The fine folks at Speakeasy Ales & Lagers are celebrating their tenth anniversary and are having a shindig to celebrate.  Since I’m in Boulder this weekend, I won’t be able to make the party, but wanted to encourage folks in the Bay Area to attend.  Speakeasy was the first angel investment I ever made, and I celebrated my 30th birthday at the brewery, so Forest and the rest of the crew over at Speakeasy have a special place in my heart.  Go try their new White Lightening Wheat Beer and my all-time-favorite IPA, Big Daddy.  They’ve been steadily expanding their distribution throughout the country over the years and I’m looking forward to a reliable supply of their fine brews popping up in Boulder in the near future.  Congrats to Forest and the rest of the Speakeasy crew on ten great years of beer in San Francisco!

Technorati Tags: Beer, Speakeasy

I thought I’d add a few more thoughts to round out my previous review of the iPhone. First, noting Sam’s comments about Apple wanting to go to market with broad coverage worldwide, I’ll agree that the GSM choice made sense, especially given availability of 3G GSM across the pond, though my American provincialism still requires me to complain and pine for EVDO here in the USA — even if Verizon refused to do a deal with Apple in the first place, as is rumored.

And I’ve discovered two more things to complain about. I’ve noticed audio distortion/clipping during music playback when the EQ is set to boost the bass response, which is not something I’ve observed in any of the other iPods I’ve owned. Second, for some reason, my iPhone seems to cause more speakerphone/polycom buzz than any other smartphone. My last phone was a T-Mobile Dash and before that a Sidekick, and they caused the buzz if they were within about two feet of my Cisco phone. My iPhone causes buzzing as far away as five feet from the phone.

Has anyone else had audio distortion issues or noticed a greater level of RF interference coming from their iPhone vs. other phones?

Technorati Tags: Apple, Audio, iPhone

As David Cowan has noted, complete with an audio sample, we’ve all heard that annoying buzz on our conference room Polycoms caused by interference from nearby cell phones and PDAs (to be fair, the problem happens on my Cisco IP phone too), and as phone-in attendees, we’ve all had to ask the people actually in the room with the Polycom to move their Blackberries and other smartphones away from the Polycom in a (sometimes futile) effort to squelch the buzzing.

Akustica co-founder and CTO Ken Gabriel tells me that this buzzing comes in through the input/mic channel. And this is because most microphones in the world are analog devices that are subject to RF and EM interference, whose design has gone largely unchanged since they were invented in the late 19th century. Since last year, Akustica has been shipping the world’s only single-chip digital microphone in volume to many of the major PC laptop manufacturers. Because these digital mics output a digital signal, they are not subject to this interference. Drop an Akustica digital mic in a Polycom and the buzzing would go away. Time for Cisco and Polycom to update their speakerphone designs to accommodate digital output microphones in their mic channels…

As a side note, I tried to come up with a catchy name for the polycom buzz phenomenon, but failed. Polybuzz doesn’t quite work for me. Any suggestions?

Technorati Tags: Akustica, Analog, Audio, Blackberry, Buzz, Digital, Polycom