We received our official registration with the USPTO a few days ago, and can now legally toss an (R) after our milliamp.com monicker.

This was not a short, easy, or cheap process, but we believe it will help demonstrate to the savvy consumer that in Milliamp LTD they have found a real business, with real people, and with real products and services that are worthy of their trust.

Milliamp reviews hundreds of emails each week (Marian would argue each day) and a common theme we get is “Can we trust you.”. It’s a big leap of faith customers have to make when deciding to send off their expensive iPad 3G or iPhone 4 to get repaired. And imparting our core values quickly (people usually just spend seconds on website before deciding to bail or not) and getting folks to gain our trust takes a lot of work, and having our milliamp.com name registered with this U.S. Government entity is just one more step in the right direction.

So, over the course of the next several months, keep an eye out on our site, our business cards, and everywhere else you see the milliamp.com logo to start sporting the slightly new look!

Best regards,

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com(R)

milliamp.com Reviews Registration

milliamp.com is Registered with the USPTO

A few weeks ago, Milliamp LTD received word that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published its’ notification of our intent to register milliamp.com.

Shortly, barring any opposition, we will be able to use the (R) symbol after the milliamp.com logo, instead of the TM designation that you currently see on our website.

This is a pretty big deal for companies, actually.

For those that are not aware, pretty much anyone can throw up a TM after a word, phrase, symbol, etc. to asert that you own the trademark to something. It’s actually a smart thing to do, and can help give you some added protection in the event someone else begins to use the same monicker. However, having a TM simply says that you plan to start or have started the protection process for your business name, but your ownership of that name is not official.

Only companies that have officially registered with the USPTO are able to replace their TM with an R (in fact, showing an R after your name without the nod from the USPTO is quite illegal). Having the R gives you even greater protection than having a TM, as the R signals that the USPTO themselves have researched your ownership rights and have given ample opportunity for others to challenge the legitimacy of the ownership claim. When the USPTO approves your registration attempt, they are effectively signing off and saying that, yes, you are indeed are the owner of the mark and are entitled to all the protections afforded to it.

Once we receive word that it’s official, do not expect our TM to transform to a R overnight. The implications of such a minor change are mind-numbing, as the number places that we have the milliamp.com logo with a TM after it are plentiful: business cards, internal documentation, instructional brochures, website meta data, website images, email signature lines, videos, and even our signage are all places to look. And don’t forget about marketing materials, affiliate marketing, and schwag, either!

It will take us months to completely remove the TM and replace it with an R on all instances of the milliamp.com logo but, like anything we set out to accomplish, we will eventually complete the task.

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.comTM (for now!)

The video cameras that we have here at our iPhone repair shop been very useful for us, and I can’t stop gushing about them. They have been a great investment.

During Receiving

We have been using our cameras to capture the unboxing of iPods and iPhones as we receive them in, which has proven useful time and time again, especially if we ever encounter the dreaded “but-it-was-working-when-I-sent-it-to-you” phone calls we sometimes get from our customers. And since the detail on our receiving cameras is not as sharp as we would like, we will oftentimes highlight defects with a laser pointer to help illustrate where exactly we are noticing something out of the ordinary.

Inbound Receiving Camera

Related to inbound devices, here is a short video we had to pull up showing the United States Postal Service delivering a package to our office. The only problem was, there should have been TWO packages delivering at this time, not one. Score another win for the cams!

Click here to view the embedded video.

During Shipping

It finally dawned on us that being able to capture the condition of the repaired devices right before we ship them back to our customers is equally, if not more, important than capturing them on the inbound. So we added a camera that captures our final stage of quality control (the part where we demonstrate that everything is working), our cleaning the device to remove any smudges, and the boxing up of the working device to illustrate the care we use when shipping anything back to our customers.

Quality Control Testing Outbound Camera

Funny Stuff

Occassionally, we happen to catch an employee falling off a chair or tripping or doing a zany dance. Or in this case, watch Chris do his best to stand on our ball of shipping labels in between fielding phone calls and emails from customers.

Spontaneity Camera Views

We continue to find ways to use video in our iPhone repair business, and not just the video that our security cameras capture. We also take videos of pages on our website, such as our terribly exciting Terms of Service, to help prove to our customers when they were established.

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

For those that know me, I have a bit of a domain name addiction. I think it reached its’ peak of insanity when I purchased the domain blake-is-the-new-sanjaya.com (true story) a few years back when Sanjaya was voted off ‘American Idol’ and hack Blake was deemed the next in line Howard Sterns’ goal to inspire enough people to vote a talentless dweeb to the top spot.

I’ve struggled to hold my personal obsession with URL’s back, but I think we got a bit lucky when, back in April 2009, we registered the iPad repair domain names ipad-repair.com and ipadrepair.com. Since we are going to be hard-core in the iPad repair business, having domain names that say what we do will be most helpful to Milliamp LTD:

Two New iPad Repair Domain Names

For now, these two sites aren’t doing a whole heck of a lot for us, but they will eventually become a great resource for our future customers seeking iPad repairs and parts.

Now, who has any suggestions for helping us monitize our leet-inspired domain names for Twitter?

Have a great evening,

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

P.S. We had two GOLD iPhone backplate winners this week – one worker here at Milliamp LTD and one iPhone fanatic from Alaska. More details on this coming soon!

To show our appreciation for our hard-working iPod and iPhone and soon-to-be iPad Repair employees (and also to get them off my back), we are going to give away one of our shiny new gold iPhone backplates (and gold bezel) to one of our workers at our next weekly stand-up meeting on Monday!

Gold iPhone Back Cover Drawing

The winning worker will be able to get a new gold backplate, new gold bezel, and new internal backplate parts (e.g. camera mount, headphone jack ring, etc.) and all the labor needed to swap out their boring black or white iPhone back cover with this stunning new mount.

They will, however, have to allow us to take a few professional, in-house pictures of their most-gloriously-bedazzled iPhone so that we can share our work with the world!

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

Until then, talk with you on Lunes.

Sweet action

For the past few weeks I have been highly involved with the latest installment of the Call of Duty series; Modern Warfare 2. Now I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s butt and claim to be an expert, but as an avid gamer since my youth I have grown very observant of game strategy and tactics. Okay let’s get down to business, I only play online. I am quite sure that the content of the campaign mode would be unique and entertaining, but let’s face it; it’s much more fun to kill real people…wait computer people controlled by real people. I love the chaos of online multi-play, and with the different achievements and leveling process this game can become seriously addicting. While playing online you have several choices in the type of match which you can play. I would have to say that the regular team deathmatch is my favorite, but the HARDCORE team deathmatch is much more intense. In this arena there is no mini-map, you don’t know how many bullets you have, you don’t have crosshairs on your weapon, one bullet kills you no matter where you get hit, and there is no kill-cam so you don’t know where you were shot from, and you can kill teammates with friendly fire. Okay, now there are really only two ways to effectively “own” at this game. The first would be camping, which is a more realistic way of combat where one would find cover in a high traffic area and just wait for the “nubs” to fall into your trap. This may keep you from dying, but I guarantee you that you will seldom be the top of the kills list. The other method of “owning” is the road few people travel, and this is mainly because the skills necessary to be at this level usually come after countless hours of game play. I will call this tactic seek and destroy because you do just that. To become good at this you must become great at handling your character, equip him with supplies that will enable you to navigate the map quickly, have a great deal of knowledge of spawn point, and be mister quick-from-da-hip. With these attributes under your belt it will be easy to be leading the pack in kills, but you may also be the guy with the most deaths because one of the major downfalls to being a champ is that you rarely know exactly where the enemy is. Well, this is just a small look into the realm of Modern Warfare 2, and if you every want to cross hairs, some pun intended, you can find me on the Playstation 3 network “oakmania3030″.

The milliamp.com Staff Hard at Work on Cyber Monday

It was a busy day here at milliamp.com – Cyber Monday Busy.

We configured our phones today so that any warm body in the office had a chance to speak directly with one of the hundreds of people that visited our website and had a question about getting their IPOD or IPHONE repaired at an affordable price. This put our technicians, usually neck-deep in repairs, on the front lines and speaking directly with our customers.

On top of all the emails and phone calls, the chime on our shop door sounded off so frequently from all the walk-in traffic, I was half-surprised it still worked by days’ end.

For those not aware, the Monday after Thanksgiving is typically a big day for online repair companies, and IPOD repair stores like us see a big spike in sales on this day, and pretty much all the other days leading up to Christmas. The day is usually also accompanied with a host of one-day coupon codes and discounts, and our site was no exception:

We Got in the Discount Spirit Today

Despite all the craziness, we were all able to remain professional with our customers and with each other. I even had a bit of time to jet downtown to register an exciting new DBA in the morning, and give a quick tour later in the day to a gentleman from an IPHONE Review website that has showered us with kudos for our great repairs and friendly customer service.

Phwew, What a Day.

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner
milliamp.com

Dear Dexter,

First and foremost, I would like to extend my most heartfelt apologies for doing this to you. I know how attached you were, and I must admit that I truly did have your best intentions in mind. It was such a mess dealing with everything, but you must understand that I never meant to hurt you. You cried and it made me sad to hear it, but I had to keep trucking on because I knew it was for the best. It’s a tragic thing, but you just don’t seem the same anymore after the incident. Well, you don’t even look the same if I have to be frank. Either way, it ended the way it did because you just let it go too far. It’s for the better, and although you were embarrassed initially, I know that you’ve come out of this like a new man. I sincerely wish that this could have turned out better.

Love always,

♥Marian

Before the "incident"

After the "incident"

All better!

P.S. I’ll always love you, no matter how ugly or stupid-looking your hair gets!

The iPod and iPhone Repair Forum is LIVE!

This is a great place to post questions that get addressed by our admittedly already-over-worked technicians shortly after questions are received. This is not intended to be a replacement for our legendary customer support by phone (1-800-809-8133) or email (service@milliamp.com), but a nice, friendly way to discuss the issues that affect iPod and iPhone users around the world.

The forum has a relaxing milliamp-green/blue appearance, and meshes cleanly with our site. We toyed around with calling it Forum-amp, until Mark set me straight (gracias, Mark).

We did a press release on the new iPod repair forum, too, if you want to read about that.

You can head to our iPhone and iPod repair Forum now if you want to check it out – it is super-easy to register and post a question.

Oh, and did i mention it was FREE???

Enjoy, my friends.

Anthony Magnabosco, Owner

Some time ago, the ‘Fam’ and I embarked on a voyage to the ever so popular state…Oklahoma!(cue SFX: Crickets chirp). I know it does not sound too exciting, but do not judge a pimp by his cane? Seriously folks, Oklahoma is more than just a SUPERFANTASTIC musical AArgh! In fact, one can have a lot of enjoyment there if you know where to look. My favorite attraction of Oklahoma is the natural beauty that is untouched by human settlement. One particular location is the Wichita Mountains, which not only contains breath taking lakes, amazing rivers, and spectacular rock formations, but is also contains a plethora of endangered wildlife species. This video may help you understand the true beauty of the Oklahoma Plains.

Click here to view the embedded video.