This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 2, 2007. As in previous weeks, we’ve been working on projects not yet ready for public announcement; also I lost a lot of time dealing with medical issues and system problems. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 26. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures I published a blog post on Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures for 2006. Legal/IP issues I’m still waiting on more feedback on the proposed corporate contributors agreement. Other We posted the Mozilla Foundation 2006 Form 990 and 2006 consolidated financial statement to www.mozilla.org along with an accompanying FAQ, as noted in Mitchell’s blog post. I attended FSOSS 2007 and met with representatives from various Mozilla Foundation grantees, including Seneca College and the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto. (I’ll blog more about this soon.) Upcoming activities I’m not planning any out-of-town trips in the near future. ...

As noted in a blog post by Mitchell Baker, yesterday we posted various 2006 financial documents for the Mozilla Foundation, including our 2006 Form 990, a 2006 consolidated financial statement for the Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, and a FAQ on 2006 finances. The 2006 financial FAQ in particular contains some figures on Mozilla Foundation grants and related expenditures for 2006. In this post I wanted to describe in a bit more detail what activities the Mozilla Foundation funded in 2006. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 19. I spent almost all of my time working on internal projects and projects not yet ready for public announcement; some of these will be announced soon. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 12. Last week we had a Foundation board meeting, and we’re working on some internal (for now) initiatives coming out of that. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 5. As with last week, I spent a lot of the week preparing for an upcoming board meeting and working on other internal projects; some of these will be announced in due time. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. ...

As noted by Digital Audio Insider, lots of economists seem to think that what Radiohead is doing is analogous to working for tips; Bob Lefsetz thinks so too. Folks, let me ask you something: When you last went out to dinner, did your waiter or waitress ask for your name, email address, postal address, telephone numbers, and for permission to contact you with information about other services they could provide to you? And will they use this information to create a customer database to do targeted direct marketing to you and all the other people they’ve served, using the amounts of your tips to tailor their marketing appropriately? I’m guessing that they didn’t and they won’t. ...

Now that the hubbub about Radiohead’s new release has died down, there are a couple of things worth adding to the analysis from various sources I’ve read, including Hypebot, Bob Lefsetz, Digital Music News, and Contentinople. (I haven’t of course read every commentary on Radiohead, so it’s possible that someone has said these things before me and better than me—I don’t do this for a living, you know.) First, I think people are missing a crucial point about Radiohead’s “name your own price” strategy. It is not all about giving listeners what they want, namely DRM-free music that’s free (or nearly so); it is also about giving Radiohead something it apparently wants (and that it could not get working through a major label): deep information about its listener population beyond the hard-core fans (i.e., those who’ve already joined the Radiohead fan club), including in particular information about which listeners are good candidates for up-selling strategies aimed to move more Radiohead merchandise, tickets, and other Radiohead-related products and services. ...

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending September 28. I spent a lot of the week preparing for an upcoming board meeting and working on other internal projects; some of these will be announced in due time. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. ...

Now that Amazon has opened a beta version of its MP3 store and everybody else has commented on it (see for example Hypebot’s roundup, as well as good takes from Duke Listens! and Digital Audio Insider) I wanted to revisit my earlier Amazon predictions. So without further ado here’s the scorecard: I predicted variable single track pricing from 60-75 cents for back catalog material, $1 for most material, and $2-3 for hot singles. Amazon instead seems to have opted for a standard price of $0.89, slightly undercutting the iTunes Store price for DRM-protected tracks, and significantly less than the iTunes Store price for DRM-free tracks. I predicted use of a single DRM-free format, namely MP3 at some high bit rate. This was an easy prediction, and I don’t deserve any credit for making it. I predicted that Amazon would offer variable pricing on digital albums, with album prices ranging from $2-3 at the low end to $10 at the high end, with the eventual maximum being in the $5-7 range. Amazon in fact is offering a limited form of variable pricing on digital albums, with most albums being $8.99 (again, slightly undercutting the iTunes Store) but some albums priced under $5. Note that these are true albums, not EPs; for example, Joanna Newsom’s Ys (only five songs, but they’re long ones) is sold for $9.99 at the iTunes Store but is only $4.95 at Amazon MP3. A less extreme example is the Decemberists’ The Crane Wife, a 12-song album that’s $9.99 at the iTunes Store but only $7.99 at Amazon MP3. I also predicted that Amazon would offer a discount on the digital album for people buying the corresponding CDs. This is not the case: If you want both the CD and the digital album you have to buy both separately at the standard prices. As I noted in my post offering such discounts on a regular basis would likely require changes to standard music licensing schemes, so their absence is not surprising. I predicted that Amazon would offer a sort-of-subscription plan with discounts (and/or free tracks) to people willing to commit to volume purchases. This is not part of the initial Amazon offering; Amazon has never offered this for books (to my knowledge), so it’s possible it may never be offered for digital music either. (Amazon does offer “club prices” for members of the CDNow Preferred Buyer’s Club. As I understand it, this is a function of Amazon’s having taken over operation of CDNow’s store, not an Amazon-native program.) Finally, I predicted that Amazon would leverage its existing technologies to provide two value-added services: backing up music libraries using Amazon S3, and personalized music recommendations using the Mechanical Turk service. Nothing like this is part of the initial MP3 store; in fact, Duke Listens! points out that Amazon currently doesn’t do a very good job of recommending new or future MP3 releases that might be of interest. Overall I’m a pretty poor predictor, although in my defense I was deliberately trying to be over the top a bit in terms of suggesting things Amazon might do to differentiate itself from existing services. ...