#websummitrio — Public Fediverse posts

Weekly output: AT&T iPad day pass, AI + used-car sales, AI + home health care, Mint Mobile, Kalshi, orchestrating AI agents, AI + car rental

I got back Saturday morning from my fourth trip in four years to Brazil for Web Summit Rio, which is enough times for me to feel like I can now write one of my conference cheat sheets for that talkfest. This Tuesday, meanwhile, I will travel to a new-to-me event: the Connectivity Standards Alliance’s Unify conference in Austin, where I’m leading a panel Thursday about how edge and on-device AI can improve connected devices in homes, workplaces and cities.

6/10/2026: AT&T Adds Cheap, Unlimited-Data Day Pass for iPad Users, PCMag

The iPad-only stipulation for this plan is a little weird and I’m not sure how many people would even need it. But it’s worth remembering that your first day pass is free if you take a 5G-enabled iPad to someplace that turns out to be WiFi-deprived.

6/10/2026: Humans + AI: The new high-performance model, Web Summit Rio

I hadn’t heard of the Brazilian used-car marketplace Mobiauto before Web Summit offered me this panel, but I enjoyed a chance to learn a little about the country’s vehicle market by interviewing Bruno Guidone, the company’s IT superintendent.

6/10/2026: The future of healthtech has no address, Web Summit Rio

The last Web Summit Rio panel I got offered–in an e-mail last Sunday afternoon–got me on the conference’s center stage, meaning my biggest crowd at this year’s event and a place in its YouTube livestream. I quizzed David Pares, chief medical officer of the Brazilian healthtech startup ISA Saúde, about their plans to shift more health tests and procedures to people’s homes instead of making them go to hospitals.

6/10/2026: Mint Mobile Increases Data Allocations on Its Plans, Keeps Prices Level, PCMag

I may have spent more time struggling to write a lede that would exhibit minimal creativity than I put into writing the rest of this post about a fairly self-explanatory bit of news.

6/10/2026: Kalshi Co-Founder: Prediction Markets Will Be Bigger Than the Stock Exchange, Even If You Lose Money, PCMag

Luana Lopes Lara, the Brazilian-born co-founder and COO of the prediction market Kalshi, spoke onstage on Web Summit Rio’s opening night Monday. I gave the company’s PR shop all of Tuesday to respond to my request for an update on the profit-loss ratio among Kalshi users that it had shared with the Wall Street Journal in early May, but they never got back to me.

6/11/2026: Agent orchestration, Web Summit Rio

My first of two panels Thursday had me quizzing Alessio Alionco, co-founder and CEO of the Brazil-founded startup Pipefy, about how it puts agentic AI models to work for clients.

6/11/2026: Mobility, hard assets and AI applications, Web Summit Rio

The pitch to drivers at the São Paulo-based car-rental platform Turbi (pronounced “tour-bee”) reminded me of car2go, the point-to-point car-sharing service that announced its exit from the North American market at the end of 2019. But back then, AI models weren’t a thing that companies were leveraging to optimize things like fleet management, so I asked Turbi founder and CEO Daniel Prado how the company has been able to take advantage of these advances.

Between late last Sunday night and very early Saturday morning, I clocked more than 10,000 miles in the air to cover Web Summit Rio, conduct an onstage interview at that conference, and see very little of the city outside my conference bubble. Is that why I’m feeling tired tonight? No, the gardening work I put in yesterday and today had much more to do with that.

4/15/2024: Ep 98 SmartTechCheck Podcast – Apple, NTT Research, Sony, Roku and digital privacy legislation, Mark Vena

My latest bit of podcast banter had me trying to break down the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple and the odds of Congress making any progress on a comprehensive digital-privacy bill.

4/18/2024: The fight for tech talent, Web Summit Rio

My spot on the conference schedule didn’t come up until the afternoon of the last day, when I quizzed BairesDev CEO Nacho de Marco on the event’s center stage about how that firm aims to meet the software-development demands of clients with a “nearshoring” strategy of connecting them to remote-working developers in Latin America. After a couple of days of other panel moderators telling me that they’d had trouble hearing their onstage counterparts in that arena, I was relieved to see de Marco ably field my questions, replying in NPR-length paragraphs that made my job of panel clock management easy.

4/19/2024: This Air Taxi Is Ready to Help You Skip the Gridlock (If Regulators OK a Flight Test), PCMag

This post was a sequel of sorts to one I filed from Web Summit Rio last year, when the then-co-CEO of Eve Air Mobility talked up the Embraer-backed air-taxi startup’s ambitions to provide fast, clean and reasonably affordable flights in eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft around major cities by 2026. This year, the pitch for Eve delivered by Daniel Moczydlower, CEO of Embraer’s Embraer-X innovation hub, came with a little more realism about how the company’s battery-electric planes won’t fly paying passengers anywhere until regulators green-light its plans.

https://robpegoraro.com/2024/04/21/weekly-output-mark-vena-podcast-nearshoring-meets-remote-coding-eve-air-taxis/

#airTaxis #BairesDev #EveAirMobility #eVTOL #NachoDeMarco #nearshoring #Rio #RioDeJaneiro #WebSummit #WebSummitRio