Once again, time put into helping family members with their gadgetry over this holiday weekend has yielded a pretty good idea for a post–or so I hope my editors will think.
You can think of this column as a sequel to a post I wrote for Yahoo Finance in August. This time around, I didn’t get so far into the weeds about adjusting Facebook notification settings–having to confine your work to 500+ words instead of as much as a thousand will do that–and used some of the space conserved to explain two newer smartphone features to regulate your time on the social network. A third option may now be available in your iOS or Android Facebook app: “Your Time on Facebook” tracking of the minutes and hours you while away on Facebook.
I fell seriously behind on tweeting out new stories this week, as Web Summit occupied most of my mental processor cycles during my stay in Lisbon. I also didn’t keep up with headlines in my RSS feed or even setting aside a minute or two a day to plod along in Spanish tutorials in the Duolingo app.
The Summit organizers usually post video of every session not long after the conference, but that hasn’t happened yet; when it does, I’ll embed those clips below. They now have.
The story assignment came from inside the house, in the form of my having to call up a bank to have our cards reissued after somebody spent close to a thousand dollars on that account at Lenovo’s online store.
11/6/2018: Disrupting the traditional SaaS business model: The rise of the developer, Web Summit
My first panel at Web Summit featured two people running software-as-a-service shops: Nicolas Dessaigne of Algolia, and Adam FitzGerald of Amazon Web Services. This topic was well outside of my usual consumer-tech coverage, but a 20-minute panel isn’t too much airtime to fill if you do some basic research.
When I saw the Post’s scoop about Amazon getting exceedingly close to anointing Crystal City, I e-mailed my Yahoo editors volunteering to write any sort of “10 things to know about Arlington” post they might need. They didn’t require that, but they did ask me to write a summary of my county’s advantages–and some of its disadvantages, as noted in a few grafs that reveal the nerdiest bit of verbiage you’ll hear around Arlington.
11/8/2018: Marketing performance in a digital age – complexity to clarity, reaction to action, Web Summit
This was my most difficult panel at this conference, thanks to some reshuffling of questions late in the game and poor acoustics onstage that left me and my conversations partners Vincent Stuhlen (L’Oreal) and Catherine Wong (Domo) struggling to hear each other.
11/8/2018: CTO panel discussion: A day in life, Web Summit
Barely 30 minutes later, I had my second panel of Thursday, and this conversation with Cisco’s Susie Wee and Allianz SE’s Markus Löffler went much better.
11/8/2018: The human-machine race for the future, Web Summit
What’s not to like about interviewing the head of a robot-racecar company onstage? As a nice little bonus, this chat with Roborace CEO Lucas Di Grassi got introduced by my conference-nerd friend Adam Zuckerman.
I wrote up Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee’s Monday-night keynote about his initiative to improve his creation, as informed by a conversation Thursday with the CEO of his World Wide Web Foundation.
LISBON–I’m here for my fourth Web Summit, which is also my third in a row to have me moderating panels and away from the U.S. during election day. I like this conference, but I’m missing the experience of casting a ballot in person on the big day. American citizens reading this: You will be doing just that Tuesday if you haven’t already voted early or absentee, right? Because if you don’t, you’re inviting the dumbest person in your precinct to vote in your place.
I talked to host Gene Steinberg about some puzzling aspects of Apple’s finally-updated computer lineup, along with its decision to stop revealing unit-sales numbers in future earnings releases.
Not for the first time, a topic I tried out as a post here became a separate story for a paying client. Did that piece get you to set the default search in one of your browsers to the privacy-optimized DuckDuckGo? I’ll take your answer in the comments.
After spending five weeks in a row at home, I’ve got this year’s last big trip coming up: Saturday night, I depart for Web Summit. The last time I was in Lisbon for a national election, things did not go so well; please do better next week, America.
I wrote this column not long after Facebook revealed its most serious data breach yet, but for reasons unclear to me but most likely related to “everybody’s overworked in journalism,” it did not run until this week.
I’ve covered the issue of whether you can replace a wired broadband connection with mobile broadband before, but this post brought a couple of extra wrinkles: AT&T and T-Mobile closing loopholes that had allowed unlimited tethering, and the testimony of somebody who’s gone a few years relying only on mobile broadband.
For most of this past week, the conference badge was on the other lanyard: My wife was out of town for work.That brief spell of solo parenting ended with the house miraculously not much messier than before and me needing a nap more than usual.
When I filed a first draft of my interview with former CIA director John Brennan two weeks ago, my editor said it read more like two posts and asked if I wouldn’t mind turning it into a pair of stories. This covers the second half of our conversation, folding in some quotes from some subsequent election-security events around D.C.
10/20/2018: Saudi Arabia’s Twitter mole, Al Jazeera
The New York Times reported Saturday that Saudi Arabia’s attempts to suppress dissidents like murdered Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi extended to recruiting a Twitter insider. Several hours later, I told viewers–as overdubbed into Arabic–that this development represented a serious departure from Silicon Valley’s traditional definition of espionage as “an employee takes trade secrets to a competitor.”
As part of what looks like the same kind of flood-the-zone coverage strategy I usually associate with Apple events, AJ had me on two more times Sunday to talk about this Twitter mole and Riyadh’s other attempts to change the social-media conversation.
Once again, Columbus Day–or, if you prefer, Indigenous People’s Day–delivered the unwelcome combination of our kid’s school being closed while both my wife and I still had to work. I joked on Twitter about resolving the argument over what to call this fake holiday and also saving Americans billions in day-care costs by abolishing it outright. But on reflection, the widely-tweeted suggestion that we relegate Columbus Day to a trivia question and promote Election Day to actual, don’t-have-to-work holiday status makes much more sense.
I’ve had this post in mind for a while, ever since conversations at events like Mobile World Congress and IFA revealed their lack of interest in shipping USB-C headphones. I expected that Google wouldn’t retreat from last year’s idiotic move to remove the headphone jack from its flagship smartphones, but I didn’t realize they would pull the same stunt with the new Pixel Slate tablet.
Even after spending a couple of weeks talking to various experts, I still have questions about how Voatz has been securing its blockchain-based voting system and whether states have thought long enough about how to ease absentee voting for faraway citizens. That said, many of the other options for absentee voting look even worse, something upon which I hope to write further in the coming weeks.
Updated 10/21/2018 to add a link to the Gordon Deal show.
11/21/2018: Thanksgiving tech to-do: Start a Facebook diet with all the trimmings, USA Today
