If only they both worked.

The cameras came from  Abel Cinetech in New York City and we paid about $14,000 for the pair. The cameras worked fine for a few weeks until one froze-up in Boulder, CO.  We couldn’t get the camera to boot.  We sent it in for repair and Sony checked it into their system on 8/4. I spoke to one of their reps a few days later and was told they were waiting for parts but the camera would probably be repaired by the end of the next week.

I called that Friday and was told the parts were in and the camera was being repaired — and that I should call again in a few days. So I called back Tuesday, then Wednesday when we were in Portland and was told essentially the same thing again — they were working on it and it would be a few more days.

I called again this past Monday and was told that they needed more parts from Israel which they were expecting sometime around September 16th. The guy I spoke to was very direct and said that considering the last time they ordered parts they came in a few days late, as well as factoring in repair time — I was looking at it being ready a few days after the 16th.

At this point I started asking for a replacement, explaining that this was a new camera and that we had already spent so much on rentals (this camera rents for $100 per day).  My priority was getting it back ASAP, which  could be achieved by having it replaced. The guy suggested I speak to a manager and it might be possible to get a replacement.

I spoke to a manager named Sylvia on Tuesday of last week who said that they don’t have loaner cameras in the service department, but that it might be able to arrange something with another department. Silvia said she’d talk to the engineers and get back with me later that day. I haven’t heard from her since… In fact, I asked for her direct number at the end of the call and she declined, saying that she was going to send me an email with all of her contact info…. That never arrived either.

I suspect Sylvia isn’t a manager at all, but rather some support rep they put on the phone to appease me.

So I contacted my salesman at Abel as well as the sales manager. They both have been working with Sony, but all I have so far from them is a promise made to them by Sony that the shipping of the part to the service facility would be ‘expedited.’ They are still working on the situation, however and I’m told they will get back to me.

Although this is a warranty repair and thus free, I asked if I could perhaps, for a fee, have the repair expedited. All they could offer was that warranty repairs were given priority anyway, and that if I included a note with the camera requesting expedited repair perhaps they would do so if they had time. I included such a letter detailing how important the camera was to the production and requesting expedited repair.

At no point did Sony contact me about the status of the repair, even when it was delayed. Also, at no point did anyone at Sony offer an apology, even when I expressed to several people just how displeased I was.

These are great cameras when they work, but when they don’t work they are simply $7,800 bricks.  Sony clearly doesn’t care about its prosumer customers.  Interestingly you can get customer support on the weekend for Sony’s cheapest consumer camcorder but not for this baby.

Tell a friend.  Tell them that Sony makes fine prosumer camcorders but doesn’t support them worth a damn.  Tell them that Sylvia is a liar.  Tell them to expect to pay $3000 to rent a $7000 replacement camera if they need a repair.

And tell them to do what I probably should have done in the first place, which was stick with Panasonic. 

I don’t think that is the case.

Patent trolls are individuals or companies that habitually sue others over obscure patents. While the Interval patents generally are obscure, that doesn’t make them invalid. And the fact that Allen and then-partner Dave Liddle paid $100 million for the basic research behind those patents, well that hardly sounds like troll behavior.

If Paul Allen actually were a patent troll. he would have sued in South Texas, where all the whopping patent judgements are handed-down, not in Seattle.

Suing in Seattle is bad trollmanship.

What we have here is a guy who may be the 37th richest person in the world, but he used to be the second-richest. He’s pledged to give away his fortune and maybe wants more to give. In short, I don’t see a problem with these legal actions.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Allen will prevail. The odds are against him. While Interval developed upwards of 300 patents, that isn’t like the thousands of patents now controlled by Nathan Myrhvold’s company, Intellectual Ventures. Myrvold has acquired baskets of patents creating a strategic mass of IP and an associated legal team he can use to bludgeon almost any company into cross-licensing. Allen has no such depth (or power).

He’s just trying to turn lemons from lemonade.

Nothing happened.

Fast forward to September and guess what?  He has had to restart the process three times now. Exactly why the process broke no one can determine. So three times he sent in his tax returns, bank information, income information and forms totaling over 100 pages only to have them disappear, again and again.  Each time the process was a little different but the end result was the same — nothing. Process improvement at work yet no change in outcome.

What’s wrong with this picture?  I see two possibilities: 1) a conspiracy theory in which nobody actually gets loan modifications, and: 2) that the IT systems are broken.  At this point normally I would illustrate a series of events that may or not involve Steve Jobs, reactions to new federal regulations, cost accounting, breaking federal laws, or perhaps even Bill Gates.

But for something entirely different — I vote for IT as the culprit. My guess is they just do not have the IT systems in place to process the applications and then modify the loans while following federal law. B of A may claim to have such systems, they may even think they have such systems, but my friend’s experience involved lots of banker eye-rolling but nobody saying “Well this has never happened before.”

It happens all the time.

And I’d say it sucks to be their customer.

These types of issues have plagued business and it’s customers since IT was an infant in punch cards.  It might be a B of A issue, but more likely it is an issue between B of A and Freddie Mac, with Freddie probably screwing-up yet not really caring enough to fix anything.

The reason this has risen to the top of the pile right now is because I see it as a basic issue at almost every company I visit.  Companies either have it – IT that is – or they don’t.  Some outfits will make it based on duct tape and bailing wired systems. But in the end — often literally the end — this has to be one of the top reasons for failure of any business.

Maverick was founded by Martin Hebig and Chuck Sherwood, both former Mankato students. As computer science students in the 1990s, both men worked part time for a partnership between IBM and the University. Mankato provided office space on campus and hired students to work for IBM testing the then-new OS/400 operating system. The students gained real work experience while IBM got its testing done for less money.

It was a good program that ran for several years, but then the faculty sponsor retired and with him went those IBM jobs.

“I always thought it was a great idea, ” Hebig recalled during our visit. “I wanted to figure out a way to get something like that rolling again. I had been seeing more and more companies sending work offshore when the idea came to me: why couldn’t we set up an office close to the University, hire students, train them and have the students do the same work that was being sent offshore? We could price the work about the same or a little cheaper, students would be in the same time zone and the company could hire the students when they graduate.

“I contacted one of my clients I had worked with as an independent consultant and they liked the idea. We worked out the details and opened our first office at Minnesota State University – Mankato. Four years later Maverick has a total of four offices (the other are the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin – Madison, and Iowa State University) and 74 student employees.”

This isn’t rocket science. The students are testing software, recording bugs, and doing middleware development mainly for a single client — Thomson Reuters. Reuters, in turn, has gone on to hire as full time employees more than 90 percent of the Maverick student consultants as they graduate.

Each consultant works approximately 20 hours per week during the academic year and 40 hours per week in the summer making $10-13 per hour. That amounts to an average 3000-hour tryout over two years for the would-be Reuters programmers. No wonder the company hires so many of them, because with that much exposure Reuters truly knows what it is getting.

Maverick isn’t hugely profitable but it is profitable… and has been since its first week of operation. Required capital has been minimal. Turnover is minimal, too, because these are often the best-paying student jobs on campus.

It’s a model Maverick hopes it can bootstrap across the nation, eventually having an office at every school with 150 or more CS majors, generating with a single manager nearly $1 million in annual revenue per office.

That‘s several hundred potential offices and a lot of pizza.

So how do you protect this great lifestyle business? With yet another refreshing business idea — honesty.

“We understand that any company could try and do what we are doing, ” Hebig continued. “Because of this we have transparent finances with our clients. They know everything about our business (cost for office space, cost for T1 lines, cost for students and the margins that we make, etc.) We show them that we aren’t making a ton of money doing this and that it would be difficult to do it much cheaper. Plus, we bring our experience, training and automated process that makes us very efficient at what we do. ”

While Maverick looks only marginally profitable on paper, the business has no debt, is completely bootstrapped, is keeping dozens — eventually hundreds — of jobs in America. And if they can scale the business the way they think they can there’s nothing that says the founders won’t soon be paying themselves a bootload of money while remaining mavericks — unbranded.

This weekend was DefCon 18, which received worldwide news coverage. At Def Con 1 (note the different spelling back then), held of course 17 years ago, all the news coverage was left to me, the only reporter to attend.

In those days there were no “independent computer security research organizations.” There were hackers, or more appropriately “crackers,” as they were then known.

Def Con was founded by a guy known back then only as “The Dark Tangent.” It was a computer criminal’s rave where — for reasons I could never quite understand — the cops were invited to watch. But that’s all gone, of course. The Dark Tangent can now legally drink at his own show, he picked up a real name along the way and even an MBA, so of course the show is now supposed to make money. They still play Spot the Fed, with the person who spots the Fed getting a t-shirt that says, “I spotted the Fed,” and the Fed who has been outed receiving a shirt that says, “I am a Fed.” It’s cute, but no longer clever.

DefCon 1 attracted around 150 hackers and crackers to the old Sands Hotel back before ConAir Flight 1 smashed it to bits for a movie. The year was 1993 and InfoWorld, where I worked in those days, wouldn’t pay my way, so I went on my own.

It was surreal. I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore when my cellphone rang in a session, setting-off four illegal scanners in the same room. As I left to take my call in the hallway I wondered why I bothered?

Note that — 17 years later — the big news from DefCon this week was GSM call hacking. There is nothing new.

There were two high points for me at DefCon 1. First was the appearance of Dan Farmer, then head of data security for Sun Microsystems. Dressed all in black leather with flaming shoulder-length red hair and a groupie on each arm, Dan sat literally making-out in the back row until it was time for his presentation. But that presentation was far more entertaining than the smooching. In a series of rapid-fire slides Farmer showed dozens of ways in which crackers had attacked Sun’s network. He explained techniques that had failed at Sun but would probably have succeeded at most other companies. It was a master class in computer crime and his point, other than to prove that Dan was the smartest guy in the room, was to urge the crackers to at least be more original in their attacks!

But the best part of DefCon 1 was the battle between the kids and hotel security. Contrary to popular belief, breaking into Pentagon computer systems was not very lucrative, so many of the participants in that early DefCon did not have money for hotel rooms. The Dark Tangent handled this by renting the single large meeting room 24 hours per day so it could be used after hours for sleeping. Alas, someone forgot to explain this to the 6AM security shift at the Sands. Just as the hardy group of adventurers returned from a late-night break-in at the local telephone company substation, fresh security goons closed the meeting room and threw the kids out.

It is not a good idea to annoy a computer cracker, but it is a very bad idea to annoy a group of computer crackers bent on impressing each other.

The meeting reconvened at 9 or 10 with the topic suddenly changed to Revenge on the Sands. Gail Thackeray, then a U. S. Attorney from Arizona who at that moment had approximately half the room under indictment, rose to offer her services representing the kids against the hotel management.

Thackeray had been invited to speak by the very people she wanted to put in jail.  I told you this was surreal.

Adult assistance might be nice, but a potentially more satisfying alternative was offered by a group that had breached the hotel phone system, gained access to the computer network, obtained root level access to the VAX minicomputer that ran the Sands casino, and were ready at any moment to shut the sucker down. It came to a vote: accept Thackeray’s offer of assistance or shut down the casino.

There was no real contest: they voted to nuke the casino. Not one to be a party pooper, I voted with the majority.

Gail Thackeray, feeling her lawyer’s oats, was perfectly willing to be a party pooper, though. She explained with remarkable patience that opting en masse to commit a felony was a move that we might just want to reconsider, especially given the three strikes implications for some of the older participants.

We could accept her help or accept a date with the FBI that afternoon. The Sands (now the Venetian), which was ironically owned by the same folks who used to run Comdex, never knew how close it came to being dark.

It was a thrilling moment like you’d never see today. Everyone who was in that room shares a pirates’ bond. And though I can’t defend what we almost did, I don’t regret it.

And like the others, I wish Gail Thackeray had stayed in Arizona and we’d shut the sucker down.

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?

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.

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.

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.

With impeccable timing, Mrs. Cringely last week stood in line four hours at the Apple Store to get her new iPhone 4. The line was cheerful, she said, Apple provided umbrellas to protect customers from the sun, bottles of water, and even pizza. I think the bottles of water were key in this case because the only way I have ever seen Charlestonians be willing to stand in line is if the drinks are free.

Her iPhone 4 is significantly faster, the screen is pretty and the unit feels heftier in the hand but we can’t say much else yet. It’s too soon. We can say plenty, however, about how Apple managed to create a publicity frenzy by faking a product shortage that turned out not to really exist.

In retrospect Mrs. Cringely wishes she’d stayed home and bought the phone at her leisure a week later.

An integral part of iPhone 4 mania, of course, is the new operating system — iOS 4. Remember how important it once was for Apple to claim that the iPhone was running OS X? What happened to that? Is iOS 4 a version of OS X or not? And what does this apparent OS bifurcation mean for the non-portable product line? Is OS X going away?

OS X is here for now, I’m told, and iOS 4 is still OS X but specifically for the new A4 chip and others of its family that will shortly appear. We’ll see non-portable A4 products from Apple and they’ll run iOS 4, too, establishing it as a kind of consumer electronic operating system for the company. This bifurcation and differentiation is key to understanding both Apple’s strategy and the philosophy — yes, philosophy — that underlies it.

One of the first non-portable iOS 4 devices we’ll see, I predict, will look a heck of a lot like the new Mac Mini. Steve Jobs, who loves to play language games as long as he controls them, says there are no plans to update the AppleTV. Yet Engadget is all aflutter with talk of an iOS-based AppleTV (essentially an iPad without a screen). I think the new Mac Mini effectively is the next AppleTV. Notice they never did call it the MacTV. With the new Mac Mini already sharing a common form factor with the AppleTV, I can imagine an A4-based version appearing shortly at a $299 price running iOS 4. Expect to link an iPhone or iTouch to this A4-based AppleTV as a remote control device.

And get ready for a big leap of strategic thinking from Cupertino.

The number one game console in the USA is Nintendo’s Wii, primarily because it has a Bluetooth-connected motion-sensing remote control. Well iPhones and iPod Touches have Bluetooth, too — and WiFi, accelerometers, and now even gyroscopes. A Mini-turned-AppleTV controlled by the installed base of tens of millions of iPhones and iPod Touches is a game market waiting to be exploited. Yes, the “console” costs more (for now) but thanks to the App Store the games can cost less, making the total user expenditure the same or less. It’s the old Return-On-Investment (ROI) argument only applied to games.

Video games are the one huge market Apple has yet to touch and the last one where Microsoft can still pretend to contend for technology leadership. A $299 AppleTV that has a serious content strategy, HD-Wii performance, and good games priced from $2.99-$6.99 would kick ass at Christmas. Yes, it is too expensive and the games are too puny for real gamers, but not too expensive or too puny to sell the 2-4 million units Apple likes when entering any new market.

That’s $1 billion in easy Christmas revenue for Apple from what’s essentially a marketing head feint.

Phones, games, TV’s — Apple’s future clearly lies with consumer electronics, not with personal computers as we have long thought of them. With Windows 8 reportedly aiming directly for OS X, Apple needs to be where Windows is not — which is in the home in consumer devices too cheap for an effective OEM strategy.

Apple needs to distinguish itself yet again in a world moving very quickly toward computer ubiquity.

How ordinary.

And so the PC business is no longer of any real interest for Steve Jobs because he sees no future in it. Steve isn’t one for sentimentality, especially when there are competitors to be crushed.

If Apple can no longer show a discernible difference in user experience between OS X and Windows 8, then much of the Apple magic will be gone. So he has to move ahead before he is left behind.  There is room for neither sentimentality nor inertia.

The digital kids of today are growing tired of things the way they were. So Apple is using the iPhone and iPad to move information, content creation, and entertainment out of the old world and into a new one. The way Steve prevents the logo on the box syndrome is to leave the box behind. Its both brilliant and inevitable.

Competitors that still think strictly in terms of individual features and form factors won’t grasp the significance of what’s going-on here. Steve is out to make them obsolete. Apple has mothballed the whole notion of vying for computer market share and is instead moving as fast as it can to redefine the whole computing model for consumers using networked mobile devices.

Remember when Ballmer talked through his hat a few years ago about how Microsoft was headed to a model of Windows based primarily on ad revenue? There’s no way in Hell that business model can be sustained for Windows or the PC (or for Macs, either). But make the platform cost $199 and be replaced every 24 months, build-in mobile subscription revenue, MobileMe subscription revenue, content revenue, app revenue and ad revenue, with none of those involving much effort or expense on Apple’s part at all and the future becomes clear.

And Apple plans to own it.