Can Amazon’s Echo Dot Make a Good SIDS Alarm?

It was 15 years ago this week that my son Chase Cringely died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) at age 74 days. I wrote about it at the time and there was a great outpouring of support from readers. Back then, before the advent of social media, parents didn’t get a chance to grieve in print the way Mary Alyce and I did. We shed a light on SIDS and, for a couple years, even led to some progress in combating the condition, which still kills about 4,000 American babies each year.

When you lose a child, especially one who dies in your lap, as Chase did with me, […]

By |April 26th, 2017|2017, cloud computing, Family, Gadgets, Health, Product Development|21 Comments
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My first Seeking Alpha post ran today

IMG_0826 (1)I know many readers are tired of my (too) many columns about IBM. So I won’t be posting the latest one here at all. It’s over on the Seeking Alpha investor blog. You can read it here. I mention the post simply because some readers do care about such things.

The Seeking Alpha post is about IBM earnings and how the company is using old business to prop-up new business and not being at all upfront about what’s really happening.

The Seeking Alpha column is also a complaint about blog posts related to earnings in general because they are often written by people who think they know a lot about financial numbers but clearly know […]

By |May 31st, 2016|2016, analytics, Business, Companies, Family, Gadgets, Media|51 Comments
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$99 Mineserver: The Devil is in the Details

IMG_0734You may recall my three sons ran a successful Kickstarter campaign last fall for their $99 Mineserver, a multiuser Minecraft server the size of a pack (not a carton) of cigarettes. On the eve of their product finally shipping here’s an update with some lessons for any complex technical project.

At the time we shot the Kickstarter video my kids already had in hand a functional prototype. Everything seen in the video was real and the boys felt that only producing custom cases really stood in the way of shipping. How wrong they were!

First we needed a mobile app to administer the server so we hired an experienced […]

By |March 17th, 2016|2016, Business, Entrepreneurship, Family, Gadgets|86 Comments
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Last chance to get a Mineserver™ for Christmas!

newmineserverlogo.jpgIt took only two days for our three sons to reach their $15,000 Kickstarter funding goal and visions of building a kit car were dancing in their heads. Almost three weeks later, however, total pledges are just nearing $30,000, which puts profits more in the deluxe quadcopter range. Still good, but not a Manx dune buggy. But there is one more day to make your pledge — the only way to get a Mineserver™ or Mineserver Pro™ in time for Christmas.

Along the way we gained the attention of Mojang, owners of Minecraft, who didn’t like our logo so the boys held a contest with the winner (from Hamilton, New Zealand!) getting a […]

By |October 19th, 2015|2015, Entrepreneurship, Family, Gadgets, Startups|86 Comments
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The Cringely boys Kickstart Mineserver™, a $99 Minecraft server

When my three sons, ages 13, 11, and 9 decided to do a summer business together I thought it could be almost anything. After all, they’ve visited three dozen tech startups with me in our RV and they’ve been surrounded by technology entrepreneurs their entire lives. What business would it be?

I just never expected a $99 Minecraft server.

It’s brilliant, really. Minecraft is hugely popular but the Minecraft hardware market is almost nonexistent. It’s not that nobody thought to do such a server but that it’s a business idea most entrepreneurs would see as not having legs. It will scale, sure, but will it endure? In a few months someone — no doubt someone in Asia — will copy the idea, […]

By |September 29th, 2015|2015, Breaking News, entertainment, Entrepreneurship, Family, Gadgets, Product Development|101 Comments
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