Mike Elgan

My prediction is that the Apple Watch will sell better than all previous smartwatches combined within a few days of its release. Critics will say that Apple Watch market success is due to Apple’s marketing mojo or because Apple fans are sheep who buy anything Apple sells. Some will say that it shouldn’t succeed because […]

An innovative Norwegian company you probably never heard of will demonstrate at next week’s Mobile World Congress the smartest bottle of whiskey ever. The company is Thinfilm. And the whiskey is a $200 bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label whisky. Thinfilm will demonstrate a label it created using its new OpenSense near-field communication (NFC) technology, […]

Japan has long been a global leader in mobile phone trends. That’s why the most recent mobile sales numbers coming out of Japan are a shock. For the past two years, smartphone sales have declined. Some 5.3 percent fewer smartphones sold in 2014 than in 2013. Meanwhile, shipments of dumb “flip-phones” rose by 5.7 percent […]

Don’t look now, but there’s an acute attention shortage. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to carve out time to focus and get real work done. It’s happening to you. And it’s happening to the people you work for and those work for you. Don’t beat yourself up about it. It’s not your fault. If you want […]

“In five years, most of [Facebook] will be video.” That’s what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in November. What he said this week during the company’s earnings report supports his prediction. Facebook users now watch 3 billion videos a day—more than three videos per each active user per day. That’s more than triple the number […]

I know podcasting is experiencing a resurgence because the Internet says so. The number of blog posts and online articles proclaiming an explosion in the popularity or quality or financial success of podcasts since the fall of 2014 has been really astonishing. Here’s what you need to know about the podcasting resurgence. 1. There really […]

A product announced (but not shipped) during the Consumer Electronics Show 2015 year gives us a preview of a transformative category of products that will dominate the next few CES sessions starting next year—the giant touch screen tablet/TV. The company, called Fuhu, exhibited a big Android tablet for children and families. How big? It’s not […]

Isolated cyber-attacks between governments have been taking place for decades. The 2010 Stuxnet attack on Iran to disrupt that country’s nuclear program is one stellar example. The multi-year Red October hack discovered in 2012 is another. But we seem to be entering a new era of bona fide cyber-war, where two nations engage in frequent […]

The right to be forgotten concept is the right to free oneself from being stigmatized for events that happened in the past. It sounds like a great idea. For example, let’s say a person gets drunk as a teenager and causes an accident. The local papers pick up the accident, the trial and the sentencing. […]

You heard about the most recent Uber scandal, right? The San Francisco-based ride sharing service has been plagued by accusations of anti-competitiveness, user privacy violations, driver exploitation, sexism and more. The most recent controversy started when Buzzfeed reported that Uber senior vice president Emil Michael was quoted as saying at a Silicon Valley dinner that […]