Mobile World Congress 2016 – Too Big to Ignore
This year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) broke 100,000 attendees. That’s up from 94,000 in 2015. The Barcelona-based event is too big to ignore, and too big for vendors to skip. Meanwhile, the event’s organizer, the GSMA, appears to be sitting pretty. According to Light Reading (LR), two years ago it generated $164 million, when attendees numbered only 85,000. Vendor angst is a reality, as the comments to that LR article suggest. But is that an evergreen sentiment? Large industry events always create concern about costs and return on...
read more3 College-Football, Tech-Writing Lessons
Two football teams are about to play for the national championship. I grew up in the shadow of one. Which raises the question: What I did learn in that town that relates to what I do today? Here are three college-football, tech-writing lessons, and a few related questions: 1) Brands matter. The local university adopted a new logo when I was in grade school. Decades later, it still triggers memories: fall days, screaming fans, marching bands, acrobatic cheerleaders, large football players. With a winning team, a university brand tends to...
read moreScrivener, 79 Deliverables and a New Year
In December 2014, I bought a copy of Scrivener, a “content-generation tool for writers.” I may be an atypical user, but the app immediately became part of my routine. In fact, it helped me to complete 79 projects over the past year. Why atypical? The developers of Scrivener designed the tool for creative writers. (Not surprising: the company behind it is named Literature and Latte.) There is a category for “Non-Fiction,” but that contains academic templates. What it does have, however, is a “Blank” project, with no presets. That’s works just...
read moreScrew the Valley – Review Essay
Silicon Valley gets plenty of attention. The Santa Clara Valley itself is beautiful, and companies based there have created staggering amounts of innovation and value. I have reported on and been happy to collaborate with many of them. So business reporters and analysts are right to focus on the Valley. But as important as it is, there comes a time when you just need to look beyond. Even players in the Valley reach that point. “Blame the seemingly never-ending hustle to find, train, and retain top development talent,” writes Tim Sprinkle,...
read moreCable-Tec Expo ’15 – A Return to New Orleans
There’s a temptation to pack the passport when traveling to New Orleans. I left it at home, but upon arriving for Cable-Tec Expo ‘15, knew that I was once again in a place both familiar and strange. New Orleans is foreign for well-known reasons. It’s familiar for particular ones. My first visit was for Cable-Tec Expo 2000, fifteen years ago, and I’d been back several times. Other ties relate to my mother, who grew up in a home on St. Charles Ave., near Tulane University. The city left its imprint. That’s where her lifelong enthusiasm for the...
read moreThe UCI World Championship – and a Memory
After a long buildup, the UCI World Championship finally came to town. When it did, it sent me back a few decades, to a year I spent with my family in northern France – and to a gray day when I stood with my brothers beside one of the region’s old stone-paved roads. We waited in the drizzle; then cyclists on the Paris-Roubaix road race appeared, and sped by as spectators shouted out names. To a young American, this was a strange scene. The locals were thrilled, but the pack of cyclists passed by so quickly. That was it? And this Belgian...
read moreData Centers, IoT and Connecting the Dots
As a tech writer working mostly incognito on behalf a range of companies, I can identify myself much less often than I could when working as a journalist. Ghost writers under NDAs don’t have bylines. Two recent projects, however, bear my name. In one case, I wrote a position paper about advanced data centers. In another, I co-authored an article about the Internet of Things (IoT) for a specialized trade journal. (See “IoT and Elevators,” p. 166.) Both projects allowed me to do some of what I like best: connecting the dots between trends,...
read moreGoing to IBC – or Not?
It’s been several years since I last attended IBC. Registering late, I found a hotel in Zandvoort, a town on the North Sea about 30 km west of Amsterdam and the RAI Convention Center, where I spent a few days with colleagues at the online publication Videonet. A busy event for some 55,000 video pros, IBC is not nearly as crazed as CES, which draws more than three times as many people. But it’s still intense, especially for the trade journalists who cover it. John Moulding, editor of Videonet, does it well, including useful pre-event...
read moreJ Tombes Consulting Rebrands, Launches Website
Midlothian, VA., August 31, 2015 — After five years in business, J Tombes Consulting has rebranded, incorporating as JT Consulting, LLC, and launched a website to highlight the firm’s technology writing services. The editorial consulting business, a sole proprietorship founded by former trade journal editor Jonathan Tombes, opened in 2010. Apart from a quiet period of 18 months, when Tombes directed content marketing for a Software as a Service (SaaS) engineering firm, it has been in active operation. Over the past five years, dozens of...
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