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I attended the Satellite 2026 conference this week in Washington, DC. The Canadian satellite operator Telesat is a long-time client of mine, and the conference is an annual chance to get together IRL.

Anyone not living under a rock knows that the space economy is dynamic and growing. As recently as five years ago, the market was dominated by a handful of companies (including Telesat) operating fleets of Geosynchronous orbit (GEO) satellites. That all changed when Elon Musk created Starlink, featuring hundreds of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites that offer the low latency required by modern Internet applications. Just look at the war in Ukraine, where LEO satellites proved conclusively how decisive they are in modern conflicts.

Jeff Bezos is now building a LEO network – Amazon LEO, formerly Project Kuiper. Telesat is launching Lightspeed, its next-generation LEO network that will take a B2B, rather than a B2C, approach to the market. The speed at which the market is moving was a major topic of the opening session panel discussion of CEOs. That, and the fact that if your name isn’t Musk or Bezos there needs to be more access to capital.

Naturally I’m biased, but I think Dan Goldberg, Telesat’s CEO, made some excellent points. One was that political tension and conflicts also have an upside. He said “the geopolitical developments we’re seeing are creating some of the biggest commercial opportunities for Telesat — and the rest of us. It’s incumbent upon us to step up.”

Telesat recently made a significant announcement regarding its Lightspeed LEO constellation, adding military Ka-band spectrum to 156 satellites. That dedicates a full quarter of Lightspeed’s capacity to defense and sovereignty programs — sovereignty being a major theme of discussion at the show. Countries want to control their own destiny for space communications, rather than depend on foreign billionaires.

Another thing that sets Telesat apart is its go-to-market approach. Rather than go directly to end users, Telesat’s approach is to work through existing service providers and equipment manufacturers. These companies know what their customers want, and one important thing is choice. Telesat works collaboratively with all these partners to shape their service offerings, expand addressable markets, and facilitate end-user growth.

While we believe this is the right way to go, Dan was also candid about the competitive pressures Telesat faces. It does mean procuring satellites and terminals from third parties, and he acknowledged that being vertically integrated (i.e., controlling every piece of the supply chain from manufacturing to launch and ground equipment) provides advantages for Starlink and Amazon. He talked about finding a way to align interests so the non-vertically integrated players can compete. “My number one request,” he said, “is trying to find a way to align our interests so that we can all remain competitive.” He also identified space-to-space communications as an underappreciated growth opportunity as constellations multiply and interoperability becomes essential.

There was broad agreement among the panelists. Multi-orbit constellations offering both LEO and GEO are real and here to stay. The importance of sovereignty in space may work against industry consolidation that might otherwise occur. Direct-to-device has broad potential if the feature is absolutely seamless to the end user and the price is driven way down.

Viasat’s Mark Dankberg, whose company’s KA-SAT network was attacked by Russia at the onset of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, bluntly stated that commercial satellite systems are now targets along with military ones. And two sides of the coin again: “Whenever there’s change, there’s opportunity,” he said. The threats are very real, as shown by a missile strike on an SES teleport in Israel earlier this month.

SES CEO Adel Al-Saleh described dealing with a fracturing global regulatory environment, saying this “old model” needs to change to meet the reality of space today. He’s building separate supply chains for North America and Europe and pushing to shorten development cycles that used to run five to seven years. He also promoted a 28-satellite order from startup K2 Space for its next-gen Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) network, meoSphere. Eutelsat’s Jean-François Fallacher echoed Dan’s message with a plea for open standards and interoperability — a way for operators to cooperate rather than each go it alone.

The Canadian government has made a significant investment in Telesat Lightspeed. It wants to use the constellation to close the digital divide for millions of Canadians without reliable broadband connectivity and to preserve sovereign space capabilities for national defense.

LEO technology has injected excitement into the space market, and the competition will be fierce. It’s going to be a wild ride!

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Happy holiday season! It’s that time again to look back at the Work, Wine, and Wheels posts over the past year.

The publication cadence continued to decline as I was busy running my StoryTech Consulting business. However, as you can see from the graphic above, traffic to the site actually increased in 2025; in fact, it was the highest since 2022. Part of that may be due to subscribers, and if that’s you I give my humble thanks.

The other factor is the surprisingly strong Google juice that many of my BMW-related posts continue to maintain. Of course, a strong organic ranking on a SERP page is no longer a guarantee of traffic, as Google has added features such as AI Overview, People Also Ask, and other paid placements. Google is now a walled garden, under assault from users turning to AI chatbots for search.

All that said, it sends regular traffic to the Triple W. The most popular post this year, by a wide margin, was published in 2017 and described how to install a new battery in an E46 M3. Google Search Console shows that my post has an average position ranking of 1.9, meaning the link is shown on page one right under all the paid options:

For my oenophile followers, the most popular wine post was on Central Coast California wines. This content resulted from one of the wine seminars put on by the Neighborhood Restaurant Group, which runs a number of places in Northern Virginia. The enthusiasm of NRG’s wine purchaser Erin Dudley is infectious, and she includes some history with the grape talk, such as how California’s wine industry was created by Italian immigrants in the 1890s.

LinkedIn remains a more logical place for work-related posts. However, my post providing tactical tips for using AI in B2G marketing attracted a strong readership. In it I shared highlights from an informative training I attended in late 2024. The post is based on an overview I shared with my GovCon Ideators organization, and the full download is available in the post.

So that’s another year in the books. I wish you a very merry New Year and a prosperous 2026!

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It seems like it’s all AI, all the time recently in Washington D.C. A flurry of executive orders and the Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan were announced last week. Coverage I’ve read explains that the plan focuses on encouraging innovation, speeding infrastructure development such as data centers, and implementing export controls on technology such as semiconductors. It differs significantly from the more cautious approach to AI by the Biden Administration.

The latest headlines reminded me I hadn’t posted a presentation I gave to my GovCon group on the first AI Executive Order, EO 14179, issued in January. Fellow GovCon Ideator Kathy Swacina presented with me on 4/29. We take a deeper dive into the EO language, highlight the differences from past EOs on AI, and suggest a possible model for AI development. An effective option is the TAIMScore model from the Holistic Information Security Practioner Institute (HISPI).

I reached out to a couple of IT clients for their views of EO 14179:

“I’ll first take the glass is half full attitude on this memo. it addresses a lot of the needed “how” that was ambiguous before as far and processes and procedures. It specifically calls out driving the
departments mission vs just efficiencies in the department. it will give teams a lot of opportunity to move forward with POC’s.”

“On the glass is almost empty side of the equation. There is no significant change to actual level of risk tolerance, governance and mitigation that must be performed. There is still plenty of
opportunity for a risk adverse Sr Manager at a department to say no.
As before the adoption of of AI will come down to agencies with leadership and actual desire to solve problems with AI.”

Here are the questions left unanswered in EO 14179, and which still are after the recent Action Plan:

• How do we safeguard industry proprietary information?
• How do we protect American citizen PII?
• How do we ensure the industry partners are following safe, ethical, trustworthy and transparent development processes?
• How do we close the gap between federal and state AI regulatory regimes?

You can download the full presentation here.

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Last month I attended a workshop focused on how to use AI technology to boost productivity. The workshop was put on by Juliana Slye and Natalie Lambert, the first in a continuing series. I’m a ‘learn by doing’ type of person and I found the workshop worthwhile.

Natalie formerly worked at Google and brings a lot of practical knowledge about AI tools and how to use them. Juliana founded Government Business Results and ties tactical AI into her patented GovBuyer’s Journey methodology. They gave a high-level presentation on this topic at the GAIN conference in October, and the workshop went into much more detail.

Each attendee needed to bring a laptop and have some kind of subscription to an AI tool. Even for things that seem staightforward – the better you prompt the better the outcome – actually doing it real-time made a big difference. Natalie turned prompt into an acronym, standing for Persona, Request, Outcome, Market/Audience, Process, Template/Example. Give your AI tool all that and the response should be a helpful one.

Here’s what that prompt looks like, asking ChatGPT to write a LinkedIn post for StoryTech Consulting:

Some things I learned in the session:

• • Understanding the token limit in your AI tool

• • Using ChatGPT Search to make sure you’re capturing up to date information

• • How useful AI can be for competitive research

• • How quickly new functionality is being added – my ChatGPT subscription now includes the video tool Sora

AI is a tool that marketers need to understand and leverage. I still have concerns about the spread of AI and true originality of thought that I wrote about last year, but that’s what the human in the equation must deliver. AI can give us more time to focus on that while lifting a lot of manual and administrative burden off the B2G marketer.

Juliana graciously approved me giving a high-level presentation to our GovCon Ideation group about my experience. You can download that deck by clicking the image below.

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Happy Holiday season! With 2024 almost over I’m resurrecting the Work, Wine and Wheels annual retrospective post. Back in the day, WordPress sent an annual report to me. I don’t know if everyone got one or if a certain traffic level needed to be met. The 2012 report is where I got the main image for this post, with a bit of crude editing.

My publishing cadence continues to decline due to the time it takes running my marketing consulting firm, but I’ll always keep the Triple W going. This year the most popular post in the Work category was my piece on original thought in the age of artificial intelligence. Large language models train on immense quantities of existing content. If they are then tasked with creating “new” content, how original will it be?

That’s where human involvement is critical. Since writing that piece in March I’ve attended AI workshops and have learned how to implement AI technology into client work in a way that combines the artificial with the human for the best possible result.

In the Wine category, my post on the Central California region attracted the most traffic. Central California is an immense territory encompassing over 90,000 acres of vineyards, and the state produces roughly 80 percent of all U.S. wine annually. Italian immigration built the industry and kept it going through a phylloxera epidemic in the 19th century and then Prohibition.

For Wheels content, the most popular post was the story of adding a Vorsteiner rear diffuser on my 2006 BMW M3. This is a common modification for the E46 M3 and there are a lot of low-quality diffusers on the market. I got lucky and was able to purchase my diffuser from a fellow CCA member who had purchased it years ago and then sold his car and no longer needed it. The fitment required a little work and I was expertly assisted by staff at the Craftsman Auto Care Alexandria location.

None of these posts will ever rival my top two for driving visitors. The #1 post is about how to unlock secret menu options in the E39 M5. This post gave me an exciting introduction into a post going viral, at least amongst BMW and car enthusiasts. First the post was promoted by Lifehacker, which at the time was part of the Gawker network of sites. (Remember them?) Then later it was promoted via the Twitter account of a Finnish security expert named Mikko Hipponen who had over 60,000 followers. (Account now deactivated.) On a single day 2,068 visitors hit the Triple W – heady numbers in 2012.

My #2 post is the one that has given the Triple W a very nichey sort of visibility in BMW enthusiast circles. BMW produced a special kind of low emission vehicles known as Super Ultra Low Emission Vehicles, SULEVs. These vehicles came with a special, 15-year warranty on all fuel-related components of the car. For whatever reason, this warranty was not being communicated well to owners (IMO of course). They were going in for relatively simple (a la fuel filter replacement) service and were being hit with estimates of $6,000 – $8,000.

So I reported on the subject to raise awareness. A number of owners posted comments on how they used this information to get dealers to repair their cars under warranty. That gives me a lot of satisfaction and I still get emails on this issue today. These posts generated a lot of comments – 115 to the #2 post!

I’ve maintained this site since 2008, probably the golden age of blogging. So much has changed since then. LinkedIn is a better environment for work-related posts. There are specialty forums and communities for BMW and wine posts. All that granted, the Triple W is my small contribution to the ethos of the Open Internet, and the power of the long tail. Whether you’ve been here for years or just subscribed, thank you for visiting.

And have a very Merry 2025!

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This week started off on the right foot with me being the guest of Mark Amtower’s Federal News Radio podcast Amtower Off Center.

No one has been a leader in the B2G market longer than Mark. He and I are co-hosts of the GovCon Ideation community with Janet Waring of ArtForm, as well as co-authors of Government Marketing Best Practices 2.0. We had a lively conversation on a range of B2G marketing topics, focused on the way to use thought-leadership content to differentiate your product and/or service to prospects.

We were shooting for interesting, informative, and even a bit entertaining. Give a listen and let me know how we did! If you don’t already have Amtower Off Center in your podcast app of choice, you can click here to hear the interview.

Thanks again Mark, and to all a Happy Halloween.

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Ever since the broad availability of artificial intelligence exploded last year, I’ve been wondering about its impact on B2 marketing. There is already a lot of “me-tooism” in much of B2G content marketing. Would AI make that even worse? Or could it, in fact, amplify the value of truly original insights for thought leadership? Or perhaps both?

A recent article by Tom Fishburne, aka The Marketoonist, articulates some thoughts on this question. While focused on SEO it’s wrestling with the same basic question. Titled “Writing and SEO Word Soup,” it talks about how since large language models (LLMs) are built on ingested content, if LLM-powered AI is used to generate “new” content then it quickly becomes just “word soup.” Fishburne quotes Jono Alderson, former head of SEO at Yoast:

Fishburne calls the temptation to turn your content development over to AI a “race to the bottom.” Unfortunately, I can see too many companies falling into this trap, humorously represented below:

While Fishburne focuses on the peril of word soup and “infinite words nobody wants,” I think that depressing vision also presents a huge opportunity for true insight and commentary. There’s an old expression, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Similarly, if everyone else is regurgitating existing content, the B2G companies that are saying something new and different have a chance to differentiate themselves.

Of course, not every piece of content has to be a heavy lift. Plenty of content created for customers and prospects is straightforward in nature, like contract vehicles, partner information, and awards. Thought-leadership content requires some time and effort, but the payoff will be magnified in the age of AI if your competitors take the path of least resistance.

There are ways AI can support your content development strategy. My friend Janet Waring and her StoryTech partner agency ArtForm recently did a video on the topic that is time well spent. But you can’t take humans out of the equation. If your SMEs don’t have useful insights, your efforts to differentiate your company will fail.

Thanks to my old friend Mark Amtower for suggesting I subscribe to the Marketoonist newsletter. I signed up for the cartoons and stayed for the commentary. Maybe you will too.

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