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

Took this shot on my trusty iPhone at the SF Moma last week during a break from the Web 2.0 Summit.  If one Ryan is good, an infinite number of Ryans must be better…

Technorati Tags: iPhone, SFMoma, Web2Summit

Well, not really, but today’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg, were each honored for their independent discoveries of Giant Magnetoresistance, or GMR in 1988. The stunning growth in storage density in magnetic media was enabled in large part by the introduction of hard drives heads that employed GMR, and most hard drives on the market today are GMR-based. For many years, the growth in magnetic data storage density matched the growth in transistors-on-a-chip density (aka Moore’s Law), roughly a 36% compound annual growth rate.

But then in the mid-1990’s magnetic storage density growth rates accelerated to a whopping 80%-100% annual growth rate, trouncing the semiconductor industry’s achievements. Much of this is a result of disk drive manufacturers commercializing read/write technology that took advantage of the GMR effect, with the first GMR-based read head introduced into the market around 1997. In many ways, the quantum mechanical effect of GMR observed in the thin-film structures of alternating ferromagnetic and non-magnetic metal layers, only a nanometer or two thick, represent an early real-world application of nanotechnology, well before the term had even been popularized.

Thanks in part to the pioneering work of these two men, the exponential growth rates we’ve all come to expect from computing hardware continue unabated. Let’s put this in concrete terms: I bought the first 5GB iPod when it was introduced to the market in October 2001. Less than six years later in September 2007, Apple introduced the 160GB iPod Classic, a 32x capacity increase over the original, a doubling in density every 14 months. Take that Gordon!

Technorati Tags: GMR, Hard Drives, Moore’s Law, Nanotechnology, Nobel, Storage

At the Postini/Google closing dinner last Wednesday night, Postini investor David Cowan gave a toast. In Limerick. Here it is in all its glory. Thanks for the laughs, David!

Technorati Tags: Google, Postini, Limerick, Toast