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Update — Those who want to meet the Cringelys can come to Graphic.ly, an electronic Comic Book startup, at 1601 Pearl Street, Suite 200, Boulder, CO.  This is at 4PM on Saturday. If you can. please bring a small unwrapped toy for my kids to distribute at local hospitals and shelters.

And yes, I DID have the RV checked-out and serviced before we left Charleston.  Stuff happens.

Bob

That’s the catalytic converter from my RV.  It literally fell off when I hit a puddle during a rainstorm last week in St. Louis.  It dragged for a quarter mile or so before I got a clue there was something wrong.  When I took this picture I’d already found a piece of string and tied the cat to the door handle.  There was no similar piece of string for the tailpipe hanging out the other side of the bus.  It dragged the last mile to the RV park.

When anything goes wrong at an RV park, men instantly appear.  You never know their names, they just start to help.  It’s some Americana throwback that rubes like me find very useful.  In this case the samaritan wanted to go further than I did, though.

“Looks pretty bad,” he said. “Want to cut it off?”

“Cut it off?  How?”

“I’ve got tools.  Let me fire up my grinder and we’ll have that off in a jiff.”

I declined.

Later, when another camper came out to complain about my attempt to asphyxiate his kids with my generator exhaust, he said, “I know you.”

Remember my picture is on the side of the bus about 10 times life size.

“You’re from Plane Crazy.”

I sure didn’t see that one coming.

But if you live in or near Boulder, Colorado, know that the Cringely’s are coming and we’ll be around this weekend.

If someone can suggest a place to meet on Saturday afternoon we’ll do just that.  Remember to bring a toy for my kids to give away (not keep) and Mrs. Cringely will allow you to admire her muffins.

Can anybody suggest a good location?

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Anarchist Leader, Age 4

As we cross America on our Startup Tour there are any number of assumptions I’ve made about both new companies and child behavior that are being challenged. My kids are clearly anarchists and determined to topple me from power for one. As for the companies, I’m amazed over and over again how little money it can take to start a good business and how many founders find themselves running companies almost despite themselves. A good example of both lessons is Front Porch Forum (FPF) from Burlington, Vermont.

Here is part of my interview with FPF CEO Michael Wood-Lewis. I’ll be back to say more when he’s finished talking:

“My wife and I moved to Burlington, VT from the big city in the late 1990s looking for a small city with a great sense of community. We landed in a neighborhood known for just that kind of thing. But in 2000, after a couple years, we still had yet to connect with the neighbors.

“One evening at dinner, we wondered “whatever happened to neighbors welcoming new folks with a plate of fresh-baked cookies?” Two years and still no cookies!

“My wife is a public school teacher and take‐charge kind of gal, so she baked cookies and took them over to several neighbors, and, at my genius suggestion, she used china plates instead of paper so when they returned the plates, we could interact again (maybe they’d even bring over more cookies!). Well… we never saw the plates again. Not entirely true… we found one at a yard sale the next summer. At 25 cents it was a bargain.

“Now these neighbors were not -­ are not -­ bad folks. It’s just that everyone was so busy and cultural expectations have shifted in this generation. We were just strangers who lived next door. There’s no social contract there.

“So, our second attempt was to create an online forum for the neighborhood.

“We used fairly primitive tools to build it, and made fliers and dropped them in 400 front doors. In short order, 25, 50, 75 households signed up and people started using it. Over time, it became obvious that we had something worth sharing. And at the same time, 2006, I was leaving my job, so Valerie and I decided to launch Front Porch Forum, offering an enhanced version of what we had been doing in our one neighborhood, but now across 100+ neighborhoods in our region.

“Today, Front Porch Forum (FPF) serves 25 northwest Vermont towns and 18,000 households subscribe, including 45 percent of the state’s largest city. People use it for the simplest things, e.g., finding lost cats, borrowing ladders, recommending plumbers, reporting car break‐ins, organizing block parties, debating local politics, etc. But it’s all done with clearly identified nearby neighbors, so it has a magical effect of turning familiar strangers into real neighbors over time and gets people more engaged in local goings on. More than 90 percent report becoming more involved civically since signing up with FPF!”

Wow, what a story! (This is Bob again.) Here we have a 10 year-old startup that was six years old before the founders even began to think of it as a startup. It has taken almost no money, has really primitive technology (text-only e-mail with three ads at the top of every issue), yet has greater market penetration than the local daily newspaper whose owners like to think their media property is worth millions, right?

Front Porch Forum isn’t another Craigslist for two vital reasons: 1) each edition covers just a single neighborhood averaging 300 homes, and; unlike Craigslist, FPF forbids anonymity.  You are responsible for your words.

If only more Internet communication was that way.

There is a lot that could be improved about Front Porch Forum and I’m sure it will be, but the company’s strength has been its simplicity. No VC would wait six years to decided whether his investment was even an investment, yet — and here’s the clear lesson — that’s what it takes sometimes.

The tortoise doesn’t always win but he always finishes.

We’re well into our Startup Tour, visiting young companies so far in New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, and Missouri.  Today we head to Kansas City and the Kauffman Foundation, one of our sponsors. That I’ve been slow to post the promised tour videos or write about these companies comes down to air conditioning failure, driving 4,000 miles, air conditioning failure (again), swiping a tree and tearing-off our retractable steps, air conditioning failure (yet again), and hitting a pothole so deep that our exhaust system literally fell off in the road.

Ah, the RV lifestyle!

We also learned a great truth about Travelocity when booking hotel rooms for the camera crew: did you know that when they take your money and promise you three rooms for two nights in St. Louis that promise means nothing? Sometimes those rooms turn out not to exist and the only recourse to being homeless in the rain at 11:30 PM is getting your money back in 12 business days.

But the startup companies we’ve visited so far has each been a joy and a surprise in a different way. I’ll start writing about those tonight as we finally get to rest for a couple days in Kansas City.

Or if you can’t wait for that and happen to be from Kansas City, drop by the Kauffman Foundation this afternoon at 3PM and meet us all for ice cream in the parking lot. And if you think to, please bring an unwrapped toy that my kids can take to local hospitals and homeless shelters. That’s their startup venture this summer.

See you at 3PM.

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation‎
4801 Rockhill Road Kansas City, MO 64110
(816) 932-1000
kauffman.org‎

Readers are reporting they can no longer buy an iPhone 4. Supplies are sold-out, but even more telling the Apple stores can’t even predict when they’ll have product to sell. This strongly suggests Apple has halted production and is going for a hardware fix. Not surprisingly, this unavailability hasn’t been noted yet in the press but I’d expect it to be a major issue at today’s press conference in Cupertino as Steve Jobs attempts to explain his way out of the current PR fiasco.

Update — The Apple event is over and all iPhone 4 users are getting free bumpers.  But I stand by my story.  Mrs. Cringely has a bumper and still finds her iPhone 4 almost unusable.  Apple must be working on a true solution to these problems for future production.

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It’s been a while since I’ve written about Cringely’s (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour, but that’s not because we weren’t working hard on the project.  In fact the effort of cutting 400+ companies down to 24, then setting-up a tour to visit them all, has been far harder than lazy-old-me ever expected it to be.  But here we are at last, ready to go.  My next post and many after will be from the Tour while this one will be about the Tour.

Look at our pimped-out RV! Not content to be incognito as we’re broken-down on the side of the road, we decided to at least evoke sympathy by leaning into the whole experience and wrapping the RV in a huge vinyl billboard.  This wrapping thing, while it took twice as long as I expected, was both fascinating and satisfying.  I wish I’d done this (the wrapping) a couple years ago, if only to cover the garish mid-90′s graphics that swarm over our old Winnebago.  It wasn’t inexpensive, but on a per-eyeball basis may be the cheapest advertising of all as we drive our 10,317 miles around America.

Our job this summer is to visit interesting tech startups, of course, but we’ll be doing more than that.  We’ll also be meeting with readers as we wander the country.  Look for an updated schedule here and also at http://startups.cringely.com to see when we’ll be near you.  Then come out to visit us in a WalMart parking lot or maybe at the local startup and Mrs. Cringely will let you enjoy her muffins.  The price of Mrs. Cringely’s muffins is a small unwrapped toy which my kids will be distributing at local hospitals and homeless shelters as we travel through.

There’s a lesson here (we hope) that not all kids get to ride around the country making TV shows.

An adventure like this one doesn’t happen without a lot of support.  It has needed the support of readers to nominate and vote for companies.  It has needed the Kauffman Foundation, which was there from the very beginning to help in every possible way.  More recently we’ve picked-up Research In Motion, makers of Blackberry mobile phones, as our single corporate sponsor.

This Startup Tour will be an all-Blackberry adventure.

We’ll be posting videos from the road starting next week, but first I have to gas-up the bus.

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Dave Miller, a very smart electrical engineer from New Zealand who is lucky enough to spend his days doing private research on gravity, has a theory about how Apple is handling the antenna problems on its iPhone 4 that have been getting so much attention in the blogosphere and even in the general press. You can read Dave’s thoughts here. For those who don’t want to go all the way to New Zealand, the gist of Dave’s argument is that Apple has a serious problem that it will try to allay by adopting AT&T’s recommended algorithm for assigning numbers of signal bars on the phone display, which Apple admits not having used to date.

Neither Dave nor I know anything about this AT&T algorithm but he supposes it might change the game a bit by representing absolute signal strength instead of Apple’s present algorithm, which appears to represent the strength of a signal within a Reality Distortion Field.

By going back to basics Dave thinks Apple can regain the upper hand in this public relations tussle.

It’s a well-reasoned argument, but the problem I see with it is that Dave is in New Zealand and AT&T isn’t. Dave thinks AT&T is a phone company, while I think it is a marketer of voice and data services with the emphasis on marketer.

As a marketer, AT&T’s longtime slogan was “more bars in more places,” which seems to me would work equally well (perhaps even better) for Hooters, but that’s for another column.

How do they get those “more bars in more places?” Did AT&T spend more than Verizon did building their wireless network? No. Do their cell towers transmit at higher power than those of other companies? No. Or do they simply make their phones — with the exception of the iPhone, the same phones used by the other networks — show more bars for the same signal?

Bingo.

I’ve been told by a couple of mobile phone manufacturers that AT&T is guilty of a little bar inflation, so to speak. It’s the most reliable way to get “more bars in more places.”

Now this is just something I’ve been told. I haven’t bought or borrowed a mess of comparable mobile phones and measured it myself. But these people had no reason to lie to me, either. So I’ll just throw this out as an idea why Apple adopting AT&T’s signal bar algorithm to somehow effectively reduce the number of bars might not be such a plausible idea.

As for Apple’s antenna problem, maybe that’s why my wife’s iPhone 4 sounds so tinny and why it drops so many calls. It’s a stunning handheld computer, but not a good phone.