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#vegas — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #vegas, aggregated by home.social.

  1. CES 2026 travel-tech report: notes on taking notes

    I gambled heavily at CES 2026 in a way that could have blown up disastrously but did not. By which I mean, choosing the year’s busiest workweek to put a new note-taking app into intense service didn’t leave me struggling to reclaim lost input or untangle duplicate records.

    (I also got in a little gambling of the blackjack sort; that worked out okay too.)

    Evernote’s new management choosing to impose a 92 percent rate increase pushed me to migrate most of my existing 15 years’ worth of notes to Obsidian before my Evernote subscription would renew at that jacked-up $249.99/year rate Jan. 2. And then Evernote’s customer-retention offer of a year of service at the old rate came after I’d gotten over the worst of the migration, so I boarded my flight from Dulles Sunday morning with a new set of note apps on my phone and laptop.

    Obsidian’s $48/year, end-to-end encrypted synchronization service didn’t allow the luxury of seeing keystrokes or onscreen-keyboard taps on one device show up on the other device’s screen almost instantly as Evernote had in recent months. But it proved reliable enough even over the iffy bandwidth at CES, with a couple of cases of the service flashing a “merging changes automatically” notice when the automatic sync lagged my device-to-device switches. I didn’t notice more than a few characters lost in the bargain.

    I was less happy with some weird onscreen-keyboard misbehavior that delayed my work for a minute or less each time.

    I turned to an extra app, Google’s Pixel-only on-device transcription of recorded audio, for two longer conversations that I needed to capture at length before writing them up. That more private AI service did not seem as accurate as Evernote’s cloud-based AI transcription; it looks like I’ll need a start-to-finish playback of the original recording to check the results.

    The hardware I brought to Vegas, meanwhile, remained unchanged from last year’s except for my buying a smaller, faster-charging USB-C power adapter last spring. The HP Spectre x360 laptop that I’d purchased in 2023 showed its age in the form of a shorter battery life compared to last year; I don’t expect to take it to CES 2027. My much newer Pixel 9 Pro, meanwhile, continued to serve as a terrific phone for photography and for standing-up notetaking.

    I wish I could be as complimentary about the T-Mobile service on my phone, but I saw my phone struggle for connectivity often enough (especially in the bandwidth hellscape that is much of the Venetian Expo) that I wished I’d repeated my earlier Wirecutter-review trick of bringing some new loaner WiFi hotspots to CES.

    And then there was the time Sunday night when everything seemed to conspire against me: The crowds at a goat rodeo of a Samsung keynote seemed to crumple T-Mobile’s network, I saw no event WiFi advertised, and even my phone somehow charged at its slowest possible rate off that charger. CES regularly serves up moments like that; getting past them does make the rest of the year’s events seem easier.

    #ces #consumerElectronicsShow #Evernote #HPSpectreX360 #LasVegas #noteTaking #Obsidian #Pixel9Pro #TMobile #Vegas

  2. Of course I’m going to CES. Again. Why would I not?

    Normal people can look forward to easing their way back into the work after the holidays, but I know I won’t have that luxury–because I will once again fly to Las Vegas for CES only a few days after New Year’s Day.

    That’s been my journalistic lot in life every January since 1998, aside from the pandemic-frozen winter of 2021, and 2026 will not break that streak. Nor will any future January that I can imagine until I retire, whatever that means to somebody who strings together words for a living.

    And yet so many tech-industry publicists open up their CES pitches by asking me, the guy serving a life sentence of covering the show, “Going to CES?”

    So here’s my official answer to that question: Yes, I am.

    To try to get ahead of other questions I keep getting in PR pitches for the Consumer Technology Association’s trade show:

    • I should land at LAS late in the morning of Sunday, Jan. 4 and fly home late in the evening of Thursday, Jan. 8.
    • Right now, my schedule looks least crowded on the afternoons of the 4th and the 5th and during the day on the 8th.
    • If your client is hosting an evening event, my least scheduled evening is Wednesday and my most scheduled evenings are Sunday and Tuesday.
    • If your client is hosting a morning event involving breakfast, please tell me about it so I have an alternative to the crime against bagels that is a CES press room.
    • I will be at Pepcom’s Digital Experience Monday night and ShowStoppers Tuesday night; if your client will be at either of those giant receptions, please tell me how to find them there, but don’t ask me to set a time to say hi.
    • If your client is hosting an event somewhere off the Strip Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, the answer is no. Vegas traffic is at its worst during CES, Clark County never does anything meaningful to improve it, and an Uber voucher won’t make the other cars disappear.
    • Invitations with no hint about an event’s location are also a complete waste of everybody’s time. (What is it about this event that makes PR types lose their minds and commit elementary mistakes like that?) Please accept the reality of the space-time continuum and describe an event’s whereabouts upfront.
    • Speaking of time, please get your pitch over with already. I don’t want to have to be reshuffling my CES schedule between Christmas and New Year’s.
    • If your pitch is good enough, I may set aside most of what I just said here and take you up on it. Case in point: In January, I accepted a day-before invitation to get a ride to Lake Mead on Monday of CES week and experience a battery-electric sport boat.
    • Yes, I got your e-mail about CES.

    #ces #consumerElectronicsShow #consumerTechnologyAssociation #cta #gadgetGathering #las #lasVegas #lasVegasConventionCenter #pr #techPr #techTradeShow #vegas

  3. Movie TV Tech Geeks #TVFeatures #JamesMangold #Vegas #DennisQuaid Before ‘Logan,’ James Mangold Quietly Perfected the Neo-Western With This Forgotten Crime Series dlvr.it/TNRMld

  4. Weekly output: 5G platforms, AI in financial services, AI and supply chains, Kamala Harris on AI, AI infrastructure, Gmail’s AI calendar integration, Android 16, AI and information security

    It’s a rare week when my work doesn’t touch on AI at all, but moderating panels at a conference devoted to that subject–and writing up two other talks there–helped ensure that AI figured in all but two of the items below.

    3/10/2025: Practical means profitable: Telco talk about building services on 5G’s framework, Light Reading

    My MWC Barcelona coverage for outside clients closed out with this writeup for this trade-pub client–my first there in a few months–of a panel in which telco executives talked about how they were building new lines of business on their 5G platforms.

    Patreon readers, however, got one more post about MWC in which I shared three other highlights from the show.

    3/10/2025: Banking on AI for personalized customer experiences, HumanX

    The first panel I did at this conference–in Las Vegas for its first year, moving to San Francisco next year–had me quizzing Better.com’s Vishal Garg, Clearcover’s Kyle Nakatsuji, Honeybook’s Colleen Stauffer, Sunrise AI’s Deepak Shrivastava and S&P Global’s Bhavesh Dayalji about how they see AI changing customer service.

    3/10/2025: AI-powered supply chains: From farm to table and beyond, HumanX

    Since this panel–featuring Altana’s Peter Swartz, Fusion Fund’s Lu Zhang and Choco AI’s Daniel Khachab–focused on agriculture, I opened it by telling the audience that I found the subject particularly interesting because I eat food.

    3/11/2025: Kamala Harris Urges Those Working on AI to Consider Trust, Empathy, PCMag

    The former vice president–whom I last saw in person in October from much farther away–was a late addition to the conference agenda. I hustled to get from the airport to the conference hotel, check in, drop by bag and get over to the event in time to get a seat in the third row for the Sunday-evening program that ended with Harris.

    3/11/2025: Rethinking infrastructure: Custom solutions for the AI era, HumanX

    My big takeaway from the conversation I had onstage with Sid Sheth of d-Matrix and Ami Badani of Arm: Industry hype about AGI (“artificial general intelligence” that could replicate a human brain) is a distraction, and not a particularly helpful one at that.

    3/11/2025: Gmail Gets AI Calendar Feature That Apple Added to Its Mail App in 2007, PCMag

    I missed this Google announcement Monday but had to write about it once I realized that the feature Google touts as an AI advancement is something that Apple delivered with plain old software in Mac OS X Leopard 18 years ago.

    3/13/2025: Android 16 Inches Toward a Launch With Accessibility-Focused Third Beta Release, PCMag

    Google PR gave me an advance on the news of third beta release of Android 16.

    3/14/2025: Ex-Facebook CISO Warns: 95% of Bugs in Your AI System Haven’t Been Invented Yet, PCMag

    I always learn something when Alex Stamos talks about information security, and I was happy to share that with PCMag readers.

    #5G #AI #AIInfrastructure #AlexStamos #Android16 #AppleDataDetectors #Barcelona #customerService #cx #dataCenters #GoogleGemini #HumanX #informationSecurity #infosec #KamalaHarris #LasVegas #MacOSXLeopard #MWC #MWC2025 #supplyChains #Vegas

  5. In less than three and a half weeks, I will fly to Las Vegas to cover CES. Because I’ve now done that 25 times, I know that I should have my schedule set by now–and yet I don’t, because I continue to get pitches and invitations for the gadget gathering.

    And many of the 61 e-mails I received Thursday alone (going by a search for “CES” in the subject line of messages that aren’t replies to my own correspondence) came from publicists pinging me about possible CES 2024 meetings and happenings for the first time this year. And as long as people keep putting new CES possibilities before me, I have little reason to nail down anything but the broad outlines of my schedule for those four days in Vegas.

    (That’s late morning of Jan. 7 through almost midnight of Jan. 11, if any tech publicists are reading this.)

    I have little room to talk about other CES types being late with their plans. But the runup period that I’ve taken to calling CES Advent really does need a lid, to steal the political-journalism term for the announcement to reporters from a White House or campaign spokesperson that there’s no more news coming out of their shops for the day.

    A set and announced date for everybody to get their pitch out to CES journalists would simplify planning in the same way. Alas, I’ve never seen the Consumer Technology Association call a lid on pre-CES announcements. So instead I’ll just say that close of business Monday is my own lid, and anybody who waits until after then to try to get a bit of my CES time or attention only has themselves to blame for my ignoring their pitch.

    But considering that since I started writing this post, I’ve gotten another four CES pitches, that means I’ll probably have another 130 e-mails about the show to deal with by the end of that day. Then I’ll just need a 28-hour day to give me four hours of free time to pore over these solicitations and decide which ones might merit a spot on my to-do or to-look-for lists, if not an actual timeslot on my calendar.

    https://robpegoraro.com/2023/12/14/ces-pitches-and-invitations-could-really-use-a-lid/

    #calendar #ces #CESAdvent #consumerElectronicsShow #fullLid #LasVegas #lid #pitches #PR #schedule #techShow #Vegas