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Just a week into nominations for the Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour we have 200 companies signed up to vie for the 24 positions. My hope to reach 600 in eight weeks, then, is very possible if I keep up the pressure and perhaps define the rules a little better. That’s what this column is for.

Non-U. S. companies are out. We’ve had a few Canadian companies enquire and one even claimed to be from Vancouver, WA instead of Vancouver, BC. No, that won’t do. This is a U. S. competition, but that doesn’t mean the next season won’t be international. In fact I can almost guarantee it will be.

Remember this is for TV as well as for the web so I might use a Canadian company or two as examples of how things are different for startups than in the U. S. but the 24 finalists will all be companies whose intergalactic headquarters are in the U. S.

While foreign startups are out of the running this time, companies based in Silicon Valley and other tech hotbeds definite are not disqualified.  I know this seems to go against the spirit of the competition, but I want the best startups I can find and if a few of those are San Jose or Boston that’s okay. My kids have never been to Boston.

Next, I’m sorry you don’t like the web site, but pouting doesn’t help, either, and it’s simply not attractive. We’re making changes to improve the site daily so let’s concentrate more on the potential of this competition and less on your personal disdain for certain kinds of javascript.

No multiple submissions! Before you nominate a company look to see if it is already there. And submitting in multiple categories won’t help, either, so stop it.

Now about those categories, I came up with the original six but there have been suggestions that maybe I’m being too strict, that perhaps there should be an education category and possibly one for finance. I am open to these changes, but only if there is real demand, so speak up in the comments section for this post.

Finally, there are some companies that want to nominate themselves but they are still in stealth mode and feel they dare not. Here’s what I suggest for you guys. if you believe your company is something really special and if you are fairly confident that you will be out of stealth mode six months from now (next September-October when the TV series starts to air) then contact me directly at bob@cringely.com and maybe we can still do something together.

I am willing to sign NDAs and will keep your grubby secrets until next fall. But you have to understand that each company I visit costs me about $20,000, so if you are going to change your mind about publicity next fall then let’s just forget it.

There’s always another startup.

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Until leaving PBS at the end of 2008 I could claim I had been fired from every job I ever held, which isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds. Leaving PBS after 11 years broke that pattern, but not for long. Now I have been fired from Home-Account, my mortgage startup. How does one found a company and then get fired from it? That’s easy: you get in a fight with the CEO. At least that’s how I tend to do it.

These things happen all the time in startups where emotions nearly always run high and the CEO (not me)  wins. That’s the case here, so life goes on. And, as I discovered after every previous firing, life tends to get better. It sure did in this case, because I have segued into working with one of my heroes.

I’m blogging with my friend Jerry Goodman, who writes under the name Adam Smith. Maybe you know the guy. He had a weekly show on PBS for 14 years (we are both refugees) and before that wrote three monster best-sellers that defined modern financial journalism — The Money Game, Supermoney, and Paper Money. My book Accidental Empires deliberately copied Jerry’s writing style as he likes to remind me.

Jerry also co-founded Institutional Investor magazine, New York magazine, and was Tom Wolfe’s editor at Esquire.  I am not worthy.

Jerry and I are blogging for a financial publisher called Asset International that caters almost exclusively to institutional investors so you probably haven’t heard of them. AI is run by Jim Casella, who was many years ago my boss’s boss’s boss at InfoWorld. He fired me there, too. But like other people have — including Steve Jobs and Stewart Alsop — Jim has hired me back, so I must have some value, however fleeting.

I’m the junior partner in this venture which is titled Adam Smith’s Moneyworld after Jerry’s old show. He hangs with titans of finance and lives to write about it while I do my usual, which is to explain complex systems. If you like such things and wonder how the world of money really works, please check us out.

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Today is a great day for I, Cringely and for me. It is the day we launch the special web site for Cringely’s (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour. I wrote a column last month announcing the Tour, which you can read here, but today marks the actual start of this summer’s adventure, because it opens nominations.

Visit the new web site here, but please remember to come back and finish reading this column.

This new web site is strictly for readers to nominate startup companies, discuss them, vote for favorites, then see the results as we come up with the top 24 companies in six different categories.

You have to register in order to nominate or vote, though not to just read.  Many people won’t have to register if they login with their Facebook or Twitter IDs. Registration is important because that’s how we keep people from stuffing our ballot box. That’s the only reason we have registration. I won’t sell your name to anyone, I promise.

Notice that the site (unlike this one you are reading right now) doesn’t even have ads. I want to keep the new site completely transparent and above-board, because I think this might be one of the most important things I ever do in my career so I want to do it right.

As I am writing this, the new site stands empty. There are no nominated companies. That’s your job, not mine. So here is how to do your job. Click on the nomination form and fill it in for any startup company that you think is doing exciting work and deserves recognition. The very act of being considered and discussed by 500,000 readers will give these companies more publicity than most of them would otherwise ever get.  So in this case it is an honor just to be nominated. But having said that, please only nominate really good companies that actually qualify.

After my first column about the Tour I received e-mail from many startups wanting to be considered and one of those was Facebook. I have nothing against Facebook, but I hardly think it qualifies for this project. If the company you are pushing has zillions in the bank and more than, say, 50 employees, it is too darned big. No Facebooks.

Beyond that it is okay to nominate companies that have been around for awhile. It is okay to nominate your own company. This isn’t frigging Wikipedia.

You can add all kinds of supporting information to the nomination including documents and even videos for voters to consider. And remember that not only the nominator can submit such materials, any registered user of the site can do so. This requires registration because there are as my Mom, Mrs. Cringely, would say, assholes out there who will submit all sorts of useless or disruptive crap. This new site is a No-Asshole Zone, so let me know if you come across any nonsense and I’ll take the garbage out myself.

This is an ongoing process that will take at least eight weeks to find our 24 companies. Keep coming back to see the new companies that have been nominated and to discuss them and vote. While the winners won’t be final until the very end, I’ll make sure you have some sense of the deliberations as they go along, so come back for that, too.

Just to recap what I announced last month, my family and I will this summer saddle-up our 1996 Winnebago motor home to visit all 24 finalists, taking with us a TV camera crew. We’ll spend two days at every company, camped in the parking lot or in the CEO’s driveway. Two days is how long it usually takes for my kids to use up all the water and demand a trip to Redbox for new videos.

In addition to two months of ongoing text, audio, and video coverage right here, the 24 finalists will appear in my 12-hour reality TV series which will be on a BIG cable channel, one you have actually heard of that does not include the word “shopping” in its name.

I am also looking for a few good experts to consult on this project and for the TV series. That’s because I want to do more than just publicize the work of these new companies, I want to help them. So if you have been a successful startup CEO, CFO, CTO — anything with a C at the front — and are willing to share a bit of your expertise, please let me know. Experts on startup financing, including venture capitalists and angels, are especially encouraged to apply (bring money — preferably small bills with non-sequential serial numbers).

Some of these experts will come with me to the companies, some will appear only on video, depending on the time they can give to the project.

Not all experts will be accepted. This is my project and I’ll be the one to decide if you get to play or not. Frankly there are plenty of people out there who know a lot but have a hard time being helpful. We’re here to encourage. If any company made the top 24, they are already successful. We aren’t here to tell them how dumb they are and how smart we are.

All decisions are final.

Finally, I want to thank the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City for their support for this project, which they jumped on within minutes of hearing about it. Kauffman is the foundation of entrepreneurism and that’s what this startup tour is all about — helping to make America even greater.

But Kauffman and I can’t do it all by ourselves, so if your organization wants to become involved please get in touch with me because I’d like to make this tour an annual event and to help technology startups become as important to television as Survivor or The Apprentice.

Go to the new site and register now.

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Apple has been criticizing Adobe Systems lately for what Cupertino perceives as poor performance and design deficiencies in Adobe’s Flash web media technology, which it darned well wants to keep off the iPhone and iPad. Adobe, in turn, has been defending Flash, however gently, citing it as a great enabling technology that has got the web in large part to where it is today. Both companies are correct, and that’s the point that seems to be missed by most of the pundits standing around pointing at the fight. Flash has been vital to the success of the web, but Flash is old.

Apple’s preferred media architecture, HTML5, is the future of the web.

Web browsers have swallowed up most every app you used to have to install on your PC. Something like TurboTax needs forms to input data, display tables of numbers, and store your returns on their server. But if you want to have forms smart enough to know what’s a date and what’s a dollar; to draw piecharts; or store your W-2 on your laptop, then you need a new browser.

Flash always picked up where the browser left off, but it can’t talk to your webcam, store local files, or draw pixels directly to your screen. Now, for the first time, a cluster of technologies known as HTML5 allow a standards-based pathway to busting those barriers with canvas graphics, drawing video onscreen, smarter forms, and local storage for private data. So who needs Flash?

John Gruber is right: Flash is responsible for most of the crashes of my Mac. I can hardly blame Adobe for defending its very successful Flash franchise, though it feels strange coming from that nerdiest of nerdy companies. And I admit there are still a few things that Flash can do but HTML5 can’t, but the evolutionary path here is clear.

Where Flash a decade ago enabled browsers to do more, I can see a time coming soon when Flash will force browsers to do less than they might.

It’s time for a change.

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No, Google doesn’t intend to become a national Internet Service Provider, despite its new plan to build a number of optical networks to serve homes and businesses at up to one gigabit-per-second.  The real plan is half Xerox PARC and half Tom Sawyer.

When the Computer Science Lab at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was organized by Bob Taylor in the early 1970s to revolutionize computer, network, and printing technology, there was a conscious decision to live 10 years in the future. The CSL would build devices that could be expected to make economic sense in 1980, not 1970.  This was a huge leap, because it meant the amount of memory in each device would be 64 times as much as made economic sense in 1970 when 1K was a lot.  Yet think of it, a 64K PC was the norm when IBM introduced that product in 1981 (base was 16K!) so the numbers were about right.  Only by embracing future limits, no matter the cost, was PARC able to achieve so much (Ethernet, Graphical User Interfaces, laser printing) in its first three years of operation.

Part of Google’s inspiration, then, for building-out a few residential and business optical networks is to do the same thing.  Because not all smart people work at Google and even more so because the smart people who do work at Google don’t generally think or operate like the rest of us, it will be very useful to see what normal folks actually do with that much bandwidth.

There will be a few surprises, I’m sure, but not many.  For the most part Google is hoping to inspire current ISPs — mainly cable companies — to follow its lead, like Tom Sawyer did when getting his friends to whitewash that fence.  Google wants to set an example for how to do local networks right and get the Obama Administration to codify that methodology through the Federal Communication Commission.  Then they want someone else to do the actual heavy lifting.

And it will probably work, not so much because Google is brilliant but because the cable TV companies are ambitious.  We’re entering an era where cable operators will have a real cost advantage over telcos in expanding residential bandwidth, thanks to DOCSIS 3.0 modems.

I’m the third DOCSIS 3.0 customer in Charleston, South Carolina and the first residential customer following two law firms.  I did it I suppose to write this column but even more so because I have some heavy video activity coming-up and thought I might need the extra bandwidth, which is substantial.  The important thing to understand about DOCSIS 3.0 technology is that it’s not a big deal, really.  It’s just channel bonding.

Where earlier cable modems had users on each subnet sharing a single analog video channel (generally channel 80), DOCSIS 3.0 devices can grab several channels and aggregate bandwidth.  Think about it, under this scenario if a cable system operator were to abandon its analog signal entirely in favor of a total IP solution that would mean a 100X increase in shareable bandwidth on each subnet — subnets that are already for the most part interconnected by fiber.  That’s 30 gigabits-per-second or more to be share in your neighborhood alone for a cost that amounts to about $300 compared to the average $1350 per customer Verizon is spending to install FiOS fiber.

Some cable companies will use DOCSIS 3.0 to take down the local phone company, which will be hard-put to compete.  And they’ll have support from the TV manufacturers as well as cable box makers.  My new 58-inch Panasonic Plasma TV has an Ethernet port on the back and all Panasonic’s competitors would like us to buy new TV’s too.  And don’t forget who is America’s largest maker of cable boxes — Cisco.  You think they don’t want IP TV? Heck, they trademarked the term.

While what Google intends to install is fiber (or so they are saying right now) the ultimate beneficiaries of this project may be more traditional cable plants running mainly thick old coax.

Google wants to nudge this along because their ultimate goal isn’t to be an ISP but to live in the data center of the ISP providing us data with ads to go with it.  They want to drop one of those shipping container server farms into the parking lot of every cable head-end in America, ultimately providing gigabits of data without having to pay anything for bandwidth.

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Small companies create jobs in America.

According to a recent study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, companies less than five years old generated nearly two-thirds of the new jobs created in the U. S. in 2007. But what’s even more important is that without these startups more jobs would be lost than created, the U. S. economy would permanently shrink and America would eventually lose its superpower status, simple as that.

This is because big companies grow by increasing scale and productivity, which is to say by reducing the number of jobs per unit of sales, while startups grow by inventing cool stuff. See the difference?

The startups that most reliably become giant American corporations and creators of wealth are technology startups. Without startups to compete with or acquire, big technology companies would do almost nothing new. In the United States large companies depend on startups to explore new technologies and new markets. Startups play a particularly important role in growing jobs out of a recession. New companies produced all of the net new jobs in the U. S. from 2001-2007, and also from 1980-1983, the last big American downturn.

Why then, has U. S. economic policy been aimed almost entirely at saving large and dying industries (banks and car companies)? Because sometimes even Presidents don’t get it.

U. S. technology startups are born and die at astounding rates. Ninety-five percent of technology startups fail — ninety-five percent. With odds at 19-to-1 against success, why do entrepreneurs even bother to build these companies? Because the potential rewards are huge (Microsoft and Apple, Cisco and Intel were all startups, remember) and for real entrepreneurs there are some things even worse than failure, like boredom or being like everyone else.

American technology startups change the world all the time and are this country’s primary global advantage, though hardly anyone understands that. Encouraging technology startups is the key to keeping America competitive and prosperous, though hardly anyone does that. Technology startups succeed despite these adversities because Americans are full of ideas, startups are so darned fun to do, and they don’t have to cost that much, either — sometimes nothing at all.

Technology export sales drive the U. S. economy and technology startups drive U. S. industry, yet in this era of too-big-to-die companies hardly anyone knows about or understands this phenomenon. The experts are supposed to be the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley and Boston, but they don’t really know what they are doing. VC returns are way down for a variety of reasons mainly coming back to the same greed and stupidity we’ve been seeing at work in other financial markets.

Something needs to be done, then, to encourage America to restart itself, and I’m just the guy to try it.

Announcing the Cringely 2010 (Not in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour.

Starting next month I will be accepting from readers nominations for interesting startup companies in six general categories — biotech, energy, entertainment, information technology, materials, and transportation.  Over the course of about six weeks we will examine and discuss as a community these nominated companies of which I am hoping there will be hundreds, primarily not from Silicon Valley or any other tech hotbeds.  I’ll have some assistance in this process from the Kauffman Foundation.

Together we’ll whittle the number down to 24 then come June I will set off with my family in our RV to visit all 24.  We’ll camp in the parking lot or in the driveway of the CEO and spend a couple days at each startup, learning about the company, the people, their technology and their market.  I’ll take with me a small camera crew and we’ll produce what will begin with a summer of blogging and end with a 13-part TV reality series

That’s my plan for restarting America and I hope you’ll be along for the ride.  Look for details soon, but no nominations yet, please.

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As we’ve all read, Google recently experienced a massive attack on its network, probably from China, and has threatened to leave the Chinese market as a result. I’ve written about that aspect before (Google taking its ball and going home) but this column is about the attack itself and Google’s internal plans for how to deal with future such problems, because of course this will happen again. I’m frankly trying to understand what Google is up to in its response to the Chinese threat — a response that doesn’t make much sense to me given the details of the attack as published.

First reports of the attack blamed a security flaw in an attached PDF file. Later reports blamed a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Adobe denies the PDF vulnerability, though the company not long ago issued a security patch for that product. Microsoft confirmed the IE vulnerability. But what’s interesting to me is that I understand from inside Google that the company plans to respond to this Chinese threat by changing its log-in process for web apps to one using a secure secondary server. That’s great, but it wouldn’t have stopped the most recent attack.

Is there something here we aren’t being told?

The most popular secure secondary server access system is called SiteKey and is used by Bank of America and many other financial institutions. The way SiteKey works is you log on to your bank’s computer, for example, by first typing an account identifier which causes one server to generate a picture and another server to generate a pass phrase which together don’t identify you to the bank but rather identifies the bank to you. Trapped as it is in a hash table, nobody at the bank can even tell you what picture you chose but you know it (the pass phrase too) so you can be pretty sure the server you are logging into is the one you want and not some phishing site. If the picture and phrase are satisfactory you can then type in your real password and you are there.

I’m told that Google will soon roll-out a similar system for Google Apps.

But I can’t see how using secure secondary authentication would have had any impact at all on the recent Chinese malware incident.

So I went to a friend who manages data security for a huge defense contractor and he agreed. “Authentication helps, ” he said, “but that was the second part of the attack, the original piece was a carefully crafted PDF file that was executed by the user. No amount of authentication helps against an authorized user. Don’t get me wrong, I am a believer in strong X. 509 based authentication, just it would not have helped against a malicious attachment.”

Adobe says it wasn’t a PDF problem at all. Yet my friend, who is privy to a flow of information the rest of us are not, says Adobe may be technically incorrect in this assertion.  I don’t know for sure, nor do I think it really matters in this case.

“The IE use was a secondary effect (to download the malware using an allowed program), ” he explained. “I’m not sure what they are calling a vulnerability (it might be a feature). The initial vector was the PDF. Typically such an attack is limited in just how large a program can be in the initial attack (hidden inside the attachment).  It has to be just enough to pull the real root kit. Early ones used their own network app but most systems are now protected by personal firewalls that would disallow or alarm. Use of IE would probably avoid this (and explains why large corporations are going to gateway white lists). Bottom line: the attack requires an executable program to be running on the workstation. Once that is in place, anything can be done. ”

The best defense against this sort of attack would have been two-fold. First, strip all e-mail attachments from messages and replace them with a URL. Send one copy of the attachment to a dedicated server that can be set to paranoid. Take as much time as needed to vet the attachment including emulation to see if it is malware or not. Once complete, the URL embedded with the forwarded e-mail becomes active and the attachment can be downloaded.

Google owns Postini, which could implement just such a technique, so we should probably expect that they will do so, making Google apps more secure and therefore more attractive in the process.  In Google’s move to make itself ever more essential to the net they may well offer such a quarantine service as a standalone product, too.

The second part of this solution unfortunately died with Windows Vista — the hated User Access Control (UAC). Temporary privilege escalation with logging, which is what Vista’s UAC provided along with some user grief, is the way to go.

Remember that all the authentication in the world will not protect against a privileged user doing the wrong thing. It’s just that logging may help to determine what happened after the fact.

We have known for years how to fix this, but nobody cared.

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Later today the Obama Administration will reportedly announce major changes in the U. S. space program that may amount to the effective end of manned space flight after this decade. As a guy who has been trying to mount his own mission to the Moon I’m not yet sure how I feel about this. Maybe it is a great opportunity, but probably not.

The FY2011 federal proposed budget will be published with the following changes:

– NASA’s Constellation program to replace the Space Shuttle will be cancelled and all hardware development will be stopped including Ares 1, Ares 5 and Orion.

– There is no real post-ISS program. Maybe something will happen past 2020 but that is for the next administration to figure out.

Where NASA goes other space agencies will follow (the Europeans, Indians, even the Russians, possibly leaving only the Chinese still headed to the Moon). The Moon is out as a destination, considered by some as too hard and others as too boring. Over the next two years we will see a serious drop-off in interest expressed by various groups (like the Google Lunar X-Prize effort).

This has happened before: back in 1990s everybody was into Mars missions (NASA, other government agencies and private groups). When NASA lost interest in Mars around 2001-03 and turned to Moon other nations followed.

On one hand this pending announcement is terribly disappointing. There is a very high chance that we will see an end to U. S. human spaceflight within the next few years. But it was probably inevitable. NASA is too screwed up to do anything else without a major restructuring and that would require spending too much Presidential capital in this terrible economy.

My Moon mission, of course, is still on.

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It’s the morning after and time for an unjaundiced look at Apple’s just-announced iPad tablet computer thingee. My last post was a series of pre-announcement Tweets from a guy at or near EnGadget and I took some grief from readers for even posting it, but in retrospect I am glad I did because it gives me a lot more to say about the new gizmo.

Were the tweets from a real beta tester? While many readers thought they weren’t, I’m pretty sure they were, primarily based on what many perceived as mistakes. Yes, the price points were off but those things can change hour-by-hour right up to the last minute and I wouldn’t put it past Apple to deliberately give bad pricing to testers to mislead and catch leaks. More importantly, the Twitterer said there would be three price points and there were. Based on the iPhone/iTouch intro model one would only have expected two price points.

Let’s look inside this price differential for a moment and try to channel our inner Steve Jobs. The Twitterer said $599, $699, and $799 while Apple announced $499, $599, and $699 without 3G and $629, $729, and $829 for the same models with 3G. But remember the Twitterer was strictly referring to 3G models, since he said they had 3G. He also mentioned both AT&T and Verizon Wireless, while Apple mentioned only AT&T.

Just because Apple didn’t mention Verizon doesn’t mean they won’t also offer 3G service from Verizon. The word “exclusive” was never used referring to AT&T. They trotted-out that pre-paid plan, but it would be crazy for carriers to not also offer a one-year or two-year subscription plan, too, which would drop the unit price somewhat. Maybe the subscription rates weren’t yet set. More likely the Verizon details were still in some limbo or Apple gave AT&T an exclusive presence at the intro in exchange for some concession we may never know about.

With Steve Jobs the deal isn’t done until it is done so I am sure he’s still trying to take one or both carriers to the cleaners.

Which brings us back to that price, which was $30 higher than predicted by the Twitterer. Remember Apple dropped iPhone prices almost immediately after the units started shipping. I don’t think this pricing is set in stone, either.  Maybe the $30 is padding they’ll drop at the intro to make us feel good.  Parts experts say 3G chips now cost around $7, so including one hardly adds $130 to the price or even $100.

Another point brought up against the Twitterer was the battery life (he said three hours, Apple said 10 hours). Reality in the PC and mobile industries is that a 10 hour battery life really means six hours. You may get 100 percent of the advertised battery life, but I don’t. My little Dell Vostro A90 (more on that in a day or so) is supposed to be good for six hours but the little battery meter always tells me on a full charge that I have 3:25 to go. There’s simply no way that iPad, no matter what the processor, is good for a real 10 hours of continuous use. And remember this is the non-3G version they are touting, while the Twitterer was clearly using 3G.

An iPod Touch with Wifi turned on lasts a lot longer than a comparable iPhone with WiFi turned off. In real life I’m pretty sure a 3G iPad IS a 2-3 hour device. And what’s wrong with that?

Finally, where were the split-view camera and the gimmicky solar charger? According to EnGadget the split-view cam is mentioned in the iPad SDK as “iPad-only” and some iPad apps ask you to take pictures without giving you the capability to do so…. yet. I’m sure the camera is coming. As for the solar charger, who’s to say that won’t come shortly, too?

In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if both features are present when the iPad finally ships in 60 days along with iPhone 4.0 software, which many expected to be part of yesterday’s announcement.

I was disappointed by the lack of iPhone 4.0 because this kind of device really needs true multi-tasking. I’m sure we will see it soon. What I am not at all sure about but wish we’d see soon is support for Adobe’s Flash. What does Steve Jobs have against Adobe, anyway? He used to love Adobe chairman John Warnock. There’s some weird daddy thing going on there with Apple’s rejection of Flash and I am tired of it. This new processor is plenty fast enough to support Flash and HTML 5 is still not ready for prime time.

Correction — Here’s a more informed view of the Flash situation from a friend.  it’s hard to argue with his numbers:

“I did a quickie test with the new YouTube HTML5 beta. On a site that embedded a video (so Flash was used), my browser CPU utilization was 22%, and the Adobe Flash plug-in CPU utilization was 55%. (dual core macbook pro, so total CPU% = 200%).

After the video played, I watched the same video again directly on the YouTube site in HTML5. Adobe Flash plug-in CPU utilization was 4% (what it consumes just sitting on its hiney), and the browser CPU utilization was 17%.

77% vs 21%. that’s why Apple hates Adobe. There certainly may be personalities involved (with Jobs, there is always something personal), but Adobe Flash is just technically awful (this actually may be the crux of any Jobs’ hatred – he hates inelegance, and Adobe Flash is inelegant).

I don’t hate Adobe, and it does bother met that I can’t see Flash on the iPhone or iPad, but Adobe has acted very awfully in this area and doesn’t appear to be doing anything to address it. Google and Apple have the muscle to squeeze them out.”

Now we return you to Bob, already in progress:

The apps were underwhelming to me with the exception of iPhoto, but maybe that requires waiting for iPhone 4, too. Overall the product felt rushed. But knowing Steve a little bit I think he’s seeing this as a two-part intro and there will be another event around the shipping date, supposedly 60 days from now, which he’ll correctly view as yet another marketing opportunity. At that event we’ll see 3G from more than just AT&T, we’ll hear about more data plans including subsidized plans that will drop the price by $200. We’ll see the split-view camera, iPhone 4.0, and maybe even that little solar charger.

As presented yesterday the iPad was cool and I’ll probably buy one, but not right away. Fortunately many people will buy them right away then buy them again when the update equivalent to 3G (4G? HD?) comes along, just as they did with the original 2G iPone and the original 128K Mac.  So I am sure the iPad will be at least a modest success, even in its initial incarnation. But you know what it feels like to me with it’s hype followed by an underwhelming reality? It feels like another Segway, which sure hasn’t changed the way people move on the Earth.