Last week I attended the annual NVCA conference, held this year in Boston. Boston obliged with some lovely springtime weather and, most importantly, Boston provided a once-in-my-lifetime musical event, in the form of the second-to-last show in the world tour of Chick Corea and John McLaughlin‘s Five Peace Band. My partner (and Soul Patch band-mate) Jason, who just joined the board of the NVCA (congrats!) noticed the tour, but we were both out of town when it came through Colorado. Luckily, he realized they were playing at the Berklee Performance Center on the final evening of the NVCA conference last week.

Thanks to the magic of StubHub (and our good fortune that we can both be relatively price-insensitive), we managed to score third-row center tickets to see an historic show. The last time Chick Corea and John McLaughlin played together was 40 years ago at the sessions for Miles Davis’ seminal jazz fusion albums Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way. IASW is easily one of my favorite albums of all time. And Chick Corea’s song Spain contains one of my all-time favorite chord progressions, one that still inspires and vexes me whenever I try to solo over it.

I’ve had the good fortune to see Chick Corea play once (in Berlin in 1992 with his Elektric Band) and I’ve seen John McLaughlin several times, once in a 1996 London date with fellow guitar virtuosos Paco de Lucía and Al Dimeola and once in California with tabla master Zakir Hussein. Needless to say, since I was born too late to see Chick and John play together back in the day, I was thrilled to discover they were touring and that I’d have an opportunity to see them.

The show did not disappoint. The rest of the band included Brian Blade on drums, Christian McBride on bass and Kenny Garrett on sax. I’ve seen Christian McBride play several times at SFJazz Fest dates with Joshua Redman and others, but only on upright bass. He played at least half this show on a fretless electric five string and I can say without hyperbole that he is quite likely the best bass player I’ve ever heard. And together with Brian Blade, they were an unstoppable force as a rhythm section. And Garret’s saxophone playing is truly stellar and he’s capable of being both incendiary and restrained.

Every single player in the band is a bona fide virtuoso and it was quite easily one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. A week later, I’m still blown away by what I heard. As a glowing review in the LA Times aptly put it, the band was led by and supported by “genius level musicians”.

A highlight of the show for me was Garrett’s solo in a new Corea composition entitled “Hymn to the Muse”. Finally, at the end of the evening during the encore, the band performed “In A Silent Way / It’s About That Time” in a way that was both faithful to the original performance of 40 years ago yet also incorporated evidence that modern jazz fusion has continued to evolve since Miles, Chick and John helped unleash it upon the world.

I feel incredibly fortunate that I was able to see this show, and it easily earned a spot in my top five shows of all time. Wow. As Zappa said, “music is the best”.

As many of my readers know, I’ve got a small record label, in partnership with my band-mates from Soul Patch. The genesis of Toothless Monkey Music (the name is another story entirely) starts when I set up my first “real” recording studio in a sound-proofed, detached two-car garage at my former home in Portola Valley, CA. It is on an idyllic creek-side spot, and many of the albums on the label were recorded and mixed in that studio.

One day, back around 1999 or 2000, when the studio was not-quite-fully operation, some friends dropped by, and a phenomenal luthier from the Santa Cruz area named Fred Carlson was with them. Fred builds some amazing instruments, starting with guitars, but ending with sympitars, harp guitars and other one-of-a-kind works that defy categorization. Check out his site at Beyond the Trees.

Anyway, Fred sat down and performed a song, which I am assuming is called Rattlesnake, but I don’t know for sure. We had one microphone set up hanging above him that captured the performance. My band-mate Nick Peters dug it up from his archives, and I did a little bit of mastering to add some stereo imaging, some gain and to bring out the vocals a bit, since the original recording wasn’t as good as it could have been — the performance was great, but I was a very green audio engineer at the time. It is a fun, quirky song, and well worth a listen. Enjoy!

A tip of the hat to my friend Dennise for sending this one to me, and another tip of the hat to the folks at Topatoco.com who created this fine technology / science cheat sheet, which would be quite useful in rebuilding modern science and technology if one were suddenly thrown back in time or we all wind up back in the stone age through pure human folly, something I place higher odds on these days…

My partners and I at Foundry Group have been involved with Eric Norlin for the past few years, and he has put on two great Defrag Conferences in Denver over the past two years (the inspiration for which came out of our work on our Implicit Web investment theme), and now we’ve decided to add another one to the mix: The Glue Conference, which will be held on May 12th and 13th in Denver.

The idea for the Glue Conference came out of our work at Foundry Group on our Glue investment theme and brainstorming with Eric about how we could take the basic notion of the web as a platform and dig in at a fairly technical level into the problems, challenges and opportunities that arise when one assumes the web and the cloud as a given and as the fundamental platform going forward.

Glue’s got a great agenda, including keynotes from the likes of Mitch Kapor (Lotus founder), Bob Frankston (VisiCalc creator) and Josh Elman (Facebook platform).

And, as far as conferences go, it is a bargain, only $495 for two days, so go ahead and register here. The Foundry Group partners will be out in force, and Seth and Brad (and I’m sure Jason and I will join in the fun at some point) will even be sitting down to listen to pitches from entrepreneurs during the conference.

Today Netflix announced that they delivered their two billionth DVD, an impressive milestone. This brought to mind something we learned in the early days of Excite, which was to never underestimate the bandwidth of physical storage media sent via UPS, the USPS or FedEx. When we opened our second datacenter circa 1996 (on the east coast in one of AOL’s datacenters) we quickly found out that it was faster, cheaper and more reliable to simply FedEx overnight an archived backup tape copy of our search index to the east coast mirror site than to transfer the files over the internet.

I’ve always thought that Netflix’s business was a brilliant bet that the bandwidth and quality of a rental experience powered by DVDs sent via USPS was going to be cheaper and exceed the capabilities of on-demand via the internet for much longer than people were expecting, and of course this turned out to be true. And now that internet tech is finally catching up to the low tech method of shipping atoms full of bits around the country, I think Netflix has done a brilliant job with their internet strategy and distribution partnerships, which should enable a graceful (and still longer-term than people expect) transition from postal delivery to internet delivery.

So when I saw the announcement of the two billionth DVD delivered, I decided to do a quick and dirty back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much data Netflix has delivered to customers in the roughly 10 years since their subscription service launched. (Apologies in advance to all the sticklers out there who might point out the imprecision of this calculation since I’m using factors of 1,000 instead of 1,024 to measure my gigabytes and petabytes.) Here goes:

A DVD has a max capacity of 4.7 gigabytes. Since Netflix also ships TV shows and the like, which don’t fill a DVD to capacity, let’s assume that the average DVD contains 4 GB of data. So, that means they’ve delivered eight billion gigabytes, or eight million terabytes, or eight thousand petabytes, which boils down to an average of 800 petabytes per year over a ten year period. Multiply that by 8 bits per byte and divide by 31,536,000 seconds per year, and you get 202,942,669,000 bits per second, or a sustained ten-year average bandwidth of 200 gigabits per second.

Of course, that’s an average spread evenly over 10 years, and today’s outgoing bandwidth from Netflix via the USPS is many times higher, given the ramp from zero DVDs shipped in the early years and given the fact that Netflix is now shipping Bluray discs, which hold 50GB vs. the 4.7GB on a traditional DVD. And, finally, given they are actually delivering movies via the net, they are now using actual net bandwidth instead of theoretically derived, USPS-enabled bandwidth, though I’m sure their actual bandwidth consumption is still dwarfed by the discs in the mail.

But still, I was surprised by the 200 Gbps number and had to check my calculations a few times to make sure I was right. And it is conceivable that that means that their theoretical bandwidth today could be in the terabit per second range. Golly.

So, the best corporate April Fool’s joke I’ve seen today comes from Antares Audio Technologies, makers of the ubiquitous Auto-Tune pitch correcting audio plugin, which is used extensively throughout the recording industry, though some producers and vocalists will deny it. There’s a great article in the New Yorker about the impact Auto-Tune has had on popular music.

Today they announced the upcoming release of Direct Mind Access (DMA) Composition Technology, a faux product that claims to enable composers to “think” their compositions directly into a computer, provided they’ve undergone the requisite cranial implantation of the iLobe USB device.

I’m amused that this is the second fake mind-reading device I’ve encountered in as many days (see my post from this morning for details on the other one). I’m also amused because while these two products are spoofs, there’s clearly a meme around mind-machine interfaces picking up steam out there, which fits quite nicely into Foundry Group’s HCI theme, and is likely influenced by the fact that there are real companies in the market today (including companies like Emotiv, NeuroSky and Foundry Group portfolio company EmSense) building real technology and real products based on EEG technology.

I’ve written in the past about our Human Computer Interaction (HCI) investment theme at Foundry Group and have mentioned our portfolio companies that fit into that theme: EmSense, Oblong and Smith & Tinker.

Well, pictured above is a delightful faux-advertisement I discovered via Thomas Dolby’s blog. I had the pleasure of meeting Thomas years ago (back in the Beatnik era) and then again around 2006 when he returned to the music world, and spent some time rehearsing for his tour at my friend Heidi Roizen’s place in Atherton. Thomas started blogging a while ago and I’ve been following it with great interest since. He’s moved back to the UK and has been working on a new album, which I can’t wait to hear. He is recording in a studio he built into an old retired boat that is sitting on his property that has a view of the sea, which seems to me a brilliant and delightfully wacky enterprise, and strikes me as a quintessentially English sort of thing to do.

Anyway, this ad was created by the folks at Status Graphite guitars, and it seemed to fit into my fascination with all things related to HCI, even if it is, sadly, not yet a real piece of gear. It is now on my fantasy product wish list.

I’ve been playing around with the face recognition feature in the newest version of iPhoto, and I’m pretty impressed with how well it works. And with how well it fails. I went through the process of confirming/teaching iPhoto to recognize me on photos where it had assigned a high probability that a photo was me, but needed my confirmation to be sure.

I know most face recognition systems start with identifying the size and shape of and spatial relationship among eyes, nose, mouth, etc. What I found to be interesting was the false positives the system delivered. When a picture it thought was me wasn’t me, probably 75% of the time it was an immediate family member: one of my parents, one of my brothers or my son. So clearly there is some amount of facial geometry that members of my biological family share. I wonder if other iPhoto users out there have noticed this? Hmm, maybe iPhoto could conceivably be used as a poor-man’s paternity test, or it might lead someone to discover they were adopted…

What was also interesting was that for the remaining false-positive identifications of me in my photo library, most of the rest were confined to four of my closest male friends: Sam Chambers, Scott Derringer, Martin Reinfried and Jason Mendelson. I’m not sure what to make of that. Are we friends because we look like one another in some subtle way that isn’t obvious to me? Or is it just statistically-likely noise since I have relatively more photos of them in my collection than other folks who appear from time to time?

Today, the Beastie Boys released the 20th anniversary remastered edition of one of their classic albums, Paul’s Boutique. And they released it direct-to-fan on their own website, using technology created by Foundry Group portfolio company Topspin Media.

Even better, in addition to making high quality mp3s available for download, the Beastie Boys are offering several different bundles of exclusive you-won’t-find-it-on-iTunes content and merchandise, including CDs and vinyl, posters, t-shirts, downloadable DVD-quality videos and lossless digital formats.

Topspin’s CEO Ian Rogers’ life has been intertwined with the Beastie Boys for decades, and he’s got a great story to share about how Paul’s Boutique literally changed the course of his life.

While I was in high school I was still busy listening to heavy metal (think Iron Maiden and Judas Priest), which became my gateway into Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and classic rock. So at the time, I wasn’t that hip to the Beastie Boys, other than knowing they were the crazy guys who sang “Fight for your Right to Party”.

Happily, my ears opened (way) up over the years, and I appreciate great music from a wide range of genres. I’m really digging re-familiarizing myself with Paul’s Boutique, as well as the Beastie Boys albums that really hooked me back in the day, The In Sound from Way Out and Hello Nasty. The track “Putting Shame in Your Game” on Hello Nasty contains one of my favorite lyrics of all time:

I am the king of boggle, there is none higher

I gets eleven points for the word ‘quagmire’

Perhaps this is because I’ve always been a word game nut and obsessively/automatically make anagrams of every word I see. Or because I once co-wrote a Boggle-solving program in LISP while in college. And now, in a case of life-comes-full-circle, I can get my word game fix playing Scramble on Foundry Group portfolio company Zynga’s Facebook app. Hmm, maybe the Beasties will challenge me to a game…

While normally I avoid participating in chain-letter type things, for some reason this one caught my imagination when it showed up in my Facebook news feed this morning. It is spreading like an extremely infectious disease on Facebook, and I’ve been amused and surprised about the things I’m learning about friends of mine, so I decided to be a vector in the epidemic. I’d also love to find out who patient zero is, though that might be hard to determine. Anyway, I published this on Facebook originally, but for those non-Facebook users among you, I am re-publishing it here on my blog.

1. I spent a summer working on an assembly line in Munich building 3-Series BMWs.
2. I have played guitar onstage at The Fillmore  in San Francisco and the Cabo Wabo in Cabo San Lucas.
3. My wife almost bailed on our first date after she found out I was taking the Concorde to London with a buddy – she thought it was a ridiculous expenditure. Luckily, I got to fly supersonic (while it was still possible on commercial airlines) AND marry her.
4. I was a slugger (batted clean-up) on my little league baseball team for several years running.
5. I was born in Wiesbaden, Germany.
6. One summer, I was a roadie for the Colorado Springs Symphony.
7. Years ago, I saved a Super Shuttle van full of people on the way to the airport (including myself) from rolling into the tracks of an oncoming SF Muni train.
8. I once served Rosa Parks dinner. Yes, that Rosa Parks.
9. A band I was in performed Stevie Wonder’s Superstition with Thomas Dolby sitting in on keyboards.
10. I think Golden Grahams is the best cereal ever. Even when those delectable grahams scratch the roof of my mouth.
11. If there’s a chocolate chip cookie within 5 feet of me, I will eat it, no matter what. This has become a problem as my metabolism has slowed with age.
12. I am by no means an athlete, but I’m a halfway decent skier and racquetball player.
13. I stole two Herman Miller office chairs from Oracle in 1993. Sorry Larry.
14. I played the trumpet for seven years.
15. I’ve only broken two bones in my life: my pinky (left hand) and my toe (right foot). Both stupidly.
16. I rear-ended two vehicles (one was parked, both while in the snow) within a few months of getting my driver’s license at age 16. Haven’t had an accident since.
17. I attended the 1995 New Year’s Eve Phish show at Madison Square Garden. At one point, the band began implanting a device in my brain in order to control me, which was very alarming, given I had previously thought they were a force for good. Or maybe it was the acid.
18. The last time I cared about professional sports was when the Redskins won the Superbowl back in the Joe Gibbs, Joe Theisman, Art Monk and John Riggins era.
19. I’ve won two things in my life in raffles/drawings: a stuffed animal named Filbert T. Squirrel from my savings and loan when I was eight years old and opened an account, and, two years ago, a Toshiba HD DVD player after visiting a booth at CES. I miss the squirrel.
20. I was once briefly engaged to another woman before meeting and marrying my wife (she called it off, I’m the lucky one).
21. The best song lyric I’ve yet written rhymes “Don Quixote” with “booty”.
22. The only time I was ever grounded was in seventh grade when I threw a water balloon at a passing delivery truck and it shattered the side view mirror. I fled from the scene and was later picked up by the police and had to be driven home though my neighborhood in the backseat of the cruiser. This happened while I was supposed to be babysitting my little brother.
23. I’ve never been in a fist-fight.
24. My favorite band of all time is Steely Dan.
25. I’ve probably seen Trading Places more times than any other movie, with the possible exception of the original version (the Gene Wilder one, not the Johnny Depp one) of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Go ahead, publish your own list too. You know you want to.