Weekly output: net neutrality, Web browsers compared, Last Gadget Standing, China’s autonomous-vehicle ambitions, Sprint and Verizon “unlimited” data

Posted on June 18, 2018 by robpegoraro

My most-distant business trip of the year is in the books, and I don’t even feel that tired after getting home Friday evening. Falling asleep in my own bed remains the single best cure for jet lag that I know. I’m traveling again this ~~year~~ coming week, but I’m only going about 3 percent as far–I’m in New York from Tuesday night through Friday afternoon for the CE Week show.

6/11/2018: Why the death of net-neutrality rules will be a big campaign issue, Yahoo Finance

I started writing this from Newark International Airport, then finished it and filed it from the plane–worrying I’d lose the satellite link as the plane got farther and farther north. My thanks to United for not leaving me in the lurch… and for opening some upgrade space just in time for my longest flight this year.

6/12/2018: Stuck on Chrome? Always use Safari? It may be time to break up with your default web browser, USA Today

Apple’s WWDC news about online privacy got my editor interested in a post comparing the virtues of the Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. If you still run Microsoft Internet Explorer, my advice in this column remains unchanged from prior years: stop.

6/13/2018: Last Gadget Standing, CES Asia

I helped emcee this competition along with my former Yahoo colleague Dan Tynan and Last Gadget’s impresario-in-chief Robin Raskin. I introduced and briefly quizzed the people behind three finalists: iGlass AR, Action One, and the Wahe nuclear living room machine V. Alas, my joke about the name of that last device–a streaming-media player with gaming aspirations–becoming “nucular living room machine” in the American South was never going to make it through translation.

6/16/2018: How self-driving cars will take to China’s roads, Yahoo Finance

I wrote most of this from my hotel, then filed it from my flight home–except that when edits came back, we were still too far north to have a reliable signal. And since I had stupidly neglected to e-mail photos before taking off, I also had to deal with the horribly slow uploads of satellite Internet.

For more from CES Asia, have a look at my Flickr album from the trip.

6/17/2018: Sprint and Verizon’s latest deals offer still more definitions of “Unlimited“, USA Today

Verizon decided that having two different flavors of unlimited wasn’t enough, so it added three–while Sprint elected to mix up its own offerings with a quickly-expiring offer that amounted to a Basic Economy level of unlimited data.

Weekly output: iOS 11 issues, Super Cruise, SESTA, Tech Night Owl

Posted on October 1, 2017 by robpegoraro

In recent years, late September has seen me jetting off to one city or another to attend the Online News Association’s annual conference, but this time around my ONA travel will consist of taking Metro–the conference starts Thursday at the Marriott in Woodley Park. And I’m also on the schedule for the first time: I’m speaking Saturday afternoon with veteran freelancer Katherine Lewis about survival skills for the self-employed.

Meanwhile, the Nationals host the Cubs sometime Friday and Saturday in the first two games of the division series, ensuring that I will be completely hoarse and sleep-deprived by Sunday. Go Nats!

9/26/2017: How to fix Apple iOS 11 battery and Outlook problems, USA Today

My editor opted to hold this post for a day to reduce the odds of it getting lost in USAT’s other iOS 11 coverage.

9/28/2017: What it’s like riding in Cadillac’s self-driving Super Cruise for 350 miles, Yahoo Finance

This account of having a 2018 Cadillac CT6 drive me along much of I-70 and the Pennsylvania and Ohio Turnpikes was the most interesting transportation-related piece I’ve written since this spring’s post about advances in Gogo’s satellite WiFi. The long drive from Washington to Cleveland also let me see parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio that I hadn’t glimpsed in years and take a detour to pay my respects at the Flight 93 National Memorial.

9/30/2017: Why the tech industry is worried about a bill targeting sex trafficking, Yahoo Finance

I should have had this post about the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act written earlier, but the delays allowed me to add some useful quotes from a panel I attended on the Hill Thursday.

9/30/2017: September 30, 2017 — Rob Pegoraro and Kirk McElhearn, Tech Night Owl

I talked with host Gene Steinberg about my Cadillac test drive, my iOS experience, and the macOS High Sierra install that was going on in the background but had not wrapped up by the time my roughly hour-long segment ended.

Weekly output: VR (x2), cloud efficiency, cloud video (x2), gig economy, work-life balance, customer experience, Facebook plans, self-driving cars

Posted on November 14, 2016 by robpegoraro

I’ve had few weeks that have left me more physically exhausted. Only hours after I was congratulating myself for crushing jet lag so soon after landing in Lisbon, the traumatic election destroyed my sleep cycle for the rest of the week, then I had jet lag in the reverse direction compounded by a cold I picked up sometime at Web Summit.

I filed the stories you see here about VR and cloud video weeks ago, so they didn’t add to the workload. On the other hand, the list below omits a post about Hillary Clinton’s broadband-expansion plans that my Yahoo editors had asked me to file by Tuesday afternoon so they could run it on Wednesday. I have never been sorrier to see a story of mine get spiked.

11/7/2016: Content and TV Companies Test the VR Waters, VR May Require Network Upgrades, FierceCable

Management at Fierce must not have hated the post I did for them two months ago, so they sent a few more assignments my way. This e-book–as with September’s, you’ll have to cough up a name, e-mail and some occupational details to download it–features two stories from me about the state of virtual reality.

11/8/2016: Revolutionising processes and driving efficiency, Web Summit

A panel about a topic as potentially vague as “using the cloud to make your business more efficient” could have been a tad dry. But my fellow panelists SnapLogic CEO Gaurav Dhillon, Symphony founder and CEO David Gurle, Dell EMC CTO John Roese, and WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner made it work. The link above points to a Facebook Live video of Tuesday morning’s panels on the Summit’s “SaaS Monster” stage; mine starts at about 55:10 in.

11/10/2016: A Complicated Forecast for Moving Video to the Cloud, Ads Move to the Cloud, Bringing Scale, Creativity and Inventory Issues, FierceBroadcasting

The first story for this Fierce e-book–you’ll have to cough up a name and e-mail to download it–covers some of issues streaming-video providers have to deal with when moving older video to cloud services. the second gets into the weeds with how ads make the same transition and explains oddities like ad breaks that don’t have an ad, just placeholder music or graphics.

11/9/2016: Rethinking the workforce, Web Summit

This panel was a more obvious fit: I’m a full-time freelancer, and venture capitalist Bradley Tusk and Handy founder and CEO Oisin Hanrahan want to make it easier for companies that rely on independent workers to provide them with portable benefits they can take to a future “gig economy” client. My one regret: After Tusk suggested that Republican control of both the executive and legislative branches could mean progress on things like tax reform, I should have asked how repealing the Affordable Care Act would help the self-employed. Skip to 1:22:50 in the Facebook video to see this panel.

11/9/2016: Technology has destroyed the work-life balance, Web Summit

This was structured as an actual debate, with Deloitte CTO Bill Briggs assigned to argue that tech has done just that while Kochava CEO Charles Manning presented the opposing case. Being a full-time work-from-home type gave me a useful perspective; moderating the debate on four hours of nightmare sleep probably explains why I forgot to take a show of hands of the audience at the start and then had to take that measurement of the audience’s pulse halfway through. This panel starts at 1:41:30 into this Facebook video.

Photo via Web Summit, reproduced under a Creative Commons license

Photo via Web Summit, reproduced under a Creative Commons CC-BY 2.0 license.

11/9/2016: Customer experience in the millennial age, Web Summit

I felt like I was more on my game for this discussion with Qualtrics co-founders Ryan and Jared Smith than at the day’s two earlier panels, even though I was so tired at that point that halfway through, I was telling myself “15 more minutes of focus and then I can go pass out in the speakers’ lounge.”

11/11/2016: Facebook’s status update: broadband bets, chattier bots, stricter security, Yahoo Finance

I gave up trying to write this Wednesday–there was zero chance of it getting any attention in the glut of election stories–but then didn’t file it until Thursday evening. One reason why: Tuesday and Wednesday left me so destroyed that I somehow slept in until 11 a.m. Thursday, something I last did before the birth of our child.

11/11/2016: These are the cars we’ll get before self-driving cars, Yahoo Finance

This post about Renault Nissan and Cadillac’s ambitions to give you a limited sort of autonomous driving took a little longer to write as well. I filed it from my hotel before joining friends for dinner at around 9 local time, which is not a crazy time to have dinner in that part of the world.

Weekly output: EU copyright, ICANN, self-driving cars (x2), MacBook battery

Posted on September 26, 2016 by robpegoraro

I could have had two other items on this list–Thursday, two different news networks asked if I could comment on camera about Yahoo’s data breach. I told each booker that as somebody who writes for a Yahoo site, it would be just a bit awkward for me to opine on camera about that issue. (Besides, it’s not like I had much free time that day in the first place.)

9/19/2016: The EU’s new copyright reforms could change the internet, Yahoo Finance

I filed this piece–a sequel of sorts to a post I did in 2012 for the Disruptive Competition Project about Europe’s doomed dream of getting search engines to pay newspapers for showing snippets of stories in search results–from the Online News Association’s conference Friday afternoon of the prior week. That scheduling seems to be the only consistently reliable way for me to get a post up on a Monday morning.

9/20/2016: No, Ted Cruz, the US isn’t giving away the internet, Yahoo Finance

I’d had this story on my to-do list for weeks, but finally writing it this week turned out to be good timing: The next day, Donald Trump came out against the planned handover of supervision of the domain name system, doing so with his characteristic lack of knowledge.

9/22/2016: Stocks extend Fed-fueled rally, Yahoo Finance

I made my debut on Finance’s 4 p.m. “The Final Round” live show not to talk about the stock market, but to discuss the legal prospects for self-driving cars. I’m on from about 5:00 to 8:00 in the video, talking to host Jen Rogers about things like who might be likely to sue whom when one autonomous car hits another.

9/22/2016: How the government plans to make your self-driving car safer, Yahoo Finance

I wrote about half this story on the train up from D.C., with the remaining half done after watching a panel of lawyers debate this topic at the MarketplaceLive conference in New York. Because I was in Yahoo’s newsroom, I could go over the edits the old-fashioned way: by sitting down next to my editor instead of bouncing messages back and forth in Slack.

9/25/2016: How to prolong your MacBook’s battery life, USA Today

Not for the first time, my own hardware served up a good column topic that helped me learn a new troubleshooting step, which is always nice.