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