Two Rooms, One Signal

Notes from Uruguay

I returned recently from two weeks on the road, partly for family time and partly for work, in Uruguay. If you can’t immediately place it on a map, that’s fine. The people there are used to it. It sits between Brazil and Argentina and, in my opinion, remains one of South America’s best kept secrets.

I arrived expecting a work trip with a good backdrop. A little thinking, a little fun, then home. Instead, it turned into something more layered, and I don’t think I was the only one who felt that shift. Nearly everyone I spoke with afterward described the same pull: the sense that something meaningful had happened, and a desire to return and keep working on what we started.

The Innovation Track

The first event was the Innovation Track, held over the weekend in Punta del Este. This was the room I helped brainstorm into being with JP and Maggie from Montevideo Tech Ventures, and one of the main reasons I made the trip. It was small by design, closed and intentionally constrained, the kind of environment where you don’t get very far pretending you already know the answer.

Montevideo Tech Ventures (MTV) set it up as a working space, not a showcase. We didn’t do panels or demos. It was just people who live inside real systems trying to describe where those systems are starting to strain, and what they wished existed instead. Operators, engineers, product leaders, standards folks, legal minds. People who spend their days dealing with the consequences of decisions, not just the theory behind them.

My role during the Innovation Track wasn’t to play host or moderator. I thought of it more as system design. Setting pressure points. Holding the room at the problem layer longer than is comfortable. Helping translate between different ways of seeing the same system. And just as important, knowing when not to intervene.

This wasn’t a room that needed to be led to a conclusion. It was a room of professionals who wanted guardrails, not choreography. Some ideas, after all, need friction before they reveal what they really are.

What surprised me was how often the same tensions reappeared, even when conversations started in very different places. Capability versus readiness. Data existing versus data actually moving. Rights treated like paperwork versus rights behaving like software. People would reach for solutions, then have to walk backward to constraints, over and over.

That repetition wasn’t a failure to converge. It was the signal. When smart people keep tripping over the same edges, it usually means the problem isn’t conceptual. It’s structural. The system itself is exerting pressure, and no amount of clever framing makes that go away.

Summer Camp and Summer Week

The second phase was Summer Camp and Summer Week, run by Qualabs back in Montevideo. It was larger and more open by design, less about debating ideas and more about putting real work in motion. Where the Innovation Track compressed thinking, Summer Camp expanded it.

Summer Camp functioned as a celebration of projects already underway, not concepts waiting in line. Two efforts anchored the week.

One was the Real-time MoQ Project, which builds on last year’s work around media over QUIC. The focus wasn’t protocol evangelism, but practical engineering: creating a modular, reusable open-source foundation that makes it easier to build real-time and low-latency media experiences using modern transport, WebCodecs, and MSE (Media Source Extensions, which let applications control how media is buffered and played in the browser). The goal is to reduce the friction developers face when trying to move beyond HTTP-bound streaming pipelines, while supporting everything from interactive applications to live sports on open infrastructure.

The other was work I’ve been involved in through SMPTE. A co-pilot for multimedia archives, focused on how large collections of media can become more accessible, more queryable, and more usable as AI systems move upstream. Not by replacing archivists or institutions, but by giving them better tools to navigate scale, context, and complexity.

Both projects shared the same spirit. Part-time, open collaboration. Learning by building. Weekly check-ins instead of grand roadmaps. The point wasn’t theory or hype. It was to produce real tools that lower the cost of adoption and make progress feel attainable from day one.

What mattered was how cleanly these efforts lined up with what had emerged during the Innovation Track. The same three threads kept resurfacing: identity and rights as live systems, not static contracts; data and metadata as something that must move intact through workflows; and monetization and advertising as coordination problems, not targeting problems. Summer Camp gave those ideas somewhere to land, not as conclusions, but as active lines of work.

In at least one case, those ideas have already escaped the room, with a new startup emerging that closely mirrors one of the concepts and may now carry it forward with new advisors and momentum.

Place, Distance, and Signal

Place played a role in all of this. This was my first extended time in Uruguay, and I arrived early with my family so they could experience it as well. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I’d been to South America before, but not this far south, not into what locals call the Southern Cone and the Río de la Plata region.

From the moment we arrived, both my family and I felt it. The calmer pace. A feeling of acceptance. The absence of constant background anxiety. Laid back, yes, but not unserious. Calm, without being disengaged. That distance mattered, especially coming from the US right now. Being removed from the usual gravity wells changed how every interaction unfolded. People stayed with ideas longer. Defensiveness was dropped and disagreement felt safer.

When Summer Camp was fully underway, the energy shifted again, but not toward pressure or evaluation. It became a moment to acknowledge the work that had already been done, to slow down enough to understand how it came together, and to spend time with the people behind it. This wasn’t about pushing ideas harder. It was about memorializing the effort, learning more about one another as collaborators and friends, and recognizing that none of this work happens in isolation.

A Different Kind of Manifesto

I called the paper that came out of the Innovation Track a manifesto, and that word was chosen intentionally. It is by no means a manifesto of solutions, demands, or certainty. Think of it more as a statement of intent. A shared belief that these ideas should exist, that the problems they address are real, and that it’s worth building structures to support them.

That’s where Montevideo Tech Ventures comes back into the picture. Not as an owner of outcomes, but as an incubator of the concepts. It’s a way to keep these conversations alive, support the people working on them, and help move ideas from rooms like this into the world without flattening them in the process. They will be publishing the paper soon and I will be sure to amplify it once it is ready.

Thanks

I want to say thank you properly. To JP and Nico, for backing something that didn’t look like a normal event and trusting the room to do real work. To Maggie, for the execution and care that turned intent into reality. To the Qualabs team, who absorbed complexity so others could focus. To the participants themselves, a mix of old industry friends and new collaborators willing to think out loud and change their minds in public.

And to Uruguay. Not as a backdrop, but as context. For the generosity, the pace, and the reminder that distance can be productive. There was something quietly novel about arriving in a place where people applauded when the plane touched down, not out of relief, but pride. A shared sense of arrival. Uruguay carries that energy in subtle ways. It’s a country that has made deliberate, often unflashy choices: investing early in digital infrastructure and education, treating connectivity as a public good, and prioritizing stability, inclusion, and long-term thinking over spectacle. It feels like a place where opportunity is paired with responsibility.

This was meant to be a work trip. It turned into a place we could easily imagine returning to, not just for events, but for life. It was a pleasure to step out of my normal work life and Those rooms are worth paying attention to.