Weekly output: Huawei’s IFA pitch, broadband buildout, Verizon One Unlimited for iPhone, iPhone 12 and 13 discounts, pay-TV warnings, Super Bowl ads, Mark Vena podcast

Posted on September 11, 2022 by robpegoraro

A week after I got back from Berlin, I finished my Flickr album of photos from the event, plus another one of Berlin scenery. That comes just in time for me to get back on a plane to Europe: Monday night, I fly to Copenhagen for the TechBBQ conference, at which I’ll be one of the judges at a startup pitching session.

9/5/2022: Huawei exec generates reality distortion field in IFA keynote, Light Reading

The head of Huawei’s Western European consumer business gave some answers in this onstage Q&A that seemed not just detached from reality but delusional.

9/6/2022: NTIA Head: At First, New Broadband Maps Are ‘Not Going to Be as Good’ as We Want, PCMag

While the federal government will soon have much more accurate maps of broadband availability, it apparently won’t use them to distribute broadband-buildout subsidies until localites get a chance to challenge perceived inaccuracies.

9/7/2022: ‘One Unlimited for iPhone’ Is Verizon’s Sixth Unlimited-Data Phone Plan, PCMag

The lede here wrote itself: “Verizon now needs both hands to count all its unlimited-data smartphone plans.”

9/7/2022: Why now’s a great time to grab an iPhone 12 or 13 at a discount after iPhone 14 launch, USA Today

This explainer of the potential appeal of the newly-discounted iPhone 12 and 13 got a quick update after AT&T clarified that only the new iPhone 14 would be supported on the 3.45 GHz 5G spectrum it’s now deploying (which is not the same as its C-band 5G but also significant to its network plans).

9/8/2022: MoffettNathanson raises red flags about cord cutting, Fierce Video

On another day when I was filling in at my trade-pub client, I wrote up a research report warning media firms and pay-TV providers that cord cutting and advertising revenue each stood to get a good deal worse, while sports-rights deals would probably get even more expensive.

9/8/2022: Fox says Super Bowl spots are going, going, almost gone, Fierce Video

And speaking of sports-rights deals and advertising revenue, Fox Sports says it’s sold almost all of the spots for the next Super Bowl.

9/9/2022: S02 E35 – SmartTechCheck Podcast, Mark Vena

I rejoined this industry-analyst host and my fellow tech journalists John Quain and Stewart Wolpin to discuss IFA (Vena and Quain also covered it in Berlin) and Apple’s product-launch event Wednesday. One point I made about the latter: While Apple’s satellite-SOS feature looks fascinating, Apple requiring a subscription after the first two years raises a risk that somebody will set out for a wilderness hike with an iPhone that just turned two years old, then realize they can’t use that feature to summon help.

Weekly output: streaming-media survey, U.S. wireless-industry history, Cue Health vulnerability, United app’s flight simulator, Earth Day optimism, federal broadband-buildout plans

Posted on April 24, 2022 by robpegoraro

In 48 hours from now, I will once again be on a plane over the Atlantic. My excuse this time is leading a panel discussion at the TechChill conference in Riga, Latvia–a new-to-me conference at which a few friends of mine have spoken before. (One of these guys may have put in a good word for me with the organizers, in which case I guess I’ll be buying him dinner some time this week.)

4/18/2022: Why Do People Stream? Must-Watch Shows, Not Cord-Cutting Cost Savings, PCMag

I wrote up a MoffettNathanson survey about people’s streaming-media habits.

4/20/2022: A historical perspective of the USA Wireless market, Mobile Ecosystem Forum

I met Dario Betti, the CEO of this industry group, at MWC Barcelona in February, and afterwards he asked if he could interview me about my experience watching the U.S. wireless industry evolve over the past 30 years. I was delighted to geek out about that and brought a couple of props to our video discussion–for instance, a Nextel-logoed hourglass and a 1990s-vintage Nokia analog cell phone.

4/21/2022: Flaw in COVID-19 Testing Gadget Could’ve Been Exploited to Change Results, PCMag

This report about a found-and-fixed flaw in the Bluetooth component of Cue Health’s COVID-19 test reader initially called the security company that found the flaw WeSecure, not WithSecure. That error crept into the post during the editing process for reasons that nobody could untangle after the fact.

4/22/2022: United Airlines Adds a Boeing 787 Flight Simulator to Its App, PCMag

The first video-game review that I’ve written in maybe 20 years involved a flight simulator added to the airline app I use all the time. How could I not write that up?

4/22/2022: 5 technologies that should give us some hope for the planet’s future, Fast Company

One of my editors at FC asked if I could write an Earth Day post outlining some reasons to feel less doomed about the environment’s future. The resulting post started off close to home–the giant Dominion Energy wind farm planned off Virginia Beach, along with the turbine-blade manufacturing facility set to be built near there at the Portsmouth Marine Terminal.

4/22/2022: Feds: Before We Spend Billions on Broadband Rollout, We Need Better Maps, PCMag

The infrastructure bill passed last year includes $65 billion to extend broadband to Americans with slow or no Internet access, but the feds can’t spend that money effectively without accurate connectivity cartography.

Weekly output: how states are working to expand broadband availability, lessons learned from Estonia’s digital society

Posted on September 12, 2021 by robpegoraro

This week saw two minor personal milestones: my first in-person attendance at a conference since last March (appropriately enough, it was the Satellite trade show then and now; sadly enough, Richard Branson didn’t say anything nearly as quotable as Elon Musk did last spring), followed by my first reception around town since then (an event at a Rosslyn rooftop with breathtaking views of the city).

9/9/2021: How States are Bridging the Digital Divide, Trust

This feature for the Pew Charitable Trusts’ quarterly magazine provided my first print appearance in a while. If you get the mag in paper form yourself, you may have seen it before Thursday–my own comp copies showed up two weeks ago–but the date above reflects the piece’s appearance on Pew’s site.

9/10/2021: This country moved its government online. Here’s why that wouldn’t fly in the U.S., Fast Company

More than three weeks after I set out on my transatlantic journey to Tallinn, this recap of what I learned on that Estonian-government-hosted trip week ran. I used the time after coming home to check in with a few U.S. experts in election security and digital government to get second opinions about Estonia’s digital-society project.

Weekly output: homework-gap help, Facebook and the media, Apple’s app-tracking prompt

Posted on March 21, 2021 by robpegoraro

I’m writing this under a moderate amount of duress, in that WordPress has demoted the “Classic Editor” to a block you can invoke in the middle of a post written with the Block Editor about which I continue to grumble. One reason why: The Block Editor, notwithstanding improvements in its image-handling functions, still doesn’t appear to offer an indent feature, forcing me to switch gears one paragraph at a time to use the Classic block in this post.

3/16/2021: Two new bills could put a dent in technology’s ‘homework gap’, Fast Company

One of the better reasons to use (and pay for) a note-taking app is the ability to dredge up a quote from two years ago that shows one of the people you’re writing about was tuned into a problem before a pandemic put it in a harsh spotlight.

3/19/2021: Facebook Wants To Put News Back On Its Friends List, Forbes

You can see from the page-view totals shown atop this post that not many people read it. On the other hand, reporting this out gave me a chance to check in with a couple of my favorite journalism-conference people. And my including a link to my Patreon page was followed by a new reader signing up there.

3/20/2021: What an upcoming Apple privacy prompt will mean for you – and the apps you use, USA Today

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency prompt–your invitation to ask apps not to track your usage across other apps–drew full-page-newspaper-ad opposition from Facebook a few months ago, but since then other large tech giants have responded to it with a remarkable level of equanimity. This post also quotes a mobile-marketing consultant who warns that smaller developers have much more to lose.

Weekly output: digital divides, copyright meets AI, COVID-19 tracing

Posted on April 12, 2020 by robpegoraro

This was my first Easter spent in the D.C. area since… sometime in the mid 1990s? I would like to know a more exact date, but those years passed when I still used paper calendars that I lost in a prior millennium.

4/6/2020: Gaps in Internet access, Al Jazeera

The Arabic-language news channel had me on to talk about inconsistent Internet access–some the fault of dysfunctional economies, some the fault of governments deciding that cutting off the Internet will help them manage domestic dissent. The next day, an e-mail from the advocacy group AccessNow scolded Qatar and its neighboring Gulf states for blocking WhatsApp, FaceTime and other Internet-calling apps.

4/9/2020: Who Wrote That Hit Song? It Depends on How Human They Are., Glimmer

My second post for the Web-creativity shop Glitch’s equivalent of an inflight mag covered how copyright law should treat works created by artificial intelligence. I haven’t had a chance to get into the weeds about intellectual-property policy like this since I was last writing for the Disruptive Competition Project seven years ago; I’m glad there’s still a market for that sort of wonky work.

4/12/2020: Using apps to trace COVID-19, Al Jazeera

AJ had me on a second time this week to talk about the potential of smartphone apps to help trace patterns of novel-coronavirus transmission–without giving your location history up to Google or the government or even sharing your name with the people you might have occupied some personal space with after catching this virus.

Weekly output: FCC broadband map (still) considered harmful

Posted on April 21, 2019 by robpegoraro

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: Porsche Design laptop, net neutrality (x2), getting the world online, app privacy

Posted on May 1, 2017 by robpegoraro

You can tell I’m about to go to New Orleans because I put a bunch of songs from the Meters and the Neville Brothers on my phone. As was the case about this time last year, my excuse is the Collision conference; I’ll be moderating four panels at this offshoot of Web Summit.

4/24/2017: We took Porsche’s pricey new laptop for a spin, Yahoo Finance

I filed this first-look report from the IFA Global Press Conference, but it didn’t get posted until the day after I returned from Lisbon.

4/26/2017: Trump’s FCC bulldozes open internet rules without a plan B, Yahoo Finance

The copy I filed went into more detail about FCC chair Ajit Pai’s weird, red-baiting attack on the liberal tech-policy group Free Press, but my editor thought that was a little too much inside baseball. I should note that I’ve spoken at two of Free Press’s events, most recently in Denver in 2013; I may have missed any praise from the organizers for Marx and Lenin when I ditched the conference for an afternoon to see the Rockies home opener.

4/27/2017: Trump’s FCC chair issues attack on open internet rules, Yahoo Finance

A day after Pai spoke about his intention to demolish the current net-neutrality rules, I unpacked the FCC notice of proposed rulemaking that would accomplish that goal.

4/29/2017: How to get 4 billion unconnected people online, Yahoo Finance

I wrote this post about the issues that keep some four billion people off the Internet after attending a Tuesday IEEE event featuring TCP/IP co-author Vint Cerf, but this week’s surplus of net-neutrality news caused it to get set aside for a few days. Having a chance to talk shop with one of the inventors of the Internet remains a mind-bending experience.

4/30/2017: Your data is priceless; that’s why some apps sell it, USA Today

Writing this piece about the amount of access some apps have to your data led me to yank the TripIt app out of my Gmail–I can have that service advise me about changes to my travel plans almost as easily by forwarding booking e-mails to it. And that way, I won’t have TripIt thinking an incremental e-mail from an airline or Amtrak represents a new itinerary.

Rob Pegoraro

Occasional shop talk about journalism, technology and a few other things

Tag Archives: digital divide