Mike Elgan

Yahoo President and CEO Marissa Ann Mayer has been in charge of her company for almost a year now. Yahoo is a dinosaur, built in another era when Internet directory-based portals reigned and blogging, social networking and smartphones hadn’t been invented yet. Mayer was hired to achieve an impossible dream: To turn Yahoo around and […]

Since Google launched the Google+ social network as an invitation-only service, Facebook has announced and shipped a series of bold new features. Some are clearly designed to copy or match Google services, others to exceed it and enable Facebook to do things Google can’t do. When first unveiled, these features often sound full of promise. […]

Yahoo’s acquisition of Tumblr this week upset the balance of power in social networking among tech giants. Yahoo is now in possession of one of the Internet’s most popular social sites. Tumblr is, or was, an isolationist. Some call it a social network; others call it a blogging platform. But Tumblr is really neither of […]

Apple and Google are Silicon Valley’s dominant superpowers, the Athens and Sparta of technology. Two or three years ago, people might have said that Apple was on the rise and Google was in decline. Today, people say Google is on the rise and Apple is in decline. Pundits and press are generally confused about why […]

You’ve heard about Google’s Chromebook Pixel, the high-end, cloud-centric laptop. It’s far better than the cheap, plastic Chromebooks that shipped two years ago. At that time, I slammed the Chromebook as the “Computer for the Rest of Them”—the computer nobody would buy for themselves, but would buy for other people under some circumstances. But the […]

Starting today, I’m going to spend the entire month of May using only Google hardware, software and services. Can it be done? Should it? I’m going to find out. To help the experiment, Google has loaned to me a Chromebook Pixel and their latest Nexus phone and tablet. I’ll be using Android apps, of course, […]

Google Now is great. But how do you make it better? I believe Google is building a software-based artificial human brain, capable of interacting with people convincingly as if it were a real friend. And Google isn’t alone in this quest. Here’s what’s going on. Google buys Wavii Google outbid Apple to acquire a company […]

People think that Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook harvest every scrap of information about us they can, enabling them to zero in on exactly who, what and where we are. They do this, we’re told, to serve up highly targeted contextual advertising, to pitch products we want before we even know we want […]

It’s nothing to be sad about. Instead, you should be filled with joy. Why? Because soon your technology will be able to understand your emotional state. This is a welcome application of technology, and I’ll tell you why below. But first, let’s take a look at examples of technology that can read — and convey […]

The smartphone market is about to get interesting. Three secret projects are likely to take phones in three entirely new directions. Facebook, Google and Amazon are all working on projects that could radically change how we use our smartphones. I believe there are three things these phones will all have in common: 1. They will […]