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.
stickers for us to 
CAKE Queuing
(17 states) 
and counting!