Today I had a lovely flight above the California coastline from Santa Ana to San Francisco. As we began our descent, I was dozing off when the stewardess woke me up to ask that I put my headrest back down. I had been about to enjoy a nice nap. And furthermore, the seat is actually quite uncomfortable when the headrest is down.

Why the hell is this a rule? What possible reason is there for this? I find it difficult to believe that safety has anything to do with it. Did someone get injured or die during a crash-landing because their headrest was too high? I’m thinking the position of my headrest would be the least of my problems in the event something went very wrong with the airplane I was in during descent or landing.

Sorry. Rant over. But sometimes the preposterous angers me instead of amuses me.

Technorati Tags: Airlines, Flying, Rant, Travel

From the New York Times: Monkey’s Thoughts Propel Robot. This is a pretty astounding feat. A monkey in North Carolina with electrodes implanted in its brain walked on a treadmill watching a video feed of a walking robot in Kyoto, Japan. A real-time output from the Monkey’s brain was sent to the robot and enabled the monkey to be a remote “puppet-master” of the robot, causing the robot to walk while exactly mimicking the monkey’s gait, resulting in the robot being metaphorically “possessed” by the monkey.

This is the stuff of science fiction, but incredible research that may one day bring mobility to patients with paralysis and, perhaps further down the road, will allow the average consumer to control devices with a simple thought, assuming means are developed to monitor neuronal activity that are non-invasive. While this kind of thing of thing exists only in a lab today, technology like this may well become commonplace in a couple decades. While this is a really far-out application, it is yet another example of the major transformations we are likely to see in the world of human-computer interaction (HCI) over the long haul, and illustrates why my partners and I are exited about the evolution of HCI at Foundry Group. Mind-control of software will certainly make the mouse look quaint, as will many other nearer-term advances that are available today or will be in the coming five years.

Technorati Tags: HCI, robotics

Sending spacecraft to another planet is a pretty neat trick.  The number of disciplines that must work together perfectly to get a camera out to Mercury that can send back pictures to us is astounding and makes most of the technologies we invest in at Foundry Group look like child’s play.  This shot of Mercury was taken yesterday from a distance of 470,000 miles.  Today, the craft passed within 124 miles of the planet, its closest approach.  I’m looking forward to seeing the images from Messenger’s close-up with Mercury as soon as they are available.

In many ways, this year’s CES was a repeat of last year’s:  bigger and flatter TVs, flatter and lighter PCs, and, of course, more of the clusterf**k that is Las Vegas when 140,000 techies show up to attend the show, resulting in half-hour cab lines, booked-solid restaurants and the longest airport security line I have ever seen as we left Vegas Thursday morning (and this was before 7am, mind you).

Complaining aside, I feel compelled to mention a few highlights of the trip.  First was a tour that one of Postini’s outstanding ops guys, Greg McGrath and my partner Jason Mendelson and I took through the SwitchComm colo facility in Vegas.  Yes, I am a data center nerd, so when I had a chance to tour this facility to see Postini’s cage down there, I jumped at the opportunity.  Let me just say that this was the most impressive data center facility I have ever been in.  Thanks to Rob Roy (CEO) and MIssy Young (VP Sales) for spending the afternoon with us — we were blown away.

Back to items that can be found on the show floor, the big TV battle continues to escalate and this year took a huge leap, with Panasonic winning bragging rights for the year with their 150 inch diagonal TV.  This thing was a behemoth, and the picture looked amazing, thanks to 8 megapixels of Quad HD (3840×2160) resolution.  Where they got the source material for the video demonstration, I do not know.  Sharp showed off a 108 inch LCD that also had Quad HD resolution, upping the pixel count 4x over their 108" monster they showed last year, which had claimed the biggest TV crown in 2007.

Speaking of high-definition, the folks at the HD-DVD booth seemed a bit morose while the people across they way at the neighboring Blu-ray booth were busy declaring victory after Warner Brothers announced they were switching exclusively to the Blu-ray format.  I’m happy to see Blu-ray "win" given that if we’re all going to have a new generation of rewriteable optical drives in our laptops and PCs, we might has well have the one with substantially more capacity, as blu-ray does, weighing in at 25GB per layer vs. 15GB per layer for HD-DVD.  Sony may finally be able to tout victory in a format war and make up for the Betamax debacle.

Or maybe not.  Given the increasing speed and penetration of broadband internet and cable and satellite HD channels and on-demand services, we may be fast approaching the end of the physical media era.  Granted, we are a long way away from the ability to reliably deliver 54 megabits per second over broadband (the blu-ray data transfer rate required by the spec for video playback) so I do think Blu-ray will have a run for the next few years, but the victory of Blu-ray may be short-lived, and the spoils may turn out to be far less than expected, when compared to the standard-def DVD market.  In any case, I do think Blu-ray is very likely the last physical media format we’ll see for audio and video.

2008 will likely be a banner year for solid-state-drives – SanDisk showed 64GB SSDs with 2.5" and 1.8" form factors, and we’ll certainly see 128GB and 256GB SSDs as well, maybe even this year.  And if the rumors are true, Apple may bring SSDs to the mainstream in large volumes, assuming they announce the ultra-portable laptop at Macworld next week that is said to contain solid state storage instead of a hard drive.  Rumors aside, an impressive machine available today is the OQO model 02, which is beautiful device that has improved substantially since the launch of the first OQO a few years ago.  The one we saw on the show floor had a 64GB flash drive, a sunlight optimized screen, 1GB of RAM, a 1.6GHz CPU, wifi, bluetooth and EVDO, all in a one pound device.

Robots also had a big presence at CES this year, with iRobot showing off more of their "chorebots" while WowWee, Spykee, Ugobe and Sony and others showing off various humanoid, caninoid and dinosauroid robots.

Finally, the OLED TVs shown off by Sony and Samsung were astounding.  We saw the Sony prototypes last year as well and were blown away by the thinness and the stunning picture quality of OLED displays.  Happily, Sony will be making an 11" OLED available this year.  Sadly, it will retail for $2499.  But the picture is so good, it is tempting nonetheless.

Another highlight was the mammoth Sling Media booth.  Sling has come a long way since their modest booth in the innovations pavilion at their first CES in 2005.  I can’t wait to get my hands on the SlingCatcher and the Slingbox Pro HD when they ship.  And thanks to Blake and Jason for the private SlingCatcher demo and raging Rock Band battles in their pimpy suite atop the Wynn on Wednesday night.

A final tip of the hat goes to Laurie for the fine restaurant recommendations.  We ate well in Vegas this year, with meals at Joel Robuchon, Bouchon and Lotus of Siam.  Yummy.  So much for my 2008 diet plans.

Today, Memeo announced that they’ve raised an $8.1m Series B round of financing, led by Foundry Group. I’ve joined the board of Memeo and am excited to be working with Hong, Steve, Chris and the rest of the Memeo team, as well as Series A investor Rudy Garza (G51) and outside director Scott Petry, with whom I had the pleasure of working with for six years at Postini, the email security company Scott founded back in 1999, which was acquired by Google for $625m last year.

Scott introduced me to CEO/founder Hong Bui several years ago when Memeo was just an idea and some powerpoint. Since then, Hong and team have made tremendous progress and built LifeAgent, an award-winning suite of digital media management software that enjoys broad distribution with the likes of Seagate, Western Digital, Buffalo Technology, D-Link and many others.

So why did we at Foundry Group get excited about investing in Memeo? Most importantly, the team at Memeo is strong and they’ve accomplished a lot with a little, which always catches our attention. Second, as most of you know, we are proud nerds at Foundry Group and we love the Memeo technology and believe that media synchronization, sharing, backup and data transformation that is driven by a device- and media-aware policy-based engine is key to managing the ever-increasing avalanche of digital media users are dealing with every day. And, finally, while there is sophisticated technology under the hood, Memeo is maniacally focused on ease-of-use and the software just works, which is the only way the average user will engage in an eat-your-vegetables and floss-your-teeth type activity like backing up files.

The once-staid data backup software market is in the midst of transformation. The increasing availability of online storage, the proliferation of devices (multi-PC households, cameras, mobile phones, iPods) and media used by the average user, the growing mountain of storage required by the average household (measuring in 100s of gigabytes today, growing to tens of terabytes over the next few years) and the increased financial and sentimental value of the data (family photos, videos, favorite movies and music, etc) has placed a strain on the capabilities of current-generation software. Furthermore, users’ understanding of the need for media protection and management has dramatically increased. I learned this this hard way and once had to spend thousands of dollars to recover thousands of photos from a crashed hard drive.

Next-generation software to address these needs must expand the traditionally narrow definition of backup software (simply a regularly scheduled transfer of files to another hard drive) to include real-time, continuous backup to and from multiple devices, support for online storage, data transformation, data synchronization and sharing among multiple users. At the same time, successful entrants into this market will have to hide this drastic increase in complexity from the end-user with software that works “automagically” to enable the average user to cope with the demands of digital media management.

Needless to say, we believe Memeo is at the forefront of new tools which recognize that previously disparate technologies such as backup, sharing and synchronization are really just different facets of the same thing: digital media management. Hong founded Memeo with a vision to build tools to enable users to simplify their digital lives, and they are on their way to fulfilling that vision. We are excited to be joining Memeo on that journey.

OK, so I’ve posted many times in the past about the magic of Moore’s Law (and the increase in storage density which is an even steeper curve), and after working 15 years in the technology industry, you’d think I’d be used to exponential growth. But the fact that Samsung recently announced a 3-platter, one terabyte desktop drive and Hitachi announced a 500GB laptop drive caught my attention.

But let me engage in some nostalgia: I remember my first hard drive, 20 megabytes, inside my Mac SE. I remember clearly sitting in a lecture in Stanford’s Terman Engineering Hall during my undergrad years (1989 – 1993) when the professor, in a flight of amateur futurism, predicted that one day, maybe 15 years hence, we will be able fit a few gigabytes into a desktop, cubic-foot sized box.

Toto, I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore. My back-of-envelope calculations suggest you could pack about 72 3.5″ drives into a cubic foot, notwithstanding thermal issues, so this professor was off by at least a factor of 25,000. Happily we’ve all been surprised at how dense magnetic storage has become. And the increase in density in flash-based storage is equally remarkable.

As a New Year’s Resolution, I’ll try to refrain from posting more about exponential growth rates in storage and processing power until at least another order-of-magnitude milestone has been passed. But we all know most resolutions are quickly broken. I’ll try to refrain in January. Or until after CES.

Technorati Tags: Hard Drives, Moore’s Law, Storage

Following up on my post pointing to David Byrne’s excellent article about music distribution options for musicians, from the biggest acts to the smallest indies, I thought I’d offer a real world data point. My (very indie) record label, Toothless Monkey Music, distributes CDs through CDBaby, which I have to say is one of the best services around for independent musicians. When you put a CD up for sale on CDBaby, there’s a nominal up front fee ($35) to get a CD listed, and then CDBaby also takes care of digital distribution as well, so your music winds up available on iTunes, Rhapsody, Yahoo Music and many more. Oh, and it is a totally non-exclusive deal with CDBaby as well.

What’s best about CDBaby is their pricing: for physical CDs, they take $4 per CD sold. For digital distribution, the deal is even better, they take a 9% cut and pass the remainder on to the artist. Their full pricing menu is described here. So in the case of the iTunes music store, when my band Soul Patch sells a track (our best-selling track of all time on iTMS is the quirky Arabic Ska), we get $0.637 per $0.99 track sold, CDBaby gets about a nickel, and Apple gets the balance. The vast majority of the revenue in this case goes directly to the artist, with Apple’s cut going primarily towards their hosting costs and bandwidth. From my perspective, 64% of all recorded music revenue going directly to the artist is a pretty good deal.

Bottom line, the world has changed. If you are an independent artist and are able to handle your own marketing and promotion efforts, the economics of digital music sales weigh heavily in your favor, arguably more than ever before. Of course, one can argue that over time even the digital distribution revenue streams may vanish, but that’s a (much longer) discussion for another day.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Music, iTunes

Armed with icicles hanging from my front porch roof, a green and a red laser pointer, a plush-toy velour pumpkin and a Canon EOS 10-D set for 30 second exposure, I set out to experiment with light painting.  I was inspired by my friend Carl Rosendahl’s excellent APAD (A Picture A Day) photoblog, and his great shot of his Gibson Les Paul.  You can find all 47 shots I took during this photo shoot here.

Technorati Tags: icicles, lasers, light painting, photography

Scotsman, musician and polymath David Byrne just penned an excellent article in Wired regarding the current state of affairs for record companies and artists for distribution of CDs and digital music. An authoritative must-read for anyone in the music business.

Technorati Tags: Music

From Slashdot, speculation that iTMS will offer tracks in Apple Lossless format as early as next year. Assuming they also make these tracks free of their evil DRM, I’d be happy to pay a premium over the standard mp3/AAC tracks available. As a recording engineer and studio owner, I definitely can hear and appreciate the difference in quality between the lossy perceptual compression of mp3/AAC and lossless/uncompressed audio.

Call me old-school, but I often still buy CDs when I buy music (unless I’m buying just a single track in which case I will probably buy online). I like the physical artifact of a CD, I like the art and the liner notes, the higher-quality sound and the fact that the media serves as an archive and backup. When I buy a CD, I rip it on to my music server at home in lossless and 192 kbps mp3, I file the cover art, and then I stick the CD onto a spindle in a storage closet. So I’m not using the disc after I rip it, but I still like the security of having the disc itself, having suffered the economic and emotional loss of a hard drive crash in the past.

Making lossless audio available would remove one of my major gripes about purchasing downloaded audio, obviously DRM is another big one, which appears to be slowing going away, but the third thing missing, from my perspective, is a digital format that serves as a replacement for all the art and information that comes packaged with a CD.

As a music nerd, I love reading the lyrics, inside cover-art, thank-yous, performance and songwriting credits in the liner notes of an album. There ought to be a “virtual album art” format that bundles all this data with an album download so I can browse it on my iPod, laptop, etc. while I am listening to music. I realize a lot of this can be found online, but I want it packaged in a single digital file that I can view and explore offline as well. I’ve never understood why CDDB hasn’t built this out, rights issues notwithstanding.

Adding this kind of data to the digital album download would bring back something missing from the digital download experience, and it might help prevent the era of great album art from coming to end, which is clearly the (sad) path we are on now.

Technorati Tags: apple, audio, compression, iTunes, music, CDDB