CyberConVA: Where CISOs and AI Took the Stage

Posted by on Feb 20, 2025 RVA Tech hosted its annual CyberConVA on Feb 6 at the Dominion Energy Center in Richmond VA. Subtitled “Where CISOs take the stage,” the conference did indeed feature a roster of chief information security officers (CISOs). But also taking the stage was machine-learning (ML)-based generative (Gen)AI, the technology du jour. (Or de l’année? du siècle?) The CyberConVA opening keynoter was Carsten...
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Five Takeaways from TechExpo 2024

Posted by on Oct 25, 2024 The SCTE held its annual conference and exhibition at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, September 24-26. It ended just as Hurricane Helene was slamming into Florida. That leads to a preliminary lesson: Check the weather. I hadn’t been following the news. It was only through exhibitors on the floor who were already talking on Day 2 about packing up that I realized Atlanta was in...
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The Power and Threat of ChatGPT

Posted by on Oct 4, 2024 After a year and a half of using the free version of ChatGPT, I signed up for a paid subscription. This paid version, ChatGPT Plus ($20/month), has been around since February 2023, when it was launched to provide paying subscribers with better performance and priority access to new features. But now seemed like a good time to take the plunge. Why so? One reason is that in September, OpenAI...
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Lighthouse Labs Rolls Strikes

Posted by on Sep 6, 2024 It’s nice to have a seed-stage business catalyst in town. On July 24, 2024, Richmond, Virginia-based Lighthouse Labs announced the 17th cohort of companies participating in its accelerator program. (I wrote about Lighthouse eight years ago in a post comparing Richmond and Silicon Valley.) On August 27, Lighthouse hosted a meet-and-greet for this batch of seven companies at River City Roll, a...
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Starlink and 50-plus Years of Satellites

Posted by on May 17, 2024 The sight is startling: Two dozen lights moving across the early night sky in a gentle arc. This is a “train” of Starlink low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, lit up by the sun and still aligned, before separating and rising to their designated orbits. Given some recent client projects, satellites have been on my mind. My exposure to space-based telecom and media infrastructure, however, has a...
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