I have only two days this upcoming workweek that aren’t blocked off completely, Monday and Thursday. Tuesday I’ll be working the Virginia primary election (hard to believe it’s been almost four years since my first long day as a poll worker), Wednesday I’m covering the  ACA Connects telecom-industry conference, and Friday I fly to Austin for SXSW.

In addition to the stories below, I wrote a bonus post for Patreon readers recapping some of the more interesting things I saw at MWC.

2/26/2024: Google Brings Gemini to Messages App in AI-Flavored Android Feature Drop, PCMag

The first story I filed from Barcelona is one that I could have written from home–Google PR gave me an embargoed copy of the announcement of these new features. But I did appreciate being able to try them out in person at Google’s MWC exhibit during a press breakfast Monday morning.

2/25/2024: 2 Wheels, 3 Cameras, One 5G Radio: Orbic Debuts Connected E-Bike at MWC, PCMag

Writing about a 5G-connected e-bike was not in any of my MWC plans, but the nice thing about large tech events like this is that they can serve up surprises that justify making your way to an exhibitor’s corner of the show floor.

2/28/2024: Cyber diplomacy for the next era of connectivity, Compiler Pop-Up Series: The Barcelona Edition

I moderated this panel discussion between a trio of diplomats–Steve Lang, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international and communications policy, Vassiliki Gogou, a cybersecurity expert with the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, and Maite Arcos, director general of the ESYS Foundation–at an event hosted by Compiler. That’s a new non-profit tech-policy publication supported by the Hewlett Foundation and founded by Mike Farrell, a longtime information-security journalist.

2/28/2024: NTT Docomo ‘Feel Tech Animal’ Exhibit Had Me Walking a Virtual Dog, PCMag

This virtual-reality demo was another thing not in my MWC plans until another attendee suggested I check it out.

2/29/2024: Bluesky Adds Hashtag Support, Better Account Portability Than Mastodon, PCMag

I saw the news about this on my way to the airport in Barcelona early Thursday morning, pitched a post about it in PCMag’s Slack workspace, and got a go-ahead from my editor before I’d cleared security in BCN. Then I wrote the post during my layover in Zurich.

2/29/2024: At MWC, AT&T and AST execs talk up space-based possibilities, Light Reading

The interviews for this piece happened Monday, but I didn’t finish writing it until Tuesday and then my overworked editor, also at MWC, needed a little more time to get this published. And then we had to correct it because I didn’t look close enough at the transcription of the interview provided by Google’s Live Transcribe app to notice that I’d jotted down a different number for the capacity of AST’s NextGen satellites in the notes I took on my laptop.

3/1/2024: Facebook Finds New Way to Unfriend Publishers by Nixing News Tab, PCMag

Writing this post became a little more fun when I realized that Facebook had not only gotten rid of the option to put the News tab among the basic shortcuts in its iPhone and iPad app, it had also left up old documentation that directs users to a nonexistent part of the settings interfaces on those apps.

3/1/2024: Ep 96 SmartTechCheck Podcast MWC, Qualcomm FastConnect 7900, Apple kills car project, SCOTUS, Mark Vena

I shared my impressions of MWC at my industry-analyst friend’s podcast in which we also discussed such recent tech plot twists as Apple closing down its car project and the Supreme Court taking up what strike me as flagrantly unconstitutional Florida and Texas laws that would compel social platforms to publish speech that they might find repulsive.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/03/03/weekly-output-android-feature-drop-5g-connected-e-bike-infosec-diplomacy-feel-tech-animal-demo-bluesky-supports-hashtags-att-and-ast-spacemobile-facebook-to-nix-news-tab-mark-vena-pod/