My apologies for not passing this on earlier: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain, is organizing a three-month course on Mozilla technologies in cooperation with the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Europe. The course is almost completely on-line, but it includes a one-week face-to-face “sprint” session in Madrid in July; students are welcome to apply for financial help with travel costs for the Madrid portion of the course. The course is open to international students and will be taught in English. You can find further information—including a course outline, important dates, FAQ, and a forum—at mozilla.libresoft.es. The deadline for applications has been extended to June 20, so get your applications in soon! ...

For today’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call at 11 am EDT / 8 am PDT / 1500 UTC we’ll be talking about a proposed multi-disciplinary multi-school “meta-project” to move the Processing programming language to the open web. (Processing is currently Java-based, though there is a JavaScript port in progress). I’ll also be glad to answer any questions people might have about the SoftHum workshop that I attended last week and blogged about.

I was at Drexel University in Philadelphia last Thursday and Friday participating in the SoftHum Workshop on Involving Students in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Projects (to use its official name). I was there representing Mozilla, and in particular to talk about our Mozilla Education initiative; I was one of the folks invited to provide the open source project perspective, along with Greg Dekoenigsberg of Red Hat and the Fedora Project and Darius Jazayeri of the OpenMRS project. ...

Mary Colvig mentioned this on the Monday Mozilla call, and I wanted to follow up with more information. Briefly, the Mozilla Foundation is one of the sponsors of the Personal Democracy Forum conference to be held June 29-30 in New York City. To quote from the conference blurb: More than 1,000 top opinion makers, political practitioners, technologists and journalists will come together to network, exchange ideas, and explore how technology and the Internet are changing politics, democracy, and society. ...

In my previous post I lamented the demise of eMusic as I’ve known it, and in preparation for the future discussed my “jobs to be done” related to discovering and listening to music: Casual listening to familiar music at my computer. Casual listening to familiar music when I’m offline. More focused listening to a) familiar and b) less familiar music while driving. Auditioning music for inclusion in my core collection. Here’s how my jobs to be done match up with various digital music products and services being offered today: ...

In less than a month my grandfathered eMusic Basic 2-year plan (40 tracks per month at a cost of $7.49 per month or $0.19 per track) will end, and I’ll face a choice of what to do next. eMusic’s suggestion is that I go for a eMusic Plus Annual plan: 35 tracks per month at a cost of about $14.33 per month or $0.41 per track. However rather than simply going along with an almost doubling in cost of my music buying habit, I’ve decided to rethink how I actually discover and listen to music, and look at additional possibilities beyond eMusic (or to supplement eMusic) that might serve me better at a comparable cost to what I’ve been paying. This also leads to some thoughts on how eMusic could become a better service from my point of view or, alternatively, how a new service could replace eMusic in my affections. ...

Most of the press coverage of the eMusic/Sony agreement has been either regurgitated press releases and echoes of the original New York Times story, or stories about the backlash from eMusic subscribers. I have a standing Google search for “eMusic” and see tons of this stuff. However there is actual smart analysis being done out there, and here are two examples. As seems to be typical nowadays, these are not from traditional media or business journalists but from a blogger turned pro and a musician who blogs. ...

As is amply clear from recent postings on the eMusic message boards and comments on 17 Dots, eMusic pretty much made a hash of its announcement of the Sony agreement, angering current subscribers not just about the accompanying price increases but also the way in which eMusic CEO Danny Stein’s 17 Dots blog post addressed—or rather, didn’t address—those increases. While I’m quite unhappy about my personal eMusic habit more than doubling in price, I can also see the economic justifications for why eMusic did what it did. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to create a fictional letter to subscribers that Danny Stein might have written in some alternative universe. ...

Well, I significantly underestimated how far eMusic was willing to go in terms of changing its pricing to attract major label content. My personal guess was that Sony demanded a minimum price of at least $0.30 per track, but based on the new US pricing it appears that the new floor is actually $0.40 per track. More specifically, the plan changes are as follows: The eMusic Basic plan is still $11.99 per month, but has been reduced to 24 downloads ($0.50 per song) from the previous 30 downloads ($0.40 per song), or a 25% per-track price increase. The eMusic Plus plan is now 35 downloads for $15.89 per month ($0.45 per song) vs. $14.99 per month for 50 downloads ($0.30 per song) under the previous plan, or a 50% per-track price increase. The eMusic Premium plan is now 50 downloads for $20.79 per month ($0.42 per song) vs. $19.99 per month for 75 downloads ($0.27 per song) under the previous plan, or a 56% per-track price increase. The eMusic Connoisseur plan is now 75 downloads for $30.99 per month ($0.41 per song) or 100 downloads for $40.99 per month (also $0.41 per song) vs. 100 downloads for $24.99 per month ($0.25 per song) under the previous plan, or a 65% per-track price increase. Also, the new Connoisseur plans are available only as upgrades from another plan, and require a minimum 3-month commitment; previously the Connoisseur 100 plan was offered as an option at sign-up time, with no minimum commitment required. People with annual and 2-year plans will be moved to higher-priced plans when their old plans refresh. In my case the default choice offered is to move from my (grandfathered) Basic 2-year plan offering 40 downloads a month for $89.91 per year ($0.19 per song) to a standard Premium Annual plan offering 35 downloads a month for $171.99 per year ($0.41 per song), or a 119% per-track price increase. When downloading at least some complete albums with more than 12 tracks, only the first 12 downloads will be counted against the subscriber’s monthly quota. Booster pack downloads now range from $0.60 per track (when bought in packs of 5 or 10) to $0.50 per track for a pack of 50. I don’t have a complete record of the old pricing, but as far as I’m aware this is not a major change from previously. eMusic is offering a free one-time 15-track booster pack to subscribers who stay with eMusic past July. I’ll have more to say about the overall changes at eMusic in future posts, but for now I wanted to note a few additional points regarding the new pricing: ...

Danny Stein, eMusic’s new CEO, dropped some major news just now on eMusic’s semi-official 17 Dots blog. As reported in more detail in the New York Times, Sony Music Entertainment (home of Arista, Epic, Columbia, and RCA, among others) has decided to release its back-catalog material (anything over 2 years old) to eMusic—basically what eMusic management has apparently been urging them and other major labels to do for ages. (For example, David Pakman addressed this in several of his interviews.) ...