#websummitrio — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #websummitrio, aggregated by home.social.
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My least-replicable travel hack is now saving me money, not just time
The passport that I’ve taken for much of my international travel since the spring of 2017 finally has some stamps in it–courtesy of the Brazilian border officers in São Paolo who did the honors with my Irish passport at the start and end of my trip for Web Summit Rio this week.
While I had traveled to Rio on my U.S. passport the previous two years, Brazil has since rolled out its e-visa program for U.S., Canadian and Australian citizens. Applying for one of these 10-year travel permissions costs $80.90 and, per numerous reports from travelers, requires time and patience to deal with glitches and delays in the approval process.
Traveling with my Irish passport, however, required nothing beyond scanning it into the United app’s Travel-Ready Center, having a check-in agent at Dulles eyeball that before issuing my boarding pass for last Saturday’s flight, and showing it one more time to a gate agent during boarding.
I didn’t have any issues exiting the country on that passport either, although having two passports on the reservation meant I had go through a second doc check for my U.S. passport before getting a boarding pass for my flight back to the States.
This was the second time this year that my Irish citizenship has saved me little money instead of merely letting me use shorter passport lines in Europe as an EU national (and not getting a passport stamp in the process).
Since Jan. 8, American citizens traveling to the United Kingdom have had to pay £16 for a two-year ETA (electronic travel authorisation) and do that at least three business days before flying to the U.K. It could have been worse; the British government originally planned to require an ETA just for connecting through Heathrow before relenting.
But Irish nationals are exempt from this, in keeping with the U.K. and Ireland’s Common Travel Area arrangements. So I didn’t have to worry about getting an ETA for my two-day stopover in London between Web Summit Qatar and MWC Barcelona.
Starting in the last quarter of 2026, I’ll get one more way to save a little money when the EU implements its ETIAS (European Travel Information and Authorisation System), which will cost €7 and be valid for three years or, if sooner, the expiration of the passport used to apply for it. EU nationals will, of course, be exempt from that.
I feel a little guilty ducking all of these minor administrative obstacles since all of these countries are only responding to longstanding U.S. travel-permissions requirements for their own citizens. Brazilian citizens need a visa to travel to the U.S., with fees starting at $185 for a 10-year non-immigrant tourist visa. And U.K. and EU nationals need to pay $21 for an ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization), good for two years or passport expiration.
No American can blame any foreign government for deciding to return a little of these favors. And every American should hope that foreign governments following news of the incarcerations of international tourists and students in the U.S. (in some cases only for their speech) under the xenophobic Trump administration have the grace not to reciprocate.
#BrazilEVisa #dualCitizenship #ESTA #EUETIAS #internationalTravel #IrishCitizenship #IrishPassport #passportStamps #passports #UKETA #USPassport #USVisa #WebSummitRio
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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.
#airTaxis #BairesDev #EveAirMobility #eVTOL #NachoDeMarco #nearshoring #Rio #RioDeJaneiro #WebSummit #WebSummitRio
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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.
#airTaxis #BairesDev #EveAirMobility #eVTOL #NachoDeMarco #nearshoring #Rio #RioDeJaneiro #WebSummit #WebSummitRio
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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.
#airTaxis #BairesDev #EveAirMobility #eVTOL #NachoDeMarco #nearshoring #Rio #RioDeJaneiro #WebSummit #WebSummitRio
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After getting back from Brazil early Saturday morning, I’ve napped more than usual but have also spoken at an event in D.C., gotten in some gardening, and enjoyed a shorter-than-usual bike ride.
5/1/2023: Companies adopting AI need to move slowly and not break things, Fast Company
I wrote about how two companies I’ve covered elsewhere recently–the satellite-imagery firm Planet and the customer-support platform Intercom–have been deploying AI-based tools a little more cautiously than others.
5/1/2023: How open innovation can drive your organization forward, Web Summit
I led this somewhat-vaguely-titled roundtable discussion at this offsite conference the day before Web Summit’s programming schedule got into gear.
5/2/2023: Mastodon Makes It Easier for Beginners to Get Started, PCMag
I was going to write a reasonably short post about the federated social network Mastodon’s founder deciding that it was time to add quote-posting and text-search features–both of which had been historically unwelcome there–and then realized that PCMag hadn’t written much lately about Bluesky, another interesting, decentralized Twitter alternative.
5/3/3023: AI Can Give Us a Productivity Boost, But Will Everyone Get a Fair Shot at It?, PCMag
I wrote about the talk that Google’s chief design scientist Cassie Kozyrkov gave to close out the conference’s first day, which I found more enlightening than the conference’s description had suggested.
5/3/2023: Goodbye passwords!, Web Summit
I accepted this opportunity to interview 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner about that password-management service’s hopes for no-password passkey authentication, and then Google announced Wednesday morning that it had added passkeys as a login option worldwide.
5/3/2023: Building an app from the ground up, Web Summit
My second panel Wednesday had me interview Signal president Meredith Whittaker about how that encrypted-messaging app could avoid making the privacy mistakes of other competitors in that market.
5/5/2023: This Florida Startup Says It Can Make Electric Air Taxis Happen, PCMag
My longstanding interest in aviation led me to watch and then write up this Thursday-morning panel in which Eve Air Mobility CEO André Stein talked about Eve’s ambitions in electric vertical-takeoff-and-landing (eVTOL) aircraft.
5/6/2023: Will AI Eat Travel? (Clickbait Title for Session on Travel Tech), Frequent Traveler University
In my first appearance at this frequent-flyer gathering since March of 2020 (which feels like 10 years ago), travel blogger Stefan Krasowski quizzed me about the possibilities for conversational AI and many other tech topics. He’s a good onstage interlocutor and I enjoyed the conversation.
5/6/2023: The state of miles and points – what to expect in the next year, Frequent Traveler University
I closed out the day by joining this plus-sized panel featuring other FTU speakers, during which we answered audience questions about things like recent or impending devaluations among frequent-traveler programs.
#1Password #AI #airTaxi #Bluesky #Brasil #Brazil #EveAirMobility #eVTOL #frequentFlyer #FTU #FTUDC #Intercom #Mastodon #milesAndPoints #Planet #RioDeJaneiro #Signal #travelHackers #WebSummit #WebSummitRio