1929 Jennings ‘Dutch Boy’ Quarter Play Slot Machine

January 21, 2013
Kindel
2 Comments

In the ’50s my father & grandfather came across about a dozen slot machines that had been unearthed from a building excavation in Chicago. Out of the pile, they were able to restore a couple of them. I remember my grandfather’s at their house in Grand Rapids. It was a nickel based unit and he always had a jar of nickels next to it. We had a $.25 based machine. When I was a kid, …Continue reading →

Don’t Make Your Team Say No To You

January 9, 2013
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups
4 Comments

Leaders are often visionary “idea people”. The difference between success and failure is how good these leaders are at training their teams to say No. Idea People often forget they are disrupting their own teams by voicing their ideas. If leaders don’t learn and practice skills for controlling the flow of ideas, their teams will fail. When I was building home networking for Windows at Microsoft, I learned getting a team to a focused plan, …Continue reading →

Goodbye GitHub: MCE Controller now on CodePlex

January 1, 2013
Coding, Smart Home, Uncategorized
1 Comment

I love git. I love GitHub. But GitHub doesn’t seem to appreciate open source projects that require hosting more than source code. MCE Controller is an open source Windows app intended to be used by non-developers. This means it has an installer, online documentation, and requires a discussion forum for support for end users. GitHub never really provided great support for this kind of project. For example, there is no forum/discussion feature (although some claim …Continue reading →

MCE Controller 1.7 Released – Now Supports RS-232

December 19, 2012
Coding, Smart Home, Uncategorized
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By popular demand (shocking, I know), MCE Controller now supports RS-232 in addition to TCP/IP connections. This means that you can now control any Windows PC via the serial port. MCE Controller is an open source application I built for my home control system. It makes it easy to integrate Windows PCs with other devices and control systems. Any device that can send strings over TCP/IP or (now!) a serial port can now send commands …Continue reading →

Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes

December 3, 2012
Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Organization & People, Startups
2 Comments

While in Amman Jordan last month, I had the opportunity to speak at Amman Tech Tuesdays, a local startup event held every month there. I was asked to talk about what I’ve learned in my career to an audience of about 500 geeks and entrepreneurs. I decided to talk about focus, a topic dear to my heart. The title of the talk is “Be as Excellent at Saying No as Saying Yes”. Below the video …Continue reading →

Four Things I Learned in Jordan

December 3, 2012
Startups
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I wrote a guest post for the Huffington Post on Dec 7, 2012. You can read the full post here, but here’s the TL;DR: If the Middle East can stay relatively stable for just 10-15 more years, entrepreneurship will have a major long-term positive impact on the social-economic future of the region. As the Middle East grows as a source of commerce and technology for the rest of the world, Arab women entrepreneurs will be …Continue reading →

Apps are Dead. Long Live Experiences.

November 26, 2012
Branding, Mobile
3 Comments

I like to get people’s attention by asserting “apps are dead”. I do this because it causes people to pause and think about what “apps” really are. After Apple started the app explosion in 2008 most apps were primarily client-side code. Today, however, it is almost impossible to find an app that does not rely on at least some Internet based service. In fact the apps most people use most of the time are almost …Continue reading →

Word as a Blog Writer? Finally?

November 4, 2012
Uncategorized
3 Comments

I have fallen in love with Windows Live Writer as a blogging tool. I love how it reads & writes to my blog seamlessly, how it renders my posts within the editor as they’ll be posted, and how it handles images and other uploads easily. So I’ve been pretty disappointed that there is no version of Windows Live Writer that works on Surface. @AlexBream just made me aware that Word 2013 has a “Blog Template” …Continue reading →

Computer Vision Explosion

November 4, 2012
Mobile
5 Comments

We are about to see an explosion in the use of computer vision systems. If you thought Kinect was cool or you think Creepy Cameraman is scary, the technology right around the corner, and its impact on our lives will blow you away. We’ve all dreamt of the day when natural user interface (NUI) systems were “real”. For example, in 1984 I built, as a high school project a system that allowed my school to …Continue reading →

Why Win8 Picture Password is Not Secure

November 2, 2012
Uncategorized
9 Comments

Windows 8 includes a slick feature intended to make it easier to log in: Picture Password. You select a photo that will be displayed on the login screen and then setup a simple gesture that you “draw” on the image to login. It makes quickly logging in easy, especially if you use strong passwords and you use a touch screen. And given Windows 8 pretty much requires you to link your Windows login to your …Continue reading →

Has MS Finally Gotten Through To DELL?

November 1, 2012
Uncategorized
11 Comments

I complained on Twitter to @MichaelDell that I could not buy a DELL XPS One 27 with “Microsoft Signature”. Today I got tweet from @MaryFadAtDell that read: @ckindel We have committed not to install bloatware on our XPS systems with Win8. I’ll email you details on what’s pre-installed. — Mary Fad (@MaryFadAtDell) November 1, 2012 The full of her email is below: Charlie – I wanted to get back to you on your concerns about …Continue reading →

If This Looks like This in 3 Weeks, We’ll Know The Answer

October 31, 2012
Mobile
5 Comments

This is the VerizonWireless Smartphone device page as of today. This is the “Featured” view, which means Verizon decides what devices appear at the top of the page. In about three weeks, if there aren’t a few Live Tiles a the top of the page then the canary is dead.

Keeping Tracks of Books I Read

October 26, 2012
Books, Uncategorized
15 Comments

Each January I post a list of books I read during the previous year (one of my favorites this year is @Scalzi’s Redshirts). Even though almost all books I read are via Amazon and Kindle, it is still a total pain in the butt to create those blog posts. http://ceklog.kindel.com/category/passions/books/ This has me thinking about a potential app idea and I’d love to hear from YOU about how you keep track, document, list, and share …Continue reading →

LockerGnome Guest Post on Mobile Fragmentation

October 22, 2012
Mobile, Platforms
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Today LockerGnome ran a guest post by yours truly titled “The Fragmentation of Mobile Fragmentation”. This is a follow-on post to my post focused on Android in January, intended to express my opinions on the broader mobile ecosystem. (Note, as of right now, the post on LockerGnome does not have my byline. They are working on fixing that). “Mobile fragmentation is going to get significantly worse over the next few years. While this fragmentation will …Continue reading →

Revisiting the Mullet: Why Surface is not a MS Business

October 21, 2012
Mobile
20 Comments

A few weeks ago a bunch of people (who should know better) were running around like chickens with their heads cut off yelping “Surface will be $199!” Exasperated, I wrote a post1 describing just how idiotic a concept that would be. I showed that even if Microsoft was serious about Surface being a real business, it could never sell it for $199 this fall. I promised to wear a Kasey Keller like mullet to Build …Continue reading →

I Want A Surface Keyboard for My iPad

October 21, 2012
Uncategorized
10 Comments

I had two hilarious encounters with the new Microsoft Surface advertising this weekend. One is just funny. The other is telling. Here’s the ad: Microsoft’s first real TV spot for the Surface Funny item #1: Multiple people asked me if, at 13 seconds in, I had a little cameo: No, that’s not me. I know people think we all look alike though. Funny, but not so funny (for MS), item #2: We’re watching the Flordia …Continue reading →

The Market Sides of the Mobile Ecosystem

October 18, 2012
Mobile, Platforms
12 Comments

I’ve been using a taxonomy to describe the market-sides of the mobile ecosystem that looks like this:     Up until now, my writing on the mobile ecosystem has been focused on smartphones, because their adoption and sales dominated. Given the season of the tablet has started, I need to make some points about how tablets relate. Even though we use the term “mobile” to describe scenarios involving both phones and tablets, before I go …Continue reading →

Mobile is Mobile

October 18, 2012
Mobile
4 Comments

In the past, I’ve instinctively associated “mobile” with “phone”, as in something that has cellular voice as a primary function. But most of the world has, apparently, decided to include tablets (but, curiously, not laptops) in this definition. I did an informal poll on Twitter. I asked: HiveMind Poll: Answer Yes/No: When someone says “mobile” (as in mobile industry) that includes tablets. — Charlie Kindel (@ckindel) October 18, 2012 The vast majority of respondents said …Continue reading →

MileLogr now Supports Outlook.com!

October 6, 2012
Startups
1 Comment

On September 10, Stefan & I launched the beta of MileLogr. We got some great feedback and have just launched a major update. MileLogr is a Calendar App that Creates Mileage Logs. MileLogr integrates with your calendar and creates mileage logs for taxes, expense reports, and timesheets. Automagically. For Free! The new update incorporates the following new features: Now supports Outlook.com (Hotmail/Live) based calendars in addition to Exchange/Office365 and Google calendars. For calendar systems that …Continue reading →

Motorola is a Sunk Cost (and a sinking Titanic)

October 5, 2012
Mobile
1 Comment

M.G. Slieger wrote, regarding the horrific “deal” Google got in buying Motorola: Google bought the Titanic. And they bought it when it was already underwater. – @parislemon This is cute (and true), not the right analogy because it makes people think Google bought Motorola for Motorola’s business. They did not. Google paid $12.5B to become a patent-superpower like Apple and Microsoft. They had failed in getting the Nortel patents (or were thwarted, depending on your …Continue reading →