Mike Elgan

Advertisers are all atwitter over the prospect of bombarding your cell phone with advertising. If you’re already annoyed by mobile spam, as I am, you’ll be disappointed to learn that the industry has barely even begun to exploit this amazing source of eyeballs. One estimate suggests that your average consumer is already exposed to about […]

Did you know that pilots use a different system of time than the rest of us? The entire aviation community — from professional airline pilots who fly the biggest passenger jets to weekend amateur pilots who fly tiny, two-seater, single engine clunkers around their local airports — uses a system called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), […]

The online catalogs have names like Spy World, Spy Source and even Spy Zilla. The wonderful and disturbing new world of spy gadgets offers obscure, often expensive devices — available in most cases to anyone with a credit card. Most spy gadgets should be and could be used for legal and ethical purposes — but […]

Personal computers are getting faker. The percentage of counterfeit components is growing steadily, if unevenly. Fake components make PCs cheaper. The downside is declining reliability, safety and performance. Is it even possible to keep it real? A massive crackdown at U.S. and European airports during two weeks in December yielded some 360,000 fake electronic components […]

You may have heard of, but probably don’t use, an online suite of office and productivity applications called Zoho. I know, I know – another Web 2.0 wonder application. I mean, what’s the point? You’ve already taken out a loan and purchased Microsoft Office. Or your company bought a license. Plus, you’ve invested your entire […]

Why would anyone want to buy a Tablet PC? Tablet devices are perceived as little more than heavy and slow laptops with small screens and large price tags. The payoff? You get to write on them with a stylus and take notes as if you’re writing on paper. Wake me when you’re done. Poor sales […]

Democracy in America is in trouble. For some reason, we can’t figure out how to cast votes and count them without blunders, inaccuracy and stupidity. In the past few decades, the simple act of voting in the United States has been characterized by malfunctioning voting machines, hanging chads, damaged, unreadable or lost ballots and gross […]

When you think about hardcore gamers, what comes to mind? Do you think of twitching slackers wasting away — mind, body and soul — in front of a flashing screen? Or do you see highly skilled people who have mastered a wide range of very complex tasks with a combination of memorization, intuition and big-picture […]

Silicon Valley is a marvelous engine of innovation — both technical and linguistic. And to use an annoying Silicon Valley buzzword, language invention is the “low-hanging fruit” of the innovation process for any Bay Area startup. It all starts with a desire to emphasize the totally new nature of something that really isn’t all that […]

Prediction: The story of the year in 2008 will be the colossal failure of censorship during the Beijing Olympic games. The games themselves will be exciting, lavish and hotly contested. But the main event will be the clash between the Chinese Communist Party, which will use biometrics, surveillance, censorship and an army of goons to […]

As we wind down another year in technology, it’s a good time to check in on the cults and see how they’re doing. For companies who inspire them, user cults are nice because they motivate customers to overlook strategic blunders, exaggerate product successes and — most importantly — walk the earth “virally” marketing products without […]

They don’t call the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday” for nothing. It’s all about launching the megastores “into the black” – into profitability. They profit not by offering goods at a loss, but by using ultra-low prices to lure you into their stores, where they can employ dirty tricks to make money. But with my […]