Mike Elgan

The world’s leading search engine company is thinking about becoming a car manufacturer to build self-driving cars. Oh, and maybe Google will build a space elevator, or an army of data-collecting robots. The New York Times revealed this week that Google maintains a top secret lab hidden somewhere in Silicon Valley that is actively working […]

Google launched its long-awaited Google+ Pages feature this week. The service enables businesses, products, brands, and organizations to host Google+ pages. With the launch, Google announced that a large number of major brands were already established. Because it takes only a minute or two to set up a Pages presence, many hundreds more quickly jumped […]

The conventional wisdom goes like this: Companies can make a ton of money by knowing everything about you, then selling advertising that leverages your private information. Because people don’t like this, companies have to be sneaky about it, and conceal how much they know about you and how they’re using your data. Facebook does it. […]

I was wrong about the iPhone 4s. I said it would be great. I predicted it would be the best phone ever built. The truth, it turns out, is that the iPhone 4s kind of sucks. There. I said it. And I might be wrong again with the headline for this column. I don’t have […]

Everybody likes to speculate about which social network is “better” or will “kill” the others. I used to engage in such speculation, too. But recently I’ve come to believe that not only will the Big Three — Facebook, Google+ and Twitter — survive and thrive indefinitely, but that it’s a good thing they will. I’ll […]

Everybody’s raving about Apple’s new virtual assistant, called Siri, and for good reason. The New York Times’ David Pogue called Siri “crazy good, transformative, category-redefining” and “unbelievable.” The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg wrote that Siri “has to be tried to be believed.” Siri represents a massive breakthrough in consumer-friendly artificial intelligence (A.I.). Apple’s Siri […]

Silicon Valley is doing what it always does: Re-inventing the future. Like all previous futures, the new future Silicon Valley giants like Apple, Google and Facebook are creating will be a mixed bag of good things and bad. The PC future gave us power and capabilities previous generations could not have imagined. But it also […]

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wowed the book-buying, gadget-loving world by announcing a line of shockingly low-priced Kindle tablets. The cheapest of the lot, the plain-vanilla Kindle, costs just $79! Other models also feature stunningly low prices: The Kindle Touch costs $99; the Kindle Touch 3G $149, and the “Cadillac” of the line, the Kindle Fire, […]

Facebook and Google+ are now churning out updates, improvements and features at a breathless clip. It’s an all-out, gloves off scramble to claim the biggest prize of all: the future of the social Internet. When Facebook and Google+ to war, who wins and who loses? The answer is that users win and Twitter loses. Among […]

Sure, Facebook looks massively successful. With a mind-boggling 750 million users, the social site can do no wrong, right? Wrong. Look closer, and it looks like Facebook can do nothing right. The company has tried and failed to launch or integrate new services that might thrill users. But users aren’t thrilled. And now its strategy […]