Tag Archives: CES 2020

Weekly output: CES recap (x2), Bezos iPhone hack, Intuit’s stewardship of Mint, VentureFuel CES panel, encrypting smartphone backups

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This week has me attending two conferences in D.C. The tech-policy gathering State of the Net has been a fixture of my winters since 2006, while my introduction to the hacker convention ShmooCon did not come until last January.

1/21/2020: Industry Insights: CES Speaker Series Part 2, eMarketer

This research firm interviewed me over e-mail about this year’s CES. The last exchange in this short piece:

Q: If you could pick one thing that should stay in Vegas, forever, what would it be?

A: CES traffic. Who else would want it?

1/21/2020: Techdirt Podcast Episode 235: The CES 2020 Post-Mortem, Techdirt

I spent 44 minutes talking to Techdirt founder Mike Masnick about my impressions of the show–including my less-than-successful ride in a self-driving car and an eerily-personalized dinner hosted by HBO.

1/22/2020: Bezos iPhone hack, Al Jazeera

I talked about the deeply-strange report that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had his iPhone hacked by a malware-loaded WhatsApp message sent by Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. As I said on the air: Who will ever again open a message from that guy?

1/23/2020: What the hell happened to Mint?, Fast Company

I have been meaning to write a piece unpacking Intuit’s apathetic stewardship of Mint for years–as the occasional rant here and on Twitter about that personal-finance app should have suggested. A mid-January ragetweet elicited an apologetic reply from one of Mint’s original developers, which led me to think I should dust off the pitch another client had rejected last year and add the promise of quotes from ex-Mint types. That got a quick thumbs-up from FC, and then I had a great half-hour conversation with Mint founder Aaron Patzer, with whom I’d last spoken when I was still at the Washington Post, not long after Intuit had bought his startup.

The post promptly blew up, getting an outsized reaction across Twitter and sparking some involved discussions at Reddit and Hacker News about possible alternatives to Mint; I’m the “robpegoraro” answering questions in each thread.

1/23/2020: The Future: From the Writers Who Cover Innovation, VentureFuel

Fred Schonenberg, founder and CEO of the consultancy that had me on a panel at CES two and a half weeks ago, wrote up the conversation I had with fellow journalists Eric Savitz and Rick Limpert. I appreciated Fred giving some prominent play to one thing I said back then: Data isn’t the new oil, it’s the new nuclear waste.

1/26/2020: Whether Apple or Google: Is there a back door into your phone’s online backups?, USA Today

A Reuters report that Apple had dropped plans to offer end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups of iPhones and iPads led to this explainer of the different levels of encryption possible with backups. Short version of the column: If you want to encrypt your phone’s data without any other party having a backup key, you’ll either have to stick to local backup of your iPhone or use an Android phone running either of the two most recent releases of Google’s mobile operating system.

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Weekly output: talking CES 2020 with Mark Vena

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This was one of those weeks where all of my public output involved me talking about my job instead of doing it (including one radio interview that doesn’t seem to have gotten aired and a second podcast that should get posted next week). The exception: Patreon, where I unloaded my CES 2020 notebook by writing about my observations of TiVo’s strategy, how HBO took me and my data with dinner, and my aborted ride in a self-driving car.

1/16/2020: Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast (1-13-20), Mark Vena

I joined my analyst friend Mark Vena via Skype Monday afternoon (hence the Jan. 13 reference in the title) to unpack what we learned from CES 2020. We talked about privacy on connected TVs (others call them “smart TVs,” but I’m not ready to bestow that kind of compliment), foldable phones and laptops, 5G wireless and the industry’s addition to hyping it up, and much much more.

Weekly output: OurStreets, ATSC 3.0, innovation in 2020, 5G meets retail, connected-TV privacy, Last Gadget Standing, Korean smart-city tech, best of CES

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Yet another CES is in the books. It was a tiring week, but once again I got an enormous amount out of the show. And it is nice to think that less than two weeks into the year, I’ve already finished the year’s toughest business trip.

Earlier this evening, I put together a Flickr album of my pictures from the gadget show; at some point in the next few days, I will write up the more interesting bits from my notes for Patreon subscribers.

1/6/2020: This app helps pedestrians and cyclists wage war on terrible drivers, Fast Company

The second-to-last piece I filed in 2019 ran a week later–a look at an upcoming app that will help pedestrians and cyclists report bad behavior by drivers.

1/8/2020: ATSC 3.0 draws selective, if not scant, support at CES 2020, FierceVideo

Industry support for a long-awaited upgrade to broadcast-TV technology is a somewhat wonky topic compared to, say, robots bearing toilet paper, but that’s why it’s handy to have a trade-pub client that deals in wonky stuff all the time.

1/8/2020: What’s Next for Innovation in 2020?, VentureFuel

I debated fellow tech journalists Eric Savitz and Rick Limpert in a panel discussion hosted by this New York-based consultancy before a small audience of investor and founder types.

1/8/2020: 5G Meets Retail, CES

My contribution to the show’s high-tech retailing track was this talk with Nokia 5G market-development director Jason Elliott and Verizon connected-solutions managing director Arvin Singh about what 5G could do for the retail experience–in a shop and along its supply chain.

Yes, this was my second manel of CES. I should have said something about that when I was asked to join each panel but did not, and feeling strung out by December’s cognitive overload is a weak excuse.

 

1/9/2020: CES: Your smart TV is watching you. Will Samsung, LG, Vizio do more to protect privacy?, USA Today

Think of this column as a sequel to the one I wrote for USAT from Google I/O in May. Where Google showed it could speak in detail–if not as much as I’d like–about adopting such data-minimization techniques as federated learning, TV manufacturers at CES appeared to be grossly unready for that sort of privacy discussion.

1/9/2020: Last Gadget Standing, Living in Digital Times

Once again, I helped judge this competition and then introduced two contenders on stage Thursday: the Octobo connected toy and the Flic 2 programmable smart button.

1/9/2020: A Look At Korea’s Smart-City Ambitions At CES, Ubergizmo

Friends at this gadget blog asked if I could help with their coverage by writing up one set of exhibits in the Eureka Park startup space. They offered a suitable rate, so I said that would be fine.

1/9/2020: CES 2020: Our best of show, USA Today

I contributed a paragraph about Hyundai’s air-taxi venture with Uber that ended with a contrary comment from an aviation-safety professional who’s understandably skeptical about the odds of this and other attempts at urban air mobility. If you’re not in the mood to read that much, you can also hear my spoken-word rendition of this piece (recorded on a Vegas sidewalk Wednesday night) on Jefferson Graham’s Talking Tech podcast.

Updated 1/16/2020 to correct the spelling of Elliott’s last name; updated 1/29/2020 to add a YouTube embed of the panel.

CES 2020 travel-tech report: too much rebooting

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My 23rd CES in a row featured an accomplishment I may never have pulled off before: I didn’t open my laptop the last day.

I got away with that because I’d filed all of the copy I owed from Las Vegas by Wednesday evening, leaving Thursday writing-free. And because I was starting to worry about having to rely on my laptop for one more day at the gadget show.

Each prior morning in Vegas, I awoke to find that my late-2017 HP Spectre x360 had crashed overnight and then failed to reboot, instead landing on a black-and-white error screen reporting that a boot device could not be found. Rebooting the laptop–sometimes more than once–allowed this computer to rediscover its solid-state drive, but I kept worrying that the condition would become terminal.

And then Friday morning, I dared to open the HP’s screen after my red-eye flight out of Vegas and had it awake normally, as it’s done every time since. I need to figure this out before I head out for MWC next month.

My HP is showings its age in other ways. The two rubber pads on the bottom have peeled off (this seems to happen a lot), and the battery life could be better.

My Google Pixel 3a, on the other hand, worked like a champ throughout my long work week as I took pictures and notes, stayed mostly on top of e-mail and tweeted out my usual snarky CES commentary. This phone didn’t crash once, and its battery lasted long enough for me not to get anxious about it–though having it recharge so quickly also helped with that.

But my Pixel 3a also briefly hijacked my Twitter account when I apparently didn’t press the phone’s power button before shoving it in my pocket after I’d tweeted my congratulations to a friend on his new job. And then I didn’t even realize this storm of pocket-tweeting had erupted until a few minutes later. Ugh.

Unlike last year, I benefited from the fortuitous overlap of an update to Wirecutter’s WiFi-hotspot guide. This let me borrow the bandwidth of the top two devices in this review, a Verizon Jetpack 8800L and an AT&T Nighthawk LTE, while also subjecting them to the harshest use possible. The 8800L also doubled as a battery pack for my phone; the Nighthawk also offers that function, but not via its USB-C port–and I forgot to pack a USB-A-to-C cable.

The Belkin travel power strip that I’ve been packing since 2012 also proved instrumental in keeping my devices charged, because there are never enough power outlets in CES press rooms. This gadget had the added advantage of not needing any firmware updates or reboots. So did the handheld storage device I used to access my notes for a panel I led Wednesday: a Field Notes notebook.