Tag Archives: robots

Weekly output: YouTube TV drops NESN, upload speeds, AMC earnings, FedEx tech, election social-media misinformation, Discovery vs. T-Mobile

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The longest Election Day I’ve seen since 2000 wrapped up a few minutes before noon Saturday, when I checked my phone on a bike ride and saw that all the major news networks had called the race for Joe Biden. A few minutes later, I turned around and rode into D.C. to witness the city as ecstatic as I’ve ever seen it.

After four years of President Trump’s lies, cruelty, bigotry, and incompetence, Americans have chosen a future that starts with four words: Donald Trump, private citizen. This is the resolution I had been hoping for since the morning of Nov. 9, 2016.

11/2/2020: RSN cuts continue as YouTube TV drops NESN, FierceVideo

I started the week by spending Monday covering breaking news at my trade-pub client. This post started with a tweet from my friend Ron Miller about his streaming-TV service dropping the network that carries Red Sox games.

11/2/2020: Upload speeds still lag on most Americans’ broadband, USA Today

This column revisited a subject I’d covered for the paper back in 2016, and I have to credit the work I did for the U.S. News Internet-provider package for refocusing my attention on this problem.

11/2/2020: AMC sees third-quarter 2020 income slip as subscriptions grow, FierceVideo

I wrote up AMC Networks’ Q3 earnings and had a little fun with the lede. From what Google tells me, I may have introduced the phrase “zombies and subscriptions” to the Web.

11/4/2020: FedEx is upgrading its tech for a holiday season in pandemic times, Fast Company

FedEx staged an online event for media that unpacked some interesting work it’s doing with robots and drones. One thing this effort won’t deliver anytime soon: a live delivery map like what UPS and Amazon offer.

11/6/2020: Election misinformation on social media, Al Jazeera

The translator for this live hit on the Arabic-language news network asked me if Twitter was being unfair to Trump. I replied that the president should try not lying so often.

11/6/2020: Discovery To T-Mobile: What Do You Think You’re Doing Bundling Us?, Forbes

Two weeks after I covered T-Mobile’s launch of a streaming-TV service with some attractive pricing and some notable gaps in the channel lineup, I wrote about the unlikely complaint of Discovery and two other entertainment-industry firms–that T-Mobile doesn’t have the contractual rights to put their channels on its $10 TVision Vibe package.

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Weekly output: Who has your back, robots, CE Week, Washington Apple Pi, travel WiFi blacklists

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Beyond a trip to New York for CE Week, the last seven days also brought me back to 1150 15th Street NW for a Washington Post alumni reunion Thursday night. That will be the last such gathering at that address, because the paper is moving to rented space in a much better-looking building on K Street.

6/23/2015: Tech Firms Trust Our Government Even Less Than You Do, Yahoo Tech

I though the fifth release of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s annual “Who Has Your Back?” report on how tech companies stand up to government requests for data about their customers was a newsworthy moment. I did not realize until starting to write this piece how much the tech industry has moved since just 2013, as I realized when I re-read some of my first Disruptive Competition Project posts.

CE Week panel description6/24/2015: The March of the Robots, CE Week

I enjoyed talking about the progress and continued problems of the consumer robotics business–from floor-cleaning robots and toys for kids to driverless cars and drones–at this CE Week panel with Engadget editor Devindra Hardawar, Spin Master designer Andres Garza, Ozobot CEO Nader Hamda, and WowWee CTO Davin Sufer. As the screengrab shows, I was checking my phone pretty often to consult my notes and look for any Twitter feedback; I don’t know how annoying that looked from the seats.

6/24/2015: CE Week TV: Rob Pegoraro, CE Week

Later that afternoon, I did a quick interview about our robotics discussion with Judie Stanford.

6/27/2015: Rob Pegoraro on personal technology, Washington Apple Pi

I returned to this Apple user group for the first time since 2013 and talked about the increasing amount of convergent evolution between iOS and Android and how that doesn’t seem to have cooled down the usual mobile-OS bigotry. Most of the questions I got from the audience afterward were not about those issues; instead, people wanted to know about their choices in broadband Internet access and what they could do to get away from traditional pay-TV subscriptions.

6/28/2015: Wi-Fi wrongly blocking sites? Blame humans, USA Today

I enjoyed the irony of using my column to unpack a problem that a longtime competitor (re/Code’s outstanding Walt Mossberg) had complained about on Twitter.

Weekly output: SXSW (x2), Google Reader, bookmarks, Galaxy S 4

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Another travel week ends as it should: me at home, photos from the trip posted, expenses duly categorized in Mint and a flurry of LinkedIn invitations sent.

Discovery News SXSW 2013 post

3/13/2013: SXSW Sights: Silly Robots and Serious Wi-Fi, Discovery News

This year’s SXSW didn’t feature any breakout apps, or even a particular category of app that had people excited. Here, I wrote about the panels, talks and demos that caught my interest instead–and noted the conference’s most pleasant surprise, reliable, fast and free WiFi almost everywhere I went.

3/15/2013: Digging Into A Few Of SXSW 2013′s Disruptive Dreams, Disruptive Competition Project

In this SXSW recap, I focused more closely on a few topics that interested me at the festival: 3-D printing, HTML5 apps, mobile finance and our not-fully-rational responses to transformational technology. I wrote about three-quarters of this on the plane home; the remaining one-fourth took the last three-quarters of the time.

3/15/2013: What’s the big deal about Google Reader’s demise?, USA Today

Google’s surprising (and, to many, infuriating) announcement of the July 1 shutdown of its Google Reader RSS service sparked this column, posted a couple of days early. I thought about linking to the “Hitler finds out Google Reader is shutting down” Downfall parody video, but I wasn’t sure all of the potential audience would be hip to the joke.

3/15/2013: Can the new Samsung Galaxy S4 take on the iPhone?, WTOP

D.C.’s news station had me on the air for a couple of minutes to discuss Samsung’s latest flagship smartphone. (Samsung invited me to what turned out to be a hot mess of a launch event at Radio City Music Hall; I opted not to run up to NYC the day after getting home from Austin, but part of me regrets not going.)

Sulia worked well for sharing my notes from SXSW in something close to real-time: for instance, highlights from Oatmeal cartoonist Matthew Inman’s keynote, details about one startup’s dubious patent filing, and a glitchy demo of Siri’s Eyes Free Mode in a Chevy hatchback on the show floor. I also noted Google’s backpedaling after a stupidly terse  post had people thinking the company was ending support for the open CalDAV schedule-syncing standard.