Tag Archives: Connected Conference

Weekly output: digitizing infrastructure, Oracle v. Google, Bluetooth beacons, ads and privacy

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After two straight weeks of travel (separated by almost 24 hours at home), I have the novel experience of looking at my calendar and not seeing any upcoming flights. That can only be explained by a bug in that app, right?

Connected Conference panel5/27/2016: Digitizing Infrastructure, Connected Conference

The scheduling for my part of this Internet-of-Things conference in Paris moved around a lot. My original connected-cars panel got swapped out for this one, and then the speakers for a discussion of smart buildings and smart cities got reshuffled more than once. As you can see, the conference site’s page about the panel still only lists some of the people who showed up Friday morning (besides me, Olivier Selles of Bouygues Immobilier, Herbert Beck of Nexity, Riad Ziour of Openergy, Jackson Bond of Relayr and IBM’s Christian Comtat). Most surprising anecdote: How an IoT climate-control system brought a little labor peace to an office where union officials didn’t trust management’s estimates of indoor air quality.

5/27/2016: Why you should care that Google dodged Oracle’s $9 billion bullet, Yahoo Finance

This jury verdict in Google’s favor and against Oracle dropped Thursday night in Paris, so I had to write this explainer during what little downtime I had Friday morning and afternoon in the city. (Did comparing APIs to the bumps on a Lego block work for you?) I promise I will look over all 120-and-counting comments sometime soon, but hopefully not tomorrow.

5/29/2016: Don’t be alarmed if Android wants to get physical, USA Today

After a visit to one Connected Conference exhibit yielded an Android notification of a Web address being broadcast by a nearby Bluetooth beacon, I realized I had a decent column topic sitting in front of me. Writing it also gave me a chance to revisit some of the early hype around Apple’s iOS-only iBeacon.

5/29/2016: A ‘right not to be surprised’ in ads would be great — good luck defining that, Yahoo Finance

I’d had this idea kicking around since hearing AdRoll CEO Adam Berke’s talk at the Collision conference, but I somehow waited to finish writing it until I was in one of the world’s most beautiful cities.

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State of my French: less rusty than feared

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PARIS–I’ve now spent more time in a French-speaking environment than at any point since the June day in 1991 when I boarded a flight to Newark from here at the end of my family’s two-year expatriate stay.

Paris in the eveningTwenty-five years is a long time to go out of practice in a language, and I lived up to my low expectations of my degraded proficiency when I said “210” as “205” Monday evening. But each day since then, I’ve gotten a little more comfortable at not just hearing or reading French but the more difficult part of speaking it.

I’m not about to have verb-conjugation tables pop back into my head all filled out, but as I find myself engaging in brief exchanges without getting flustered, I’ve realized that the francophone parts of my brain haven’t turned to mush. Instead, I can almost picture the old synapses lighting up for the first time in a quarter of a century.

Vous pouvez imaginer mon soulagement!

(Yes, I did wimp out by checking that in Google Translate.)

I am going to need more practice to get close to my former fluency. I could add French to the Spanish lessons I’ve been taking in the Duolingo app (thanks for the recommendation of that in a comment on an earlier post here), but what I really could use is another good tech event or two to attend here. Suggestions?