Category Archives: Weekly output

Weekly output: cybersecurity, pay-TV satisfaction, U.S. vs. Huawei, personal air transport, open-source SaaS, Collision conference

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I don’t have to fly anywhere Monday, which seems a cause for joy after the last six weeks of travel.

5/21/2019: Cybersecurity: In search of the Holy Grail?, Collision

This somewhat broad description yielded a talk on what we’re doing wrong in infosec with defy.vc managing director Trae Vassallo, Veracode co-founder Chris Wysopal, 4iQ CEO Monica Pal, and Emerson Collective managing director (and former Democratic National Committee CTO Raffi Krikorian. I will add a link to video of this (and the other panels I moderated in Toronto) whenever the organizers post it; in the meantime, enjoy the picture by my friend John Ulaszek.

5/21/2019: Comcast, DirecTV and others suffer another round of low customer satisfaction scores, FierceVideo

I wrote up the latest findings of the American Customer Satisfaction Index survey for my occasional trade-publication client FierceVideo.

5/21/2019: U.S. vs. Huawei, Al Jazeera

I talked to AJ’s Arabic-language news channel about the growing isolation of the Chinese telecom firm via Skype from the Collision speaker-prep lounge; if you watched this hit live, that setting should explain the dull backdrop.

5/22/2019: The race to rule the skies, Collision

My second Collision panel featured Gwen Lighter, founder and CEO of the GoFly competition, and Ben Marcus, co-founder of the drone-cartography firm AirMap, talking about efforts to enable personal air transportation.

5/23/2019: Open source in the SaaS era, Collision

Panel number three of this week called for me to interview MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz, and that proved harder than I’d expected: The stage acoustics made it difficult for mo to hear complete sentences from him.

5/24/2019: At Collision conference, Facebook and the rest of tech gets taken to task once again, USA Today

I wrote a recap of the conference for USAT that noted the general distaste for Facebook’s reach and conduct as well as the lack of certainty over what, exactly, we should do about that company.

Updated 6/29/2019 to add links to videos of my Collision panels.

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Weekly output: the future of pay TV (x2), wireless choices

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I returned from Denver Thursday afternoon, and Monday morning I fly to Toronto to start my sixth week in a row of travel–after which I’ll have a whole eight days at home. This streak should end on a high note: the Collision conference there has me moderating three panels, I’m happy to return to Toronto after my years-overdue introduction to the city last year, and I always get a ton out of Web Summit’s events.

5/14/2019: Fireside Chat- State of the Market with Wolfe Research and S&P Westminster Ballroom, The Pay TV Show

I quizzed analysts Ian Olgeirson, research director with the Kagan group of S&P Global Market Intelligence, and Marci Ryvicker, managing director and senior equity analyst at Wolfe Research, about the present and future of streaming TV.

This was a weird panel for me: Right after moderating it, I got hung up over the words that I’d stumbled over and some subpar clock management that led me to drop a couple of topics and then have a minute to fill at the end of the panel. But every attendee who shared an opinion with me said the panel was great, and their opinion overrides mine. Well, at least the opinion of the FierceVideo managers who are covering my travel costs for this show.

For more on our discussion: FierceVideo and Streamable both covered my panel, and each one ran a photo that shows me talking with my hands.

5/17/2019: You might soon have to choose between local channels and cheaper TV prices, Yahoo Finance

I wrote up my major takeaways from the show for Yahoo, and I have to imagine that sports fans and people lacking good over-the-air TV reception won’t be happy with them.

5/18/2019: The Big Four Of Cellular Plans and Their Inner Workings | #204, Popular Technology Radio

I talked to host Mike Etchart how the big four wireless carries have evolved (yes, I name-checked Sprint Spectrum) and how to choose among them.

Updated 5/28/2019 to add my radio appearance.

Weekly output: 8K TV, privacy at Google I/O, Waymo

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A week after taking off for the Bay Area to cover Google’s I/O conference, I’m departing for Denver early Monday afternoon. This week’s excuse for propping up the airline industry: moderating a state-of-the-industry panel at the Pay TV Show, in return for which the conference organizers are covering my travel costs.

5/6/2019: Dark clouds invade forecast for 8K TV shipments, FierceVideo

My big takeaway from the IFA Global Press Conference two weeks ago was a dramatically more pessimistic forecast for 8K TV shipments from the research firm IHS Markit. It was refreshing to see analysts decline to get in line behind industry hype over a new product category.

5/8/2019: Google attempts a pivot toward privacy at I/O developer conference, USA Today

For the first time in my experience, USAT didn’t send any of its own reporters to Google’s developer conference, leaving this piece my client’s sole dateline from that event.

5/10/2019: Waymo Doesn’t Mind Being Boring, CityLab

I took a break from I/O Wednesday morning to attend a press event hosted by Waymo, the self-driving-car subsidiary of Google’s parent firm Alphabet. Said event did not feature any time as a passenger in one of Waymo’s autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans, because the company apparently still doesn’t have the California permit needed to offer rides to non-employees.

On top of those stories, I also launched a page on the Patreon crowdfunding site. Despite getting no more publicity than a post here Saturday evening and one appreciative tweet afterwards, this experiment already has a non-zero number of supporters pledging to chip in a couple of dollars a month. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

Weekly output: cable-ISP data caps (x2), how long wireless carriers keep your cell-site location history, Facebook banning extremists, IFA GPC

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Tomorrow kicks off three weeks in a row of travel: first Google I/O in Mountain View, Calif., which I’ll be covering for as many of my clients as feasible; then the Pay TV Show outside of Denver, at which I’m moderating a panel discussion between two industry analysts; then the Collision conference, newly relocated to Toronto and once again involving me speaking on a few panels. Fortunately, I have four nights at home between each of these trips.

5/1/2019: Why your cable company might be happy to see you stop subscribing to its TV service, USA Today

After seeing a research note from MoffettNathanson highlighting how some smaller cable operators have made their peace with video subscribers cancelling cable TV and switching to streaming TV services, I noticed that both firms spotlighted in that note–Cable One and Mediacom–had some stringent data caps in place that should allow them to profit handsomely from their Internet subscribers pivoting to online video.

5/2/2019: This Morning with Gordon Deal May 02, 2019, This Morning with Gordon Deal

I talked about my latest USAT column with this business-news radio show; my spot starts at the 14-minute mark.

5/3/2019: Why carriers keep your data longer, TechCrunch

I’ve been reading TC for years and going to their events for almost as long, but this is my first byline there. This post is also my first paywalled work in a while, requiring an Extra Crunch subscription ($150 a year, two-week free trial available). Here’s my one-sentence summary of this roughly 1,500-word piece: The four nationwide wireless carriers keep your cell-site location history for as long as five years and as little as one year, but none of them act as if these retention periods are information you’d want to know.

5/3/2019: Facebook banning extremists, Al Jazeera

I had my first appearance in a few weeks at the Arabic-language news channel to talk about Facebook’s recent move to ban such extremists as InfoWars conspiracy-theory liars Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson, Islamophobic loon Laura Loomer, and Nation of Islam anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan.

5/4/2019: Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast (5-4-19), What’s Hot in Tech?

If you thought the people giving you advice about what gadgets to buy could get said gadgets to work every time: My Saturday-afternoon conversation with analyst Mark Vena and my fellow tech freelancer John Quain recapping the IFA Global Press Conference was the third take of this podcast. The first attempt at the IFA GPC went awry when Mark’s iPhone overheated in the heat of a Spanish afternoon, then a second try a few days later fell prey to a corrupted audio recording.

Weekly output: Apple’s AirDrop privacy error

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I’m home for the shortest interval ever between trips, but it’s not my work’s fault. After four days getting an update on consumer-electronics trends at the IFA Global Press Conference (this year, that event took place on the Spanish coast; as in prior years, the organizers covered most of my travel costs and those of the other invited journalists and analysts), I’m flying to Cleveland early tomorrow morning for my Uncle Jim’s funeral.

If this post gets you to call or e-mail an aunt or uncle you haven’t talked to in a while, then it’s been more useful than most of these roundups.

4/27/2019: The feature Apple needs to change in AirDrop, Yahoo Finance

I’ve written about how the design of the AirDrop file-sharing feature in iOS enables harassment from creeps trying to send dick pics and other unwanted images to strangers. But hearing my wife talk about how a visit by our daughter’s Brownie troop to the neighborhood Apple Store end with a store employee offering to AirDrop pictures of the kids to the parents there—an invitation they could only accept by setting AirDrop to accept files from “Everyone,” which would in turn leave them open to “cyber-flashing”–led me to decide to take another whack at Apple for leaving this flaw unfixed.

To all the men who have commented that they’ve never had this problem and, come on, it’s not that hard to change the setting back: Thanks for making my case that we need more diversity on development teams, and please don’t join any yourself.

Weekly output: FCC broadband map (still) considered harmful

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This week was our kid’s spring break, so we had a lot of family time. I, in turn, had a little less laptop time than usual–which is another way of saying I’m starting this workweek slightly behind.

4/19/2019: Why it’s so hard for some Americans to get high-speed internet, Yahoo Finance

This piece started with a lengthy e-mail from a reader of a column I wrote for USA Today four years ago. As I do too often, I neglected that message from this resident of a broadband-deprived part of rural Michigan for a week before kicking off a slow-motion correspondence that revealed a fairly horrible failure of the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband map. The major fault here: The map relies on old and fuzzy data from providers that don’t always accurately report where they provide Internet access. Since this post ran, I’ve received another lengthy e-mail from a resident of rural northern California who’s been dealing with another broadband drought that doesn’t show up on the FCC map, and I can’t rule out writing a sequel.

Weekly output: world leaders on Facebook, Facebook phone-number privacy

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This week is ending with a dubious first: I’ve had a tweet taken down in response to a groundless Digital Millennium Copyright Act request. After a couple of decades of covering digital-intellectual-property foolishness, it’s interesting to have the shoe on my own foot.

4/10/2019: Trump is 2nd most liked current world leader on Facebook, Yahoo Finance

I wrote up a study that found that America’s authoritarian president ranked behind Brazil’s authoritarian president in terms of their effectiveness at coaxing interactions out of Facebook.

USAT Facebook phone-number privacy post4/14/2019: Facebook, lose my digits: Here’s how to unlist your phone number, USA Today

I spent more than a month researching this post–by which I meant, I kept asking Facebook to answer what I thought reasonably simple questions about how it lets advertisers and other users try to look you up by a phone number you first provided as a two-step verification method. Said research finally ended with Facebook saying it would stop letting advertisers target numbers newly added for that purpose.

In case you’re wondering why it’s been a month since my last appearance at USAT, this long wait to get a straight answer out of the social network is one reason. Another is that people above my editor’s pay grade have cut back on the freelance budget–have I mentioned that this is a tough time in my industry?–and one way to deal with that for now is to run half as many pieces from me.