@LARGE
House calls, when the Maytag Man is stumped

By Scott Kirsner

Ken Smith is standing on the porch of a Victorian home outside Harvard Square. Every few minutes he rings the bell, which causes the dogs inside to bark. But no one answers.

Smith is starting a business, The Digiticians, that will make house calls to help install computer equipment and solve technical problems. He has sent out yellow postcards that say ''Need Tech Support at Home?'' to upscale neighborhoods in Cambridge, Concord, Weston, and Wellesley. He'll defrag a hard drive or configure a home network, starting at $95 for a 90-minute service call.

The customer he's visiting responded to one of the postcards Smith distributed in this high-income enclave off Brattle Street. This is his second service call. The first time he resurrected a balky fax machine. This time, he's been asked to buy a laser printer and come set it up.

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Smith rings. The dogs bark. No one answers.

''Fifteen minutes waiting, and you pay for the visit,'' Smith says, relating The Digiticians's policy on no-shows.

As more technology makes its way into the home, will we need an army of on-call techies to help us keep it running and bug-free? Analysts and technology vendors say that high-speed Net access, combined with multiple PCs in the home, means that consumers will want to connect all of those devices to each other to share access, files, and printers - just like an office network.

Then there's the vaguely Jetsons-esque scenario of refrigerators with touch-sensitive display screens and Net access, MP3-compatible stereo systems, TiVo-equipped TVs that can display caller ID and instant messages, and security systems that can be monitored remotely.

Keeping the wired home fully functional could prove too complicated a job for the Maytag Man, your trusty electrician, or the guy in the Sears van.

That's where Smith sees an opportunity. He hopes to forge partnerships with retailers in the Boston area, so that when customers ask for help installing and configuring equipment, the retailer would refer them to The Digiticians.

Already, with enough effort, you can track down an itinerant computer technician who is willing to come to your house and help troubleshoot your system.

David Firmes is one of those roving techies. A onetime Digital Equipment Corp. employee, he actually earns a living as an exterminator - but he does computer tutoring and problem-solving on the side.

''I meet a lot of people in my pest control work,'' says Firmes, whose territory includes Worcester and the surrounding suburbs. ''When I see computers in [a customer's] home, we get to talking.''

He'll help replace a hard drive, set up a new modem, or add memory, but he says he makes less money dealing with bugs embedded in silicon than he earns from bugs living in walls.

''An average carpenter ant job is $200, and it doesn't take very long,'' he says. ''I only charge $30 an hour for the computer service.''

Smith wants to build the Orkin of home tech support. One problem with sole practitioners like Firmes is that they're hard to find. And, Smith adds, ''our guys will all be certified. They'll have badges and uniforms, and we'll have done background checks on all of them.'' The Digiticians will happily recommend the necessary equipment for a wireless home network, purchase it for you, and come to install it, for example. ''That would be a 21/2-hour call, and we'd charge $275, plus the cost of the gear.''

While Smith thinks he can make a profit from that visit, he expects long-term service contracts to generate the bulk of The Digiticians's revenue. But will customers want to pay monthly, quarterly, or annual fees to keep The Digiticians on retainer in the event of a meltdown? Smith says many would. I'm skeptical.

Already, there are similar businesses in other cities. Seattle has Rent-A-Geek. Minneapolis and Los Angeles have the Geek Squad, which shows up in vintage 1950s cars and ''Dragnet'' garb.

But is this an appealing market with growth potential? As new technologies pervade the home, the demand for some sort of in-person support could follow. The Yankee Group projects that, by 2003, 10 million US homes will be networked to support multiple PCs and other devices.

But Firmes wonders if The Digiticians's pricing will prove too high.

''Seventy-five or ninety-five dollars a visit wouldn't work in Worcester,'' he says. ''Maybe in Boston, though.'' Then, there's the question of who eats the cost of the drive time, as Digiticians battle traffic to get to your home.

Antonio Rodriguez, cofounder and CEO of Memora, which makes personal servers for the home, says the complexity of wrangling with Windows could easily drive up the cost of a visit beyond what customers would be willing to pay. ''In a perfect world, you'd be able to do the service and support remotely, over the Net,'' Rodriguez says. ''But I do know that my father-in-law would be willing to pay out the teeth'' for a visit from The Digiticians.

''Home networking has really only started to get hot in the last month or two,'' says Vincent Grosso, chief executive of Into Networks, a Cambridge company that helps deliver software over broadband connections.

''No one is available to help people set up their networks. When people ask me how they can put together a network like the one I have at home, there's no one I can refer them to.''

Back in Harvard Square, Smith's one o'clock appointment finally rolls up in a minivan, 10 minutes late and still flushed from a lunchtime yoga class. She opens the door and Smith carries the laser printer up to a home office on the third floor, where he quickly connects it to the customer's PowerBook and tests it out by printing a few pages. The customer writes Smith a check for $95, and by half past one he's back on the street.

Smith says that the business is still in pilot mode, but already he and the nine Digiticians who work for him have been on dozens of service calls. He expects to surpass 2,000 calls by year-end.

''We're not building this business with an exit strategy in mind,'' he says. ''We're designing it for profitability.''

That's a standard mantra of the entrepreneurial class of 2001, since it seems, right now, that there are no viable exit strategies. The scope of ambition is different for the class of 2001, too: Smith talks about The Digiticians as a regional, multimillion-dollar business, not a national multibillion-dollar operation. Granted, there's still plenty of entrepreneurial optimism built into that objective.

Is there a decent business opportunity here? I think there may be, if the menu of services is limited, operational costs are tightly managed, and efficiency is paramount. And if home computer support doesn't take off, Smith can always find lucrative work in pest control, chasing carpenter ants and battling that other kind of mouse.

Meet the pols

Starting tomorrow, Harvard and the National Commission on Entrepreneurship will present what they're calling the first-ever conference on entrepreneurship and public policy. (Really?)

''Entrepreneurship and Public Policy: New Growth Strategies for the 21st Century Economy'' runs for two days at Harvard's Kennedy School, and will feature speakers such as John Sidgmore, founder of UUNet and vice chairman at WorldCom; Harvard Business School's Michael Porter; Michigan Governor John Engler; and Kirk Watson, mayor of Austin, Texas. More information can be found at www.ncoe.org.

Scott Kirsner is a Boston freelance writer and a contributing editor at Wired and Fast Company magazines.