Mike Elgan

If the many on-demand startups spawning in San Francisco “change the world” in the way they want to, we’ll all be able to live like people in Manhattan have been living for decades—with easy, inexpensive transportation, on-demand food services, pet care and more. Here’s how the on-demand economy is trying to turn San Francisco and […]

The famous Great Firewall of China has been in effect for decades. But in recent months, China’s current authoritarian leader, President Xi Jinping, has been taking domestic censorship to a new level. Under Xi’s leadership, Internet police officers have been embedded inside Chinese tech firms, depictions of extramarital affairs and homosexuality have been banned from […]

People trash-talk email a lot these days. If you accept the conventional wisdom, email is old, bloated, full of spam and yesterday’s way to communicate. Instead, we all have better alternatives like Slack, WhatsApp, Snapchat and a hundred others. But this favoritism is misguided. Worse, email’s bad reputation exists for one spectacularly bad reason. Based […]

U.S. Senator John McCain wants Silicon Valley to “join the war on terrorism.” At least, that’s what he said in the headline of an OP/ED he penned for BloombergView recently. The obvious implication here is that Washington, D.C., is fighting terrorism but the U.S. tech industry is standing in the way. Specifically, according to Senator […]

Are you ready for it? Super Bowl 50 is going to be epic—not just because of the game, but because of the technology and the volumes of data generated. The Super Bowl is the nation’s most popular sporting event. This year it will take place in Santa Clara, Calif., the heart of Silicon Valley, at […]

The availability and use of digital virtual assistants—software-based artificial intelligence services that do things for you—is about to explode. Today, we think of the all-purpose assistants like Google Now, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Facebook’s M and Amazon’s Alexa. To some degree, we feel compelled to choose which we’ll use. Sometimes that choice is easy. If […]

Texas passed a law just last year allowing police departments to install credit card readers in squad cars. The idea was to enable cops to collect unpaid court fines instead of arresting people for the unpaid fines. Police in Kyle, Texas, are now automating the identification of court fine deadbeats using scanners that automatically read […]

Amazon is working on a new Echo virtual assistant appliance. The product, code-named Fox, is reportedly about the size of a can of coke and can run on batteries. It’s also cheaper than the current $179.99 Amazon Echo (pictured). The Fox version sits on its side rather than standing straight up and responds to commands […]

The mind-blowing 2002 Steven Spielberg sci-fi thriller Minority Report, which starred Tom Cruise and was based on the book by Philip K. Dick, thrilled general audiences with its central premise—that sedated clairvoyant siblings connected to a recording device could predict murders before they happened, enabling “pre-crime” police to arrest perpetrators before they committed their crimes. […]

Virtual reality headsets are about to become part of your arsenal of gadgets. No, really! A year ago, pretty much nobody had what are generally referred to as VR goggles or headsets. But a year from now, I predict that pretty much all serious tech fans, gamers, media consumers and social media users will own […]

I carry an iPhone in my pocket all the time. And on that phone I have enabled two intelligent personal assistants (IPAs): Apple’s Siri and Google Now. Each has advantages. Siri is quicker to get to, as it’s better integrated into the iPhone. A long press on the phone’s home button or center button on […]

Research projects dating back to the 1950s have attempted to apply artificial intelligence to create machines that think—or at least behave as if they can. The quest to build computers that think like humans has necessarily focused on words. The famous Turing Test, for example, is designed to prove a machine’s ability to act intelligently […]