Mike Elgan

Ken Okuyama is an automobile visionary and he fears that Apple and Google might take over the car industry. I think his fears are well-founded. Okuyama is a Japanese industrial designer. One of his specialties is designing cars. He designed the Ferrari F60 Enzo and the Porsche Boxster, and redesigned the Chevrolet Camaro and Corvette. […]

City planning visionaries have tried again and again to create futuristic cities—gleaming, high-tech hubs where urban problems are solved with advanced systems, materials and technologies. Think Brasilia, Brazil; Valencia, Spain; Masdar City, United Arab Emirates; or Singapore. And, for that matter, Disney’s EPCOT was supposed to be the Mother of All Futuristic Cities, and it […]

It’s easy for critics to mock Apple for the iPad Pro tablet. After all, Apple’s tablet business is on the ropes—one of the embarrassing problems the company has to admit on each quarterly earnings call. And the most visible attributes of the product are optional accessories—a keyboard cover that looks like a copy of Microsoft’s […]

If it seems like major services have been crashing a lot lately and for extended periods, you’re not imagining things. A cluster of crashes has plagued users of a wide variety of high-profile cloud services in the past month. If this is a glimpse of what our future holds then let’s examine the occurrences, learn […]

The conventional wisdom is that Microsoft and Google are completely different in how they approach the market. Microsoft these days is thought by many as a stodgy “has-been” company with an obsolete business that renders it incapable of overcoming its own internal politics to leverage innovations from the lab and transform them into actual shipping […]

Silicon Valley has a diversity problem. The problem is that women and minorities are underrepresented and not by a little—by a lot—especially in technology and leadership roles. A casual glance at the data might lead someone to conclude that women and minorities just aren’t interested in tech and therefore don’t seek employment in that sector […]

A chorus of tech journalists this week is saying that Google is phasing out its social network, Google+. Where did they get this juicy nugget of information? Well, they made it up. And I’ll tell you why. But first, let’s look at what the press is saying and compare that with reality. Here are a […]

Google rolled out this week a new Bluetooth LE (low energy) beacon technology that competes directly with Apple’s industry-leading iBeacon offering and also does a lot more than iBeacon. It’s called Eddystone. And it’s a big deal, for two reasons. First, beacons have unleashed new capabilities for automation, virtual assistant technology, retail applications, social media […]

In Japan, they love their robots. No, really. They love them. A recent series of stories coming out of Japan uncovers a mini-trend among some fans of the Sony Aibo robot, which launched in 1999. Sony sold about 150,000 of them before the line was discontinued in 2006. The Aibo robots are “dying” now, with […]

Nobody likes boring presentations, so I’ll get right to the point. Microsoft’s new Surface Hub digital whiteboard is so good and so affordable and so well suited for its purpose that it makes existing conference room equipment instantly obsolete. The Surface Hub is essentially a giant tablet built from the ground up to live in […]

As a veteran of four Google I/O conferences, it’s clear that this year’s event was the least exciting for users and attendees, but it was definitely the most exciting for serious developers. Unlike at past I/Os, nobody jumped out of blimps to deliver Google Glass to Sergey Brin. Rock star CEO Larry Page didn’t give […]

Some people were born with photographic memories. They can recall random facts and obscure details instantly. But the rest of us need to augment our memories by taking notes, making lists and keeping files. Does that make sense anymore? With all the technology changes we’ve all seen in the past few decades, we rarely stop […]