I know I do, and I’ve played guitar in numerous bands for the past 20+ years, I have a recording studio in my house, an angel investment in an indie record label (About Records) as well as my own boutique label (Toothless Monkey Music), and my band Soul Patch (which includes my partner Jason Mendelson on drums) is about to release our second album in January.

My band in college, Where’s Julio? (see the link to the album in my righthand sidebar) included three of the six Excite founders, and we got to play some fun gigs during the bubble era, including one at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore for a benefit for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where we got to share the stage with Roger McNamee’s band, The Flying Other Brothers. Roger is probably the highest profile investor who is also a musician and somehow manages to maintain a fairly active gigging schedule with his new band Moonalice. Heck, one of Roger’s partners at Elevation is Bono, so Roger’s rocker cred is pretty unassailable at this point.

Well, there’s a new kid on the block now. I had the pleasure of working with my colleague Heidi Roizen at Mobius VC over the past eight years, and now Heidi’s stepped back into her entrepreneurial shoes (jeans?) as CEO of SkinnySongs. A few years ago, Heidi generously hosted a party for About Records at her home, where she met About’s CEO George Daly, a long time record industry A&R veteran behind acts such as The Cars, The Tubes, Vanessa Carlton and Tool. Heidi penned all the lyrics on this album and teamed up with George Daly and super-producer David Malloy (who has over 40 Billboard #1 hits to his name) to create Skinny Songs, an album full of well-polished, genre-hopping pop tunes aimed at motivating women to lose weight.

Heidi herself is a great endorsement for the product and has slimmed down considerably over the past six months while she put together the album. Read more about the SkinnySongs story in this Forbes article or this article in the Merc. Heidi, best of luck with your new gig, and may SkinnySongs go platinum!

I was reading Chris Fralic’s post about LinkedIn vs. Facebook, when he talked about his first Facebook birthday, which he described as a personal “aha” moment with the service after his recent birthday. I had this same same exact “aha” experience on my birthday several weeks (October 29th for those of you keeping score) when I too received more birthday wishes on Facebook than I did through any other medium on any other birthday. Pretty cool.

I’d been using it intermittently ever since they opened it up to all comers, but mainly as a means to keep myself current, but my usage has shot up since then and I am beginning to understand the attraction.

My experience with Twitter was similar — I had been a user for weeks, mainly for “research”, when one night I was having margaritas on the roof deck of the Rio in Boulder and decided to tweet what I was doing. Over the next hour, at least four friends who follow me on twitter who happened to be nearby came upstairs and said hello. Also pretty cool.

Finally, last week at the recent AlwaysOn Venture Summit West conference, I ran into Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials, on Friday morning, and he mentioned he had been expecting to see me since I had noted my attendance via my Facebook status.

The reason these sorts of things are appealing (beyond the obvious fact that we are social animals) has been much discussed, with two of my favorite characterizations of what these apps enable being Lisa Reichelt’s term ambient intimacy and Jaiku’s social peripheral vision.

But there is something else going on here too, which is that the social graph is both virtual and physical and allows the virtual world to reach into the physical world in a more meaningful way than we are used to. Sure, a mouse click can cause a book to arrive at my doorstep a couple days later, but the thrill of that has long since worn off. The fact that a simple SMS message can result in four friends dropping by to say hi while I am out for drinks, or that someone might notice (via Beacon or similar) what movie tickets I bought on Fandango and decide to meet me at the theater is compelling.

Over time our virtual and physical environments are becoming increasingly intertwined (more on this later), but the merging of our virtual and physical social worlds is happening today (perhaps leading the way) and will become increasingly more common (and ultimately pedestrian) over time. To paraphrase Gibson, the future is here now, just unevenly distributed.

There are no doubt many more examples of this melding of the social bitspace and meatspace, and I’d love to hear people’s stories, so please comment.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, social graph, Twitter

Via Gizmodo:  Upgrading your Comcast Motorola/Scientific DVR to run TiVo software costs an extra $2.95/month and has been rolled out in New England.  More details from Comcast here.  And go sign up here to be notified when it rolls out in your neighborhood.  Comcast, please hurry up and get this rolled out in the Boulder/Denver area! 

I gave up my DirecTiVo box when I moved from CA to CO and have been a victim of the Comcast DVR user interface for the past 16 months, and I have been wistfully remembering my TiVo days.  In fact, I’ve seriously considered leaving Comcast altogether because the interface on their DVR boxes has to be one of the worst UI abominations I’ve ever experienced.  Seriously — it boggles my mind how a UI can be so bad when there exists a great UI like TiVo that can be imitated.  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Comcast’s attempts to imitate have been a disaster.  So I’m glad they’ve given up and decided to make the best-of-breed TiVo interface available.  Finally.

I cannot wait to get TiVo back.  I can only hope it will happen sometime in the next few months because I’m not sure how long I can hold out.  Can anyone from Comcast chime in here on the rollout schedule?  Can anyone hook me up with early access?

Technorati Tags: Gadgets, Comcast, TiVo

From Slashdot:  AT&T is decommissioning their pay phones.  Video killed the radio star, p2p, Skype, and now this?  Probably a somewhat overdue capitulation on AT&T’s part given the ubiquity of the mobile phone.  I commented in a previous blog post about encountering a decommissioned pay phone — clearly they are on their way to becoming an historical curiosity, though perhaps they will live on in small numbers in dense urban areas and/or as a result of public outcry related to public safety and/or accessibility concerns.

There’s a tall smokestack near my house in Boulder that is part of the Boulder Community Hospital’s Mapleton Center.  Though it is a bit of an eyesore, happily I’ve never seen smoke coming from it, so I assume it isn’t actually in use.  I walked by it the other day and took a few shots with my iPhone that I thought came out well.  I particularly like the first one I’ve posted because the thin cloud passing overhead makes it look like there is smoke coming out of it.

Technorati Tags: Boulder, iPhone

Just a random thought: I’ll bet TinyURL has seen a spike in usage since Twitter came along. I’m seeing a ton of tweets with TinyURLs embedded in them. If anyone reading knows anyone associated with TinyURL, feel free to comment on my idle speculation…

Update: well, I just went to the TinyURL site (to make a self-referential TinyURL for this post) and discovered they do 1.4 billion hits a month, so I’m guessing Twitter isn’t yet moving the needle that much.

Technorati Tags: TinyURL, Twitter

Just a quick tout for one of my companies: Akustica. Today they announced they’ve shipped their two millionth microphone. It took fifteen months from shipping their very first production microphone to reach the one million mark, and a scant three months to reach the second million. Congrats to Akustica on their very steep (and getting steeper) volume ramp!

Technorati Tags: Akustica, MEMS, Microphones

One of the benefits of living in an historic neighborhood (no, the anti-property rights Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board is not one of them) is the mature trees that line the streets.  I took a quick snapshot this morning of the beautiful autumn colors on the block between 4th and 5th on Pine Street.

Technorati Tags: Autumn, Boulder, Leaves

I am a glass is half-full kind of guy (which can come in handy as an early-stage venture investor).  So while I was not excited to be at Denver International Airport at 7am this morning, at least I got to see this great sunrise.

Technorati Tags: DIA, Denver, Sunrise

Hooray for Sonos for listening to their customer feedback. Today, they released version 2.5 of their system software, adding the most useful feature yet: search. Sonos also added access to Napster, but as a subscriber to Rhapsody and Pandora, I’m less interested in access to yet another online service at this point, though I definitely appreciate their apparent strategy to support as many third-party music services as possible.

But back to search: we’ve all been trained by Google to depend on the search box, and Sonos has (finally) provided it to us. I’ve long been a fan of Sonos, and use it for listening to both my large mp3 collection at home as well as for streaming from Rhapsody and Pandora. The biggest drawback (particularly with Rhapsody’s multi-million song library) was the lack of a search function. I’ve been a big fan of Sonos for years now, and with the addition of the search feature, I am an even happier user.

The fine folks at Sonos were kind enough to let me download the new software a few days early this past weekend, so I’ve been happily searching away since Saturday morning. At this point, I only have three remaining major feature requests: one, it would be great if one of the ZonePlayer models (or the new ZoneBridge) had a USB slot accessible on the face that enabled playback of music from a USB flash drive — as someone who records a lot of my own original music, it would be great to have a fast way to access a few new tracks of music without having to go through the trouble of re-indexing the music collection.

Which brings me to feature request number two: there has got to be a way to enable to Sonos to do a real-time, continuous sync with my local music collection. Every time I rip a new CD, it is a pain to have to reindex the collection just to find the new tracks — I have several thousands CDs worth of music on my network and it can take Sonos ten or fifteen minutes to update the index. I wish it didn’t.

And my third and final feature request is one I realize Sonos has no control over: Support for playback of Apple DRM’d music. As I’ve written before, I wish I could play songs purchased on the iTunes Music Store on my Sonos. Now that Apple is selling some songs DRM-free, I have a partial solution going forward, but what about all my old purchases? I’ve tried AppleTV and the Airport Express for music streaming at home, but Sonos beats those solutions hands-down, particularly for multi-room and whole-house audio.

Apple, are you listening? The Sonos is a great product, has great industrial design, is super easy to set up and use, and, if I’m any proxy, Sonos seems to have a loyal, vocal and very happy user base. Sound familiar? Seems to me Apple ought to seriously consider buying Sonos. It would give them a stronger beachhead into the digital home than the lackluster AppleTV has achieved to date. On the surface (at least to me) it is a match made in heaven…

Technorati Tags: Apple, Audio, Convergence, DRM, Gadgets, Music, search, Sonos