Scrivener, 79 Deliverables and a New Year

Posted by on Dec 23, 2015 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...
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Screw the Valley – Review Essay

Posted by on Nov 13, 2015 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...
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The UCI World Championship – and a Memory

Posted by on Oct 2, 2015 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....
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Data Centers, IoT and Connecting the Dots

Posted by on Sep 9, 2015 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...
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Going to IBC – or Not?

Posted by on Sep 4, 2015 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...
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