The Modern:  I’ve blogged in the past about my love of the Sonos digital music system, which I’ve installed throughout my home.  As an avid music collector, over the years I’ve amassed a collection several thousand CDs strong.  However, there are still gaps in my collection, and sometimes you just need to hear The Bangles’ version of Hazy Shade of Winter.  Happily, Sonos released an upgrade a couple months ago which offered native Rhapsody support using the new Rhapsody APIs.  There had previously been Rhapsody support via a kludge whereby the Sonos system talked to a Windows PC with Rhapsody installed on it to allow Rhapsody support.  My house is an all Mac household, so I wasn’t going to go there.  Other folks have praised the new Sonos / Rhapsody integration, and I couldn’t agree more.  I always though about subscribing to Rhapsody to have access to the infinite jukebox in the sky, but it wasn’t until I test drove it on my Sonos that I decided to take the plunge and become a paying customer.

However, I have one UI big complaint that I just have to mention, and I hope the folks at Sonos and Rhapsody are listening.  I don’t know if the shortcoming is a result of Sonos’ design choices or a shortcoming in the Rhapsody API, but hopefully they’ll work together to iron this out.  The glaring omission in the Rhapsody interface on Sonos is the ability to do any kind of keyword search for an artist or album.  The Rhapsody browsing paradigm appears to be totally locked in to a hierarchical model which somewhat surprisingly has the musical genre as one of the top level branches, forcing me to guess what genre a particular artist has been categorized in, which often leads to a frustrating dead-end if you’ve chosen the wrong genre.  Is Alison Kraus country or bluegrass?  Is Jack Johnson rock or pop?  What genre is Steely Dan?  How about Ani DiFranco?  Anyway, Sonos / Rhapsody would go from good to great if I could just do a search for a specific artist or album and not have worry about which genre a particular artist has been categorized in.

The Retro:  My friend Jason called me over the weekend, and asked me to come over to see the "engineering marvel" he had just purchased.  I walked down the block (he lives all of 300 feet away) and was surprised to discover a vintage turn-of-the-century Brunswick Victrola that he had just purchased from a local antique shop.  The device is an amazing artifact because it manages to produce sound without any electricity.  A hand crank on the side winds a spring-driven motor that spins the turntable.  As it rides the vinyl record’s groove, the needle vibrates a membrane it is mechanically coupled to, creating (very quiet) sound in a chamber on the machined metal arm, which is hollow and pipes the sound produced by the membrane through an expanding horn-shaped tube, providing natural bullhorn-style amplification.  The horn terminates just behind the "speaker" grille shown in the picture.  The sound is a bit scratchy and tinny and lacks low-end frequencies, but it sounded surprisingly good to me given the decidedly low-tech means of producing the sound.  Never mind tubes, solid state circuitry, capacitors or resistors, there are no electronics of any kind in this system.  Cool.

The Convergence:  So here’s how the past and present converge.  After sitting around and listening to several very scratchy vintage  78s (including Bing Crosby’s White Christmas), Jason and I decided that what we really wanted to do was hear our own music on the Victrola.  After some research, Jason found a site called Custom Records Vinyl Mastering which allows you to have a custom one-off 78, 45 or 33 rpm LP vinyl phonograph record made from a digital audio file that you upload to the site.  So Jason uploaded a couple of tracks (Make Me Feel and Arabic Ska) from our band’s album, Summers in Rangoon, and we are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the vinyl 78s later this week.  I can’t wait for the anachronistic thrill I know I’ll get from hearing the low-fi sounds of Soul Patch emanating from the Brunswick phonograph.

Technorati Tags: Analog, Audio, Brunswick, Convergence, Digital, Music, Sonos, Victrola

When I moved to Boulder, I found out that our house (and several blocks of our street) in Boulder, CO didn’t exist, at least according to Yahoo, Google and MapQuest.

I filed a bug report with NAVTEQ, the provider of the underlying geodata and was told to not expect a fix for six to eighteen months. My colleague Jason (who lives on the same block) discovered that this problem has now been remedied on Google Maps, though Yahoo and MapQuest still provide erroneous data.

Thanks Google! Yahoo and MapQuest, please get your act together. I’m tired of furniture deliveries, electricians and plumbers winding up at the wrong place after relying on online mapping services to find my house.

Technorati Tags: Geocoding, Geocoding, Mapping, Maps

Jobs’ open letter, Thoughts on Music, published this morning, has brought the DRM-free music meme to the forefront in a way and scale that only Jobs can achieve. As Fred Wilson points out, perhaps Steve Jobs has had a change of heart when it comes to DRM. Or perhaps not.

We should remember that Jobs is first and foremost a great marketer and PR guy, and the beauty of publishing this letter is that it gets Apple fantastic PR and doesn’t cost the company anything, regardless of the outcome. And he does a great job of passing the blame (deservedly so) for the evils of DRM on to the record labels, where the blame belongs.

Apple already has de facto monopoly share with or without DRM. And historically, they haven’t been willing to open up FairPlay – the fact that I can’t stream my iTMS-purchased content in my home via Sonos or Squeezebox frustrates me on a daily basis. Between heat from the EU and the bad press Apple gets already from “activist” users and journalists who harpoon Apple for being closed and consumer unfriendly, their dominance and their DRM has become a liability.

I’m sure Apple would happily jettison DRM and it would solve some problems for them, though I think it would have minimal impact on the status quo WRT their market dominance, which means that some of Apple’s detractors will linger simply because they are the big gorilla when it comes to digital music.

Jobs wrote this letter for Apple’s benefit, and any positive side effects for consumers are just happy coincidences. This is a clear case of enlightened self-interest. He gets awesome PR and can position himself as the anti-DRM standards bearer, while solving a growing PR problem for Apple, whether or not it actually leads to a world of DRM-free music. Altruism does not necessarily play a part here and Apple wins regardless of the outcome.

Regardless of Job’s motives, which in the end don’t matter as this is a case of “greed is good”, I am encouraged and excited to see this issue in the limelight.

So kudos to Steve Jobs if he’s had a change of heart and now believes in the anti-DRM religion.

And kudos to him if this is all just savvy marketing and self-interest on his part. Either way, he’s brought the issue to forefront, and users benefit.

Technorati Tags: Apple, DRM, iPod, Jobs

Today as I arrived in Columbus, Ohio, I unwittingly found myself face to face with a bit of Americana:  the original Wendy’s location.  While I have been known from time to time to enjoy a nice Frosty, today all I took from Wendy’s was this picture, saving myself from the 430 calories in a medium-sized serving.

On Wednesday, after my partner Brad and I finished a meeting in Washington DC, we settled in for the long drive (during rush hour) from DC to Dulles International Airport. Sitting in the back of the car, we fired up my MacBook Pro, got online using my Verizon EVDO card, fired up my SlingPlayer, connected to the Slingbox in my living room in Boulder, and then proceeded to watch Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report as we made our way to IAD. From the back of a moving car, our connection speed averaged about 500 kbps, and we were treated to an impressively high-quality viewing experience.

Amazing.

Technorati Tags: Gadgets, MacBook Pro, EVDO, Sling Media, Slingbox, Travel

It has been a rough travel week. It started with my ill-timed journey from Denver to Harrisburg, PA on Sunday afternoon when the snow in Denver and Chicago conspired against me and trapped my plane on the tarmac in Denver for 4 hours while we waited for de-icing and runway plowing. Once I arrived in Chicag, snow had caused 5+ hour delays. I arrived in Harrisburg at 2am Monday morning. Never thought I’d be so happy to see Harrisburg, PA.

Now I’m sitting in the airport in Pittsburgh waiting for a flight to Philadelphia. The terminal is relatively empty and my gate is near the end of one of those moving walkways. There is not a single person on the moving walkways, yet I’m sitting here, forced to listen to a pre-recorded voice politely saying, ad nauseum, “Caution, the moving walkway is nearing its end, please watch your step. Thank you.”

What would otherwise be a relatively quiet and peaceful experience has been destroyed by the incessant repetition of this disembodied voice at the end of the walkway. Two things about this absurd situation really grate on me.

First, no doubt the only reason this bit of noise pollution is being forced on every person sitting at my gate is because some enterprising lawyer successfully sued some airport at one point after their oblivious dumbass client fell on his face at the end of some moving walkway.

Second, this is just terrible design. Would it have been that hard to install a sensor near the end of each walkway such that the Voice of Caution would only be triggered if there were actually someone on the walkway?

Jeesh.

Technorati Tags: Airports, Rant, Travel

I was in Las Vegas last week with my partner Jason Mendelson for CES, my third or fourth (they sort of all blur together) trip to Sin City for this bit of consumer-electronic craziness. I just read Dave Hornik’s post on his trip to CES and felt compelled to share my thoughts as well. While I think it is highly unlikely that I’d find a startup to invest in in Vegas, it is a great way to get the lay of the land in the consumer electronics industry and generally soak in the zeitgeist of today’s gadget universe. We also walked the halls to see the buzz that our portfolio companies which exhibit at CES are drawing. We had several MobiusVC companies to check in on this year: eCast, MicroDisplay, Perpetual Entertainment, Reactrix and Sling Media.

In the past few years, the big themes that have been prominent at the show have ranged from digital music devices, mobile video and smartphones. This year was the year of Full HD (1920 x 1080 progressive scan), and, of course, the ongoing game of one-upsmanship in flat screen TVs. Sharp’s 108 inch LCD TV ruled the day, trumping the 102 inch and 103 inch plasma screens in previous years, thanks to Sharp’s new eighth-generation LCD plant. We looked at as many TVs as we could find, since Mobius VC is a co-investor in Microdisplay, along with the fine folks at August Capital. MicroDisplay was showing their gorgeous LCoS (liquid crystal on siicon) Full HD RPTVs in their booth as well as in the booths of their partners Akai and Memorex, who will soon be shipping MicroDisplay’s TVs into the retail marketplace.

But the best-quality, most astonishing TV I saw at CES wasn’t even a big screen TV (the biggest was a mere 27 inches) and, sadly, is not yet commercially available and was billed as a prototype. Sony’s ultra-thin OLED TVs were truly stunning and their display quality was markedly better than anything I’ve seen before, owing partially to their remarkable 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. I’ll be picking one of these babies up when they are finally ready for prime time — I’m guessing that Sony’s still struggling with lifetime issues on these displays, given the organic compounds used in the displays.

I’ve been involved with Sling since leading their Series A round in the summer of 2004, and it has been great to see how they’ve grown each of the three years they’ve been at CES. The first year, they were showing pre-release prototypes of the original Slingbox, last year their announcement of the SlingPlayer Mobile for mobile phones was all the rage, and this year, Sling made waves with the announcement of the upcoming SlingCatcher device, as well as with CEO Blake Krikorian’s appearance during Les Moonves’ keynote speech, where they announced the upcoming release of the clip-n-sling feature in the SlingPlayer and CBS’s partnership with Sling whereby Sling users can freely clip and share snippets of CBS programming they capture while watching their Slingboxes. Kudos to Sling and CBS for this groundbreaking deal.

Finally, I should mention that the biggest buzz during CES wasn’t at CES at all. It came from up north in San Francisco at Apple’s MacWorld conference. Apple’s announcements of the iPhone and AppleTV easily generated as much press coverage as all of CES combined. For any consumer electronics company other than Apple, hosting a conference at the same time would have been suicide, yet, once again, Steve Jobs has pulled off a marketing masterstroke and demonstrated his company’s ability to define the conversation in the world of digital media and consumer electronics.

Technorati Tags: Apple, CES, eCast, Gadgets, HDTV, LCD, Microdisplay, OLED, Perpetual Entertainment, Reactrix, Sling Media, Slingbox

Many blog pundits have predicted that blogs and RSS will ultimately kill the press release / newswire business. But as Mark Twain might say, “the rumors of the press release’s death have been greatly exaggerated.” At least thus far.

The more accurate thing to say is that world of PR will be forever changed by the emergence of citizen media. PR Newswire is wisely embracing this change and has just announced a deal with Technorati, whereby reader of PR Newswire’s press releases online are provided with links to Technorati at the bottom of every press release they publish online. The press release can be found here at PR Newswire, and the real-time conversation going on in the blogosphere about this release can be found here.

Congrats to both Technorati and PR Newswire, each of whom has made both the press release and the blogosphere more relevant by bringing them together.

Technorati Tags: PR Newswire, Technorati

As reported earlier this week, eBay announced it is buying StubHub for $310m. As a (small) individual investor in StubHub, I’m delighted by this outcome. StubHub is a great success story: the company was started by Stanford MBA students Eric Baker and Jeff Fluhr in the dark days of the tech downturn and was able (or forced by necessity) to raise money primarily from angel investors (with the exception of the Series D round they raised from Pequot last year) when most VCs had pulled up their tents to ride out the storm. At the time, conventional wisdom was that eBay would own the auction market for every conceivable type of good, and, furthermore, it wasn’t worth the risk to invest in what was regarded as “online scalping”.

StubHub’s insight was that while eBay is a fantastic generic-auction marketplace, the secondary event tickets marketplace had several unique characteristics for which eBay’s one-size-fits-all approach would fall short. First, event tickets spoil. After the days of the game or show, the ticket becomes worthless. eBay probably doesn’t sell much milk on its site, and you wouldn’t want to buy a glass of milk that had been on auction for a week’s time. Nor would you want a ticket for an event that had already occurred.

StubHub’s buying experience is totally specialized for buying and selling tickets. It is very easy to find tickets for the specific date, artist, team, venue, etc, that you are looking for. StubHub provides seat maps for most of the venues they carry tickets for. StubHub handles the fulfillment for both the buyer and the seller via FedEx (making sure those tickets get there before the event to prevent spoilage), preserves the anonymity of the buyer and seller, guarantees the tickets and takes a healthy fee from both parties, for a total of 25% commission per ticket.

StubHub also had an insightful approach to build critical mass in their marketplace quickly. Early on, they partnered with several teams in each of the major sports leagues so the teams could offer their season ticket (or single event) holders a better way to sell off tickets they were not going to use. StubHub (and the teams they partnered with) recognized this as a win for everyone involved: fans who could not attend a game gained a safe and convenient way to sell their seats and recoup some of the cost of their season tickets, the team in some cases got a cut of the secondary sale, StubHub made money on the transaction, and, importantly, the venue would gain valuable revenues from concessions and memorabilia sales that would have otherwise been lost. And there were the less quantifiable benefits associated with a more crowded venue: more fans meant more noise and cheering to build home field advantage, and the team certainly looked better on TV when there were fewer empty seats in the stands. The fact that the average transaction is worth hundreds of dollars also makes the secondary tickets marketplace very attractive when the revenue model is based on a percentage of the sale price.

StubHub’s strategy of partnering with teams coupled with heavy advertising on sports radio (which can be a very cost-efficient media buy) enabled StubHub to build inventory, traffic and transaction volume quickly. Eventually the site grew large enough that it no longer needed to partner with the sports teams to build inventory and transaction volume, and it started growing quite well organically as buyers and sellers of tickets recognized the superior experience that StubHub provided. The company grew quickly and is said to have sold over $400m worth of tickets in 2006, netting the company about $100m in revenue last year.

StubHub’s success can be attributed to the power of vertical specialization. While eBay may have a lock on generic merchandise auctions and Google may own generic web search, these markets are so vast that there are often extremely rich verticals that can be better served by specialization, be it shopping search, travel search, ticket auctions, or other as-yet-unidentified verticals. When vertical specialization offers a sufficiently more compelling experience than the generic approach, real value can be built. The trick is figuring out which verticals are ripe for this type of mining. Clearly StubHub found a rich vein to mine.

While eBay also does a decent volume of ticket sales on their own site, in spite of the inferior experience their generic auctions provide, eBay smartly recognized that StubHub was the market leader with a congruous business model and a better user experience, and it was a natural (and smart) decision to buy StubHub.

Congrats to Jeff, Eric and the entire team at StubHub. Your success is richly deserved.

Technorati Tags: eBay, StubHub

This news is a bit stale, but I’ve not been posting to my blog over the holidays. I’m waiting for snow tires to be put on my car (about time given the two blizzards that have hit Colorado in the last few weeks) so I had some time to kill. Time for a blog post.

Both Technorati and Sling Media (makers of the Slingbox, which is allowing me to watch Jon Stewart while I write this) have been named 2007 Technology Pioneers by the World Economic Forum. The complete list can be found here. I’m on the board of two of the 47 companies selected, so I’m expecting my all-expense-paid invitation any day now. 😉

Congrats to Technorati and Sling Media!

Technorati Tags: Slingbox, Technorati, Sling Media