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Rested, rejuvenated, and — most important of all — replenished with good ideas, the Startup Tour is getting back on the road, revisiting the companies we saw last summer. That first visit set a baseline, introducing the startup companies, but this trip is our chance to help.

Just like they did on the old Newlywed Game, we’re bringing to each company a gift “chosen especially for you.” This is typically something we sensed was missing on the first visit that — through the power of television — we could help provide on this second trip. Sometimes it will be a customer, a strategic partner, a distributor, an investor, a new head of marketing or CEO for those companies that need one, or even a hero for inspiration. For about a third of the companies we’ll be bringing plain old money.

All startups think they need money and some can actually use it. For many, though, cash alone isn’t the answer, because cash brings complexity and obligation — two things these earliest stage companies often can’t handle. Ready-fire-aim may work in Silicon Valley, but we’re avoiding Silicon Valley, remember? So aiming is what we’re all about.

Sometimes finding what we can do to help is easy. The company can’t get a meeting at WalMart, for example. We can fire-up the cameras and maybe get that meeting in Bentonville, but first we’d argue against it, because working with WalMart kills many companies, especially those with shallow pockets. WalMart shows vendors no mercy and doesn’t care how big or small they are. It may be better to aim our cameras elsewhere.

But finding money, it turns out, is a little harder.  At least it was for me.

Every startup needs a break, a lucky accident like sitting next to exactly the right person on an airplane or finding the ideal partner at your son’s Cub Scout meeting. But such accidents happen only to those who actually get on planes and attend Cub Scout meetings. Good fortune rarely knocks on doors.

Nor does capital, it turns out.

I had this idea right from that start that venture capital would play a role in both the Startup Tour and the TV show. Here I had this crowd-sourced deal funnel filtering hundreds of good companies into a couple dozen really exceptional opportunities. Readers did the work of a dozen overpaid VCs finding the best startups. What resident of Sand Hill Road wouldn’t want to hitch a ride on something like that? I envisioned offering my VC friends the chance to tag along, giving sage advice on TV and snapping-up the best investment opportunities in the process. It was going to be a win-win.

Except I couldn’t interest anyone in seriously participating.

“We’ll eventually see all those companies,” my VC friends said to me. “They’ll come to us. ”

No they won’t.

Most of our Startup Tour companies have never even met a VC and wouldn’t know how to arrange a pitch, much less do a good one. That’s the Silicon Valley tradition of startup-as-theater. Startup Tour companies have real products, not just ideas, and they’ve already survived an average of six years. I’m not saying they can’t do an elevator pitch nor that they shouldn’t have to do one. I’m saying the Tour and the show aren’t about pitching, but doing.

My VC friends turned out to be too lazy, I think, to participate in what would have been an amazing opportunity for any of them. That’s their loss. But where was I going to get the money?

Hong Kong, mainly.

Now does it make more sense that I’ve been writing about China?

America is strapped (all except the banks and of course the big corporations sitting on $1.4 trillion in cash). Okay, Americans are strapped, while Asians seems more prosperous and less risk-averse, at least for now. Little Hong Kong has plenty of accredited investors still interested in the American Dream. Ironic, eh?

So with my friend Jong Lee, the guys and gals of Hambrecht & Quist Asia Pacific, and Kingsway, a Hong Kong investment bank, we raised the Startup America Fund specifically to help some of these little Startup Tour companies. H&QAP is a Hong Kong-based private equity firm that is 25 years-old and has $2.8 billion under management, so there is adult supervision, which means no new RV for Bob, dammit.

These aren’t prizes, they are investments. We sat down in Hong Kong and decided as a group to practice old-time venture capital, investing modest amounts in real companies with real products that are ready — or nearly ready — to go. The investments vary from $100K to $5 million, which are amounts beneath the threshold of many Silicon Valley VC firms, and involve a substantial component of sweat equity — the fund’s sweat, not the founder’s. Helping startups to succeed is what this is all about, though making a profit is nice, too.

So we’re getting that win-win after all from this desparate exercise in me channeling Simon Cowell.

I only wish more American investors and institutions had taken my call.

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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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I’d been putting-off going to startups.cringely.com to finally read all 286 entries so far in this summer’s Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour.  But when I finally went to the site, I couldn’t get in.  The page timed-out.  This was not good.  Or maybe it was very good in that the site was so busy.  But even that’s not good because I don’t like turning readers away.  So which was it — good or not good?

Not good.

Twelve hours later, when I still couldn’t get in I called the CTO at the company that hosts that site — Democrasoft.  You haven’t heard about them, believe me, and I’ll explain why below.  But they weren’t having any trouble seeing the site.  Nor was I having trouble seeing it on my iPhone, or using my Verizon MiFi cellular access point.  It seemed to be a problem with my home ISP — Comcast.

Twenty minutes on the phone with Comcast tech support found the problem, though not the solution: the server IP address was blacklisted by an outfit called SORBS (Spam and Open Relay Blocking System) that claims to keep track of mail servers run by spammers or compromised by computer crackers.  Of 105 such blacklists available, only one — SORBS — listed this IP address, which wasn’t even for a mail server!

That IP was part of a block of addresses owned by Amazon Web Services, with the entire block listed by SORBS as suspect.  So Comcast (only the eastern half of Comcast, I later learned), tending to believe SORBS, blocked the address and Cringely’s (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour from tens of millions of subscribers.

The suspect IP address may have been used previously for another machine that was a mail server or maybe a compromised web server.  It has only been startups.cringely.com for a couple weeks, after all.

I’m amazed to learn that as rigorous an outfit as Amazon Web Services doesn’t check its IP addresses for blacklist status before reassigning them.  If I were an AWS customer I would be upset.  Since I’m freeloading I guess I’m just a little miffed.

We’ll sort this out shortly, I’m sure.  The guys at Democrasoft have lodged a protest with SORBS, but I am not very confident that will accomplish anything quickly.  Better to make Amazon assign the server a different IP address.

If you are having trouble reaching startups.cringely.com as a result, try it from a computer with a different ISP.

In the meantime, what is this Democrasoft?  Well until a moment ago it was called Burst.com, a little company from Santa Rosa, CA that I wrote about years ago over and over when they were fighting Microsoft and then Apple in court, winning both cases.  Burst was involved then in the efficient distribution over the Internet of video and audio streams and I suppose they continue to own and license patents in that area today.

A few months ago the folks at Burst called to tell me they were changing direction, creating a new kind of web service designed to help groups explore issues and make decisions.  The called it Collaborize.

Startups.cringely.com, if you can get to it, is a custom instance of Collaborize dedicated solely to the nomination, discussion, and evaluation of startup companies.  Not even a beta, I’d say my site was alpha software, but I was intrigued by the concept, trusted the people behind it, and who can turn down free service?

Collaborize was formally announced this week at the Demo conference in Palm Desert.  I wasn’t there but from what I hear the product was well received with attendees seeing all sorts of interesting ways to use it.  Have a look and let me know what you think.

That is if your ISP will let you.