Weekly output: Zipline drones, fixed wireless broadband, AI transformations, Dashlane, AI fairness, FCC resignations, AI resiliency, National Capital Radio & Television MuseumM

My third week in a row of business travel had me in Santa Clara, Calif., from Tuesday through Friday–at a venue I’d last set foot in at the Demo conference in 2013.

6/3/2025: Inside Zipline’s high-tech drone factory where delivery innovation takes flight, Fast Company

My decision to book an early-afternon flight from SFO to National at the end of my Google I/O trip last month paid off when I used that time to visit the drone-delivery startup Zipline’s factory in South San Francisco. I followed up that visit by quizzing an executive from the firm a week later.

6/3/2025: Fiber Is Fast, But 5G Home Internet Is More Appealing for One Reason, PCMag

I didn’t want to write up this J.D. Power customer-satisfaction survey without getting some answers about the weirdly-high scores for old, slow digital-subscriber-line services.

6/4/2025: Transforming Industries with AI & Big Data—Success Stories from the Frontlines, TechEx North America

The first of three panels I did at this conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center (with the organizers covering my lodging and reimbursing my airfare) reunited me with a fellow panelist from 2021: Lufthansa Industry Solutions’ Stanislaw Schmal, who was on a panel I did at my first post-pandemic conference trip in September of 2021. It was a treat to have Stan on stage again, and he and my other panelists–Oracle’s Shasank Chavan, Ford Credit’s Manav Khatri, Airbnb’s Dror Engel, and Deepgram’s Kris Efland–made my panel-moderation work easy.

6/5/2025: This Password Manager Now Lets You Create an Account Without a Password, PCMag

Dashlane gave me an embargoed copy of their announcement of their new option to let people create accounts secured only by USB security keys, but that left me a little fuzzy about how exactly this would differ from that password-manager service’s existing support for passwordless authentication–and my editor was fine with holding the post until I could get those details cleared up.

6/5/2025: AI Fairness and Bias Mitigation—Advanced Approaches, TechEx North America

My second panel had me quizzing JPMorgan Chase’s Naresh Dulam, Aon’s Aras “Russ” Memisyazici, and PwC’s Ilana Golbin Blumenfeld about how to avoid having AI systems amplify human biases.

6/5/2025: Who’s Running the FCC? Surprise Resignation Reduces the Agency to a Duo, PCMag

I’ve been writing about the Federal Communications Commission for well over two decades, probably closer to three, and I can’t remember a commissioner announcing a resignation on a Wednesday effective on Friday of the same week. Also unprecedented: having this five-member commission reduced to two people.

6/5/2025: Building Resilient AI Infrastructure, TechEx North America

My last panel at TechEx was a late addition when another moderator dropped out; when an event paying your travel asks for you to pitch in, it’s a good idea to be a team player. My teammates on this panel: Ford Motor Company’s Robert Gray, Oracle’s Iman Zadeh, Red Hat’s Mark Kurtz and InfoVia’s Mike Magalsky.

6/6/2025: Spotify Takes Flight on United Airlines: Here’s What You Get, PCMag

When I got to try this on my flight from San Jose to Houston Friday, I realized that United’s implementation of Spotify did not include the ability to listen to the airline’s longtime theme song, “Rhapsody in Blue”–which made the lede I’d written incorrect. Instead of just rewriting that, I opted to take notes on the experience over that three-plus hour flight and rewrite the entire post.

6/7/2025: This Little Museum Outside DC Offers a Deep Dive Into Retro Radio and TV Tech, PCMag

My friend and longtime CES fellow traveler Gary Arlen suggested that I visit the National Capital Radio & Television Museum in Bowie, Md., where he’s a docent, and I took him up on that advice in February. Then I didn’t write the post until March, after which my client needed a little longer to get the story edited and published.

#AI #artificialIntelligence #conference #Dashlane #droneDelivery #DSL #FCC #FIDO2 #fixedWireless #JDPower #NationalCapitalRadioTelevisionMuseum #passwordManager #SantaClara #Spotify #techHistory #TechExNorthAmerica #UA #UnitedAirlines #vacuumTubes #vintage #Zipline

It’s gotten easier to get away with forgetting to take a laptop charger

SANTA CLARA, Calif.

Eighteen years ago, I managed to forget to pack my laptop’s charger for a transcon business trip, didn’t realize my oversight until reaching Dulles Airport, and then swore that I would never make that mistake again. Reader, you can guess what I did Tuesday morning.

In my inadequate defense, the compact, Wirecutter-endorsed charger I’d meant to bring is so small that its absence from my gadget-accessories bag was easy to overlook until I reached for it at the Capital One lounge at IAD. And the night before, its black USB-C cable was apparently too easy for me to overlook draped across the dark rug in my home office after I unplugged it from my laptop, tucked the laptop into the sleeve in my messenger bag, and then stupidly left the charger plugged into the wall.

But unlike in January of 2007, when I was heading to CES with a Dell laptop that needed a proprietary charger that I discovered was almost as rare in Vegas as a blackjack dealer handing you two aces in a row, this HP laptop charges via the same USB-C port as every other portable computer I own.

So I did not freak out but did resolve to stick to my phone for e-mail until I could get to my layover in Denver, where I knew multiple lounges would offer USB ports for the adapter cable I did still have tucked into that bag.

(That adapter cable is one of the best pieces of tech-event swag I’ve ever collected, as it includes a Qi cordless charger in a pod between its combination USB A/C plug and the USB-C, micro-USB and Lightning plugs at its other end. Whoever at Supermicro marketing picked this thing as a giveaway at HumanX in March, tell your boss I said you deserve a raise.)

After mostly recharging my phone in DEN, when I checked into the Hyatt Regency here Tuesday evening–where the organizers of TechEx North America are hosting me in return for moderating three panels at that conference–I asked if they might have a spare USB-C charger I could borrow. The rep at the front desk said they’d check, and barely a minute after I got to my room, somebody from housekeeping showed up with a new iPad charger.

I have to smile at a hotel bailing me out like this: I’d had to buy that compact USB-C charger after I’d left this HP’s original, larger power brick at a fancy hotel in D.C. during a conference there in February, after which nobody at the hotel was able to locate it even though I’d taped my business card to the thing.

One lesson of this episode is that by ensuring that devices finally use the same connector, the tech industry finally solved the problem of needing to find the right charger for a laptop, phone or tablet. It’s worth recognizing when these companies do something right–even if in Apple’s case, it seems to have required a shove from European Union regulations that made USB-C a required standard.

The other is that since I’m developing a bit of a history of leaving a laptop charger at home, I need to get myself into the habit of unplugging that thing from the outlet before I unplug it from my laptop.

#ACAdapter #charger #HP #Hyatt #laptopCharger #powerBrick #Qi #SantaClara #SiliconValley #SpectreX360 #TechExNorthAmerica #USB #USBC