I was on the road for a few weeks after posting my gripe about Apple losing my new MacBook Pro, so I neglected to post a follow up. That post wound up on the front page of Digg, and I received many comments, words of sympathy and stories from folks who have had similar experiences with Apple and other PC makers.

The very next morning after I posted about the loss of my mac, I received a call from a helpful guy who was a regional manager for customer service. He arranged for my local Apple Store (29th Street Mall in Boulder) to give me a brand new mac with the same specs as the one I ordered. It was ready for me the same day.

And because I already had a bunch of sensitive data on my hard drive on the lost machine, he kept up the search for the old one and located it on a Friday afternoon. They overnighted the hard drive from the old new machine (via Saturday delivery no less) back to the store in Boulder and installed it in my new new machine and I was up and running in time for my Monday morning trip across the pond to London.

The one thing they didn’t have at the Apple Store at the time was the extra RAM to get my machine up to 3GB, so I’ve still got to go back to the store to have that installed at some point, but other than that, I’m now a happy camper.

Kudos to Apple for turning on a dime and fixing the problem quickly once I was able to rise above the noise. Hopefully next time I have an issue it won’t take an email to Steve Jobs and having my blog on the front page of Digg to get a response. But that being said, once they recognized there was a problem, Apple did the right thing and made it better in short order.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Customer Support, Macintosh, MacBook Pro

Just thought I’d follow up on my ongoing (and now totally unbelievable) saga with trying to get my brand new MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo computer repaired.  As I mentioned in a previous post, my new Mac had a serious problem with the audio system — the speakers output nothing but loud static whenever I tried to play any audio.

I bought it the day it was released in late October.  I brought it in for repair on November 4th.  Today, on November 29th, it has still not been returned.  And I have Apple ProCare, which theoretically means I get "priority" service.

After several days of showing up at the Boulder Apple Store and asking where it was and being told "don’t call us, we’ll call you", I decided to press a bit harder.  According to my online repair status (see the first screenshot in this post), the computer was repaired on November 17th — 12 days ago — and was then shipped to the Apple Store.  Helpful Apple even provides a DHL tracking number (see the next screenshot).  According to the DHL tracking page, it was delivered to the Apple Store that same day via next day air.  Last known location according to DHL, was their Santa Clara facility, CA, which confused me somewhat given I dropped it off in Boulder, CO.  This did not seem right to me.

I spent a solid half hour on the phone with Apple today, first trying to break through their phone system to speak to a human.  First time I got through to a person, I was placed on hold and subsequently hung up on while listening to Elanor Rigby (while Apple doesn’t yet sell the Beatles on iTunes, I guess they have a license for on-hold music). 

The second time, I got through to a person who actually took seriously the notion that the machine might have slipped through the cracks in the sytem.  After she put me on hold for 15 – 20 minutes, she announced that they are unable to locate the machine and that they have escalated the matter to the "Tracing Department".  I was assured that the Tracing Department would call me in 1 – 2 days with further information.  When I asked if I could have a contact name or number into the Tracing Department, I was denied. 

So 25 days after I dropped my computer off for repair, Apple now cannot locate it.  And every time I tried to tell someone at the Apple Store that I thought there might be a problem, they refused to look into it and just told me to wait.  I wonder how long this would have gone on if I had not decided to spend an hour (which I had much better use for) haranguing the poor folks on the other end of the customer support line?

This level of incompetence is almost amusing.  Almost.  I want my damn computer.

Apple, you really suck.  Your customer service is as dismal as your products are superior. 

Insanely great?  Nope.  Insanely late.

Are you listening, Steve?

Technorati Tags: Apple, Customer Support, MacBook Pro, Macintosh

My partner Brad Feld wrote a post today crediting me with coining the term Intelligence Amplification. While I’d like to take credit for it, all I can take credit for is applying the term to what Brad had previously called Dynamics of Information. After Brad asked for a better name, I suggested Intelligence Amplification, a term whose origination dates back as early as the 1950s and has been attributed variously to William Ross Ashby, Vannevar Bush, Douglas Engelbart (as if the mouse weren’t enough), and various other pioneers of cybernetics, information theory and computer science.

I think this term applies very well to what is enabled when you combine elements of social networking, open-source knowledge (I rely heavily on Wikipedia for links in many of my blog posts), trusted relationships, folksonomy/tagging (see the wisdom-of-crowds at work with Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Digg, etc), collaborative filters, search engines and other tools that use the internet to coordinate human-to-human sharing of knowledge and information. These tools use algorithms to leverage human activities and human minds belonging to millions of strangers, and, increasingly friends and acquaintances, to help us find relevance in the flood of information we are trying to stay afloat in.

My undergrad degree at Stanford was called Symbolic Systems, and my concentration within the major was artificial intelligence. I left Stanford unconcerned that I’d need to worry about Skynet or any other mechanized intelligence (dystopic or otherwise) taking over the world within my lifetime. (Sorry, Ray Kurzweil.)

But while computer scientists might not bring us software that can pass the Turing Test anytime soon, and certainly not within the relevant time horizon for a venture capitalist, the latest generation of social media sites can do things for us that leave the latest-and-greatest AI efforts in the dust.

Take Flickr, for example. Late this past August, I was getting emails from friends and colleagues who had just returned from Burning Man, which had concluded less than 24 hours earlier. I went to Flickr, searched for the tag “Burning Man 2006” and was pleased to discover over 8,000 photos taken at the event. Try asking a hyper-sophisticated image analysis algorithm to find a picture of Burning Man 2006 in a (virtual) stack of photos, and you’ll get nowhere.

Our ability to produce information is growing exponentially, and this can be problematic. What do you get when you leverage internet applications to coordinate the clickstreams, hyperlinks, tags, actions, relationships and interests of billions of people? Hopefully the means for humans to synthesize information into knowledge exponentially faster than was previously possible.

Sure, we already rely on software for things like OCR and voice recognition that might be considered artificial intelligence applications in the classic sense, but we’re also beginning to rely increasingly on the intelligence amplification enabled by software that lets computers do what they excel at (fast computation, “perfect memory”, gruelingly repetitive tasks, statistical analysis, etc) and also leverages what humans are far better at (face recognition, voice recognition, any cognition, matters of cultural discernment, language generation, etc).

To paraphrase the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel, may our intelligence amplifiers one day “go to eleven”.

Technorati Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence Amplification

I’m a huge fan of the Macintosh, the iPod and Apple’s incredible design sensibilities and well-integrated products. I’ve probably owned at least a dozen macs in my life, starting in 1989 with a 512K Mac SE with a 20 meg hard drive. In general I appreciate Apple’s products almost as much as Mark Morford at SF Gate, who somehow manages to fit the word vulva into his review of the MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo.

The day the new Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro was announced, I bought one. My old 17″ Powerbook G4 had been on its last legs for months (dropping it in the airport security line that one time didn’t help), and in an unusual act of gadget-lust self control, I had managed to wait until the long-rumored Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro was announced.

This is where my love story turns into a hate story.

Upon unboxing the machine (maxed out with 3GB RAM and a 200GB hard drive) and booting it up, instead of hearing the mellifluous and familiar Mac startup chime, I heard loud and nasty static. Any time the mac tried to produce sound, it instead produced static. The headphone jack worked fine, but the speakers were kaput. So I took it to the Apple Store and they informed me that I could not simply exchange it for a new one since I got the build-to-order option. That will teach me to buy a top-of-the-line machine from Apple.

So I made my appointment at the Genius Bar and used my Apple ProCare membership to get an appointment the next day. After some time at the counter, they determined they could not fixed it locally and had to send it out. Since I am a ProCare member, I was entitled to “priority” service.

Guess what? I handed over my lovely new MacBook Pro to the Apple Store on Saturday, November 4th. Today it is November 17th. And my new laptop still has not been returned. So much for the “value” that Apple ProCare offers. Lucky for me, my old PB G4 17″ is still working so I’m not totally out of commission, but this is incredibly frustrating.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, Apple is squandering a ton of good will by not offering customer support that matches the excellence of their products.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Customer Support, Macintosh, MacBook Pro

One of my special abilities (my wife disbelieves and mocks this claim of mine) is that I have knack for looking at the clock when it is 11:11. It happens to me several times each week.

Imagine my pleasure when I glanced at the clock today at 11:11 and realized today is November 11th. I’ll be sure to watch again this evening when it rolls around again to observe when the seconds also hit the eleven mark: 11:11:11 on 11/11.

Five years from today, I’ll throw an Eleven party and invite all my hendecaphiliac friends to celebrate the moment when it is 11:11:11 on 11/11/11.

I can’t wait.

(Special note: it took me a solid fifteen minutes of web-sleuthing to come up with the word hendecaphilia, which is the affinity for the number eleven. If I had more time, I would have written this blog post in hendecasyllabic verse.)

Technorati Tags: Numerology

Well, by now you’ve probably heard of placeshifting, the functionality enabled by the Slingbox and other devices that allows you to stream your home television signal to a PC or phone anywhere in the world. But Sling Media has now gone one step further: Stadiumshifting.

While I’m not much of sports fan myself, I love this application. This past weekend, a Slingbox attached to the scoreboard video feed at a non-televised game between Cal’s Golden Bears and Washington State’s Cougars sent the live video of the game from Pulman, WA straight to the big screen on the scoreboard at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, which enabled the rabid Cal fans to gather en masse to watch their team play a game that was not broadcast on any of the networks. More details can be found here. Very cool.

Update: Blake Krikorian (Sling’s CEO and co-founder) took a video of the event and put it up on YouTube. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Cal Bears, Football, Placeshifting, Sling Media, Slingbox, Video, Washington State Cougars

Early this morning, while downloading a software update onto our Mac Mini, I mentioned to Katherine that our internet connection seemed to be running rather slowly.

Several hours later, Quinn and I were hiking above Boulder on the Red Rocks trail, and he turned to me and said, “the little baby computer was downloading too slowly, so we need to turn it upside down and shake it to fix it.”

It seems to me that Quinn’s strategy to fix our internet speed issues was at least as sophisticated as the approach many of the IT professionals I’ve known might take to solve the problem.

After 17 years living in the California Bay Area, I forgot how lovely Fall can be. Boulder is awash in Autumn’s colors and it is beautiful. This shot is taken from our back deck.

Nice to know that when the leaves have gone, there will still be the backdrop of evergreens on the mountains. I will admit, however, to some apprehension about the coming Winter months. Though I lived in Virginia and Colorado as a kid and remember almost enjoying harsh Winter weather, I’ve since grown soft after nearly two decades in the moderate Mediterranean single-season climate of Silicon Valley. Hopefully I’ll relearn to love the cold…

Technorati Tags: Autumn, Boulder, Fall, Leaves

Back when I was at Excite, I would often pat myself on the back for co-founding a company with a low environmental impact that “simply pushed electrons around a network.” Granted, a company whose only “product” is HTML-based web pages is less resource-intensive than say, an aluminum smelter or a strip-mining operation, but I wasn’t thinking critically enough about just how much energy a data center with thousands of servers can suck down.

And for years, computer manufacturers and CPU makers paid no attention to the profligate energy consumption of each successive generation of ever more powerful machines. Arguably, a driving factor in Apple’s switch to the Intel platform was the fact that IBM’s PowerPC chips were big power hogs that ran hot. Frustrated with IBM’s inability to deliver a version of the G5 chip that wouldn’t melt a laptop, Apple moved to Intel, whose chips crank out more MIPS per watt than IBM’s, though Intel still lags AMD in terms of compute mileage. And the increasing popularity of dense server configurations like blades has only made the problem worse as it has become possible to pack hundreds of CPUs into a single standard data center rack.

Fortunately, the technology world is waking up to this issue. Not because of altruism but because it impacts the bottom line of anyone who uses computers. And I’m glad we don’t have to rely on altruism alone, since market forces do a much better job of spurring action. Energy costs (for both the compute power and the HVAC required to cool down the computers) are the single biggest expense in any data center operation.

Google, owner of the biggest server farm on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of servers, feels this problem acutely, and may have the biggest electric bill on the planet, and therefore has gone to great lengths to reduce power consumption in their data centers, and is pushing for more electrical efficiency in PCs, while Jonathan Schwartz has been blogging regularly about power issues in the data center and their (very smart) focus on the energy efficiency of their servers. Certainly the performance relative to power consumption of the Niagara servers is quite compelling and can really cut down on the power density in a data center, provided your application isn’t heavy with floating-point operations, in which case the Niagra might not be the box for you. In fact, nearly a year ago, Google predicted that the lifetime cost of providing electricity to a server will eclipse the capital cost of the server itself.

Still, there’s nothing like a close-to-home experience to really drive this issue home. I’m on the board of Technorati, and they recently finished the painful task of transitioning their entire server farm to a new data center. Technorati’s old data center was over-provisioned and out of power. As Technorati planned to expand and occupy more rack space, their old provider was only able to offer half the power per new rack than they had been offering previously. Ouch. So the only option was to move to a new data center. But this is only a stop-gap measure, so Technorati is also busy evaluating more power efficient servers (Opteron-based and the Niagara, for instance) in an effort to continually increase MIPS/watt and, therefore, increase the compute density per rack in their data centers. Another anecdote from my portfolio was Postini’s experience a few years ago when they established data centers in Europe. They were surprised to discover that most European data centers offered substantially less power density per rack than was available in the US.

Finally, in talking to a friend of mine who builds and configures data centers for a living, he observed that the fundamental issue for many data centers is not so much the ability to bring enough power to each rack, but rather the ability to keep the building cool enough with all the equipment kicking off so much heat. Many of the buildings that house data centers are converted warehouses or were simply not built with a mindset designed around thermal management issues. Small design changes in buildings can have a huge impact on their power needs. So while the chipmakers and server makers have plenty of work to do, the folks who design data centers also need to do their homework to optimize the building for the application. The high (and growing) cost of electricity also makes me think that hosting providers like SolarHost might be on to something — investing in on-site power generation, be it photovoltaic, stationary fuel cells or whatever, could give a hosting facility a permanent operational cost advantage.

If you’re involved with a SaaS company or a web2.0 play (which is really just a SaaS company for consumers) make sure the engineering and operations team is thinking hard about these issues. Many such companies have probably already been forced to deal with hosting cost increases, power rationing in their data centers, or have dealt with downtime due to overheated machines. If it hasn’t happened yet, it certainly will soon, since the problem is only going to get worse over time. Increasing compute cycles per rack (while holding power consumption per rack steady or reducing it) has to be top of mind for the software and network operations teams of any such company.

Technorati Tags: compute efficiency, conservation, Data Centers, energy efficiency, green computing, Postini, SaaS, Technorati

I like surprises. On Tuesday night, my friend Tom Higley took me and Jason to Rose Hill Drive’s CD release party at the Fox Theatre in Boulder, returning the favor after we brought him to the Steely Dan show a few weeks ago. I’d never even heard of the band before (they are homegrown in Boulder, and their name comes from a street in the city) and they just blew me away. This power trio has a totally authentic vintage sound, thanks to the Vox and Ampeg amps, a Rickenbacker bass and a sunburst Les Paul, with shades of Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and early Led Zeppelin in evidence.

While paying homage to this early hard rock and proto-metal sound, they also manage to interpret it all through a modern lens: they’ve got a tight (and even funky) modern groove sensibility and sound that is ultimately unique and non-derivative. I love it when a band’s musical DNA is totally identifiable, yet the resulting sound is something new and fresh through the alchemy of mixing and mutating influences from previous eras. And these guys put on a powerful, high-energy show. Download the album or pick up the CD. And if you have a chance to catch them live, you won’t be disappointed.

Technorati Tags: Boulder, Music, Rose Hill Drive