busts from the world’s most renowned gadget show, Yahoo Finance
I enjoyed writing this reality-check post about past flops at CES–some of which I thought at the time could fly.
1/3/2017: Can you put a price on ‘freemium’ apps?, USA Today
You may have seen my column on alternatives to paying Evernote and iCloud appear a few days earlier in a personal-finance section that I’m told ran in some Gannett newspapers.
1/3/2017: What to expect this week at CES, the world’s biggest gadget show, Yahoo Finance
This was the second post I filed on Monday–you know, the day that was supposed to be a holiday.
1/4/2017: Faraday Future’s FF 91: Electric speed at a vaporous price
I attended the unveiling of this self-driving, electric-powertrain supercar Tuesday night and did not find the overhyped “reformat the future” sales pitch super-persuasive.
1/4/2017: Tech trends at CES, WTOP
I talked with WTOP’s Shawn Anderson and Hillary Howard about early headlines from the show. We usually do these interviews over Skype, but bandwidth was so bad that they had to call my phone.
1/5/2017: The Escalating War on Cybersecurity, CES
I talked about the changing landscape of cybersecurity with Blackberry chief security officer David Kleidermacher, HackerOne CTO Alex Rice, and Qualcomm senior director of product management Sy Choudhury. One big takeaway of our discussion: Companies and organizations that don’t want to talk about their security misfortunes aren’t the ones you want to trust.
1/6/2017: CES 2017: The top trends in new TVs, Yahoo Finance
This piece ran over a thousand words in my first draft, which is not an optimal writing strategy when you have a CES-dense schedule.
1/6/2017: Selfie drones and more fly into CES 2017, Yahoo Finance
I finished and filed this from a chair near an entrance to the Venetian at around 6:30 Friday night, which is not generally part of people’s weekend activities in Vegas.
1/7/2017: Business Models in the Personal Data Economy, Mobile Ecosystem Forum
I inflicted some dead air on the organizers when I forgot that they’d moved up my introduction of this panel by 15 minutes. After that awkward start, I had a good conversation about ways customers can become empowered custodians of their own data with executives at companies trying to make that happen: digi.me founder Julian Ranger, MatchUpBox CEO Didier Collin de Casaubon, Meeco founder Katryna Dow, and Universal Music CTO Ty Roberts. Update, 2/6: MEF posted audio of our conversation.
1/7/2017: Mobile Apps Showdown, Living in Digital Times
I helped judge this competition (irreverently emceed by my Yahoo colleague David Pogue), then jumped on stage to introduce the app I’d evaluated, Intel Security’s True Key. My summary of its use case: “You all suck at passwords.”
1/8/2017: How to stay online in impossible circumstances, USA Today
My editor suggested I use my column to share lessons learned from CES about preserving the battery life and connectivity of mobile devices in phone-hostile environments like the gadget show. I should have known that the press-room WiFi would crap out as I was trying to write this Friday afternoon, leaving me to limp along on the Las Vegas Convention Center’s insultingly-limited guest network.
1/8/2017: The weirdest tech we saw at CES 2017, Yahoo Finance
I filed this from the United Club at McCarran at around 11, which is also not how people normally spend a weekend night in Vegas.
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