Tag Archives: Mobile Ecosystem Forum

Weekly output: free MLS Season Pass via T-Mobile, Twitter snuffs out transparency reports, MWC preview, spam calls, Android data-safety labels, fake reviews, mobile edge computing

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BARCELONA–Ten years after my first trip here for the telecom trade show then called Mobile World Congress, I’ve learned a lot about the event, the wireless industry and this lovely city. Alas, I cannot say as much about dealing with jet lag.

2/21/2023: Here’s How to Get a Free MLS Season Pass From T-Mobile, PCMag

I wrote up a quick explainer of this process after stepping through it on my own phone.

Story as seen in Safari on an iPad mini; lead art is a color-shifted image of Elon Musk2/22/2023: Twitter’s transparency reporting has tanked under Elon Musk, Fast Company

I can’t take credit for noticing that Twitter had not posted a transparency report since last July–the Washington Post’s Cristiano Lima brought that to my attention a few weeks ago–but I did get some justifiably-angry quotes from digital-rights experts about this latest casualty of Elon Musk’s chaotic reign. A few days later, Rolling Stone picked up on this subject and got some good quotes from former Twitter staffers.

2/22/2023: Episode 8 – Previewing MWC 2023, Liberty On the Line

I joined this Liberty Comms podcast–hosted by Liberty CEO Elena Davidson, with the other guests being telco analyst Charlotte Patrick and Telecoms.com editor Scott Bicheno–to talk about what I’m expecting from the event and share some MWC tips. Of course, my advice started with taking the metro.

2/23/2023: If You Think Phone Spam Is Bad in the US, Try Picking Up in Argentina, PCMag

I wrote up a study of spam calls–which can include both unwanted calls from legitimate businesses and outright fraud–among dozens of countries that found that U.S. callers actually don’t have things too bad.

2/23/2023: Don’t Trust the ‘Data Safety’ Labels on These Android Apps, PCMag

I got an advance on this Mozilla study of how the privacy labels in Google’s Play Store compare to the privacy policies of their developers, then updated the post with a comment from Google. Big surprise, Google was not happy with it. I imagine the company was even less happy with Gizmodo’s more scathing coverage of this study.

2/24/2023: Fake Online Reviews, CQ Researcher

My former Washington Post business-section colleague Kathleen Day quizzed me for this piece and quoted me once in it.

2/26/2023: The Interoperable Mobile Edge: New monetization opportunities for operators and enterprises via the Telco Edge Cloud, MEF Global Forum

I took part in a brief discussion at the Mobile Ecosystem Forum’s afternoon event with Summit Tech chief sales and marketing officer Doug Makishima, STL Partners principal consultant and edge practice lead Tilly Gilbert, and Bridge Alliance senior vice president Ken Wee about mobile edge computing–think cloud computing, except fast 5G connections let telecom firms push the remote processing much closer to the customer or device in question. As a student of digital privacy, I said I was most interested in “MEC” because of how it can allow personal data to be processed and then deleted much closer to its source than traditional cloud architectures often permit.

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Weekly output: Qualcomm’s automotive ambitions, MEF Connects USA, corporate America’s tech ideas, Verizon 5G home and gaming news, Halo car sharing

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I went to my last Nats game of the year Saturday–a 13-4 trouncing of the Phillies that reminded me of better days in the past and, I trust, the future. We also had tickets for Sunday, but with rain forecast all day I declined the opportunity to participate in the sunk-cost fallacy.

9/27/2022: Qualcomm sells a story of in-car inevitability, Light Reading

I wrote this recap of Qualcomm’s pitch to the auto industry at an event in New York the previous Thursday. Note that Qualcomm’s pitch to invited attendees included comped travel; I already had my train fare to and from NYC covered by the Back Market conference at which I spoke earlier that week but did accept two nights in a hotel to simplify my logistics–after obtaining my client’s permission.

A printout shows the order of panels at the Mobile Ecosystem Forum's MEF Connects USA conference.9/27/2022: MEF Connects USA, Mobile Ecosystem Forum

After joining this industry’s group’s podcast in April, the MEF people asked if I’d be interested in speaking at the conference they were organizing for the day before MWC Las Vegas. I wound up emceeing the afternoon half of the program and moderating three panels–one about the future of mobile identity yielded a what-if post for my Patreon readers, while two others on carrier billing for services educated me about aspects of the mobile industry that I’d overlooked.

9/29/2022: Sorry, But Your Boss Is Pretty Hyped About Today’s Most Annoying Tech Trends, PCMag

I can’t claim any credit for the headline on this post summing up a KPMG survey of attitudes among senior U.S. tech executives towards such topics as cryptocurrency and VR.

9/29/2022: At MWC, Verizon unwraps upgraded FWA receiver and 5G gaming gambit, Light Reading

With the MEF folks having agreed to cover my airfare and two nights of lodging, sticking around for another two nights on my own dime to cover MWC Las Vegas was an easy call. This recap of Verizon’s announcements during the opening keynote was the first of two posts I wrote for my telecom trade-pub client that week.

10/1/2022: Hello, Halo: This Car-Share Service Remotely Drives Its Vehicles to You, PCMag

With nothing blocking my schedule Thursday afternoon, I opted to ditch the conference for a few hours to try out Halo, the car-sharing service I’d covered for Fast Company last summer that has the car meet you, controlled remotely by a professional human driver, instead of your having to make your own way to the vehicle. As I quickly learned, the reality of this service in its beta-test stage includes some safety-driven inefficiencies.

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

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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.

Screenshot of the MEF page as seen in Safari on my Pixel 5a, with a still from the video in which I'm holding up a Nextel-logoed hourglass.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.