Due to lack of time and taking off for the Memorial Day holiday, I didn’t do a public status report for this week; see the next status report for the week ending June 1, 2007.

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 18, 2007. Most of the stuff I worked on is not yet ready for public announcement, hence the skimpiness of the report. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. I completed paperwork on a new accessibility-related proposal, and worked on paperwork for a grant proposal originally submitted for Summer of Code. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 11, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others did this past week: Grants and related activities. I worked on paperwork for a grant proposal originally submitted for Summer of Code. Charles Chen and Peter Theissen presented a paper “Ajax Live Regions: Chat as a Case Example” at the recent W4A conference featuring work funded by the Mozilla Foundation. ...

From time to time I like to highlight eMusic-related business deals. Here’s a new one (not mentioned on the eMusic press release page): eMusic will be the featured music provider for Jump Music, a new service from Alltel Wireless that lets cellular subscribers download music from their PCs to their mobile phones. Alltel is the fifth-largest wireless provider in the US, and is rumored to be an candidate for acquisition either by private equity firms or by Verizon. (Both Verizon and Alltel use CDMA technology.) Although Alltel claims to have the largest wireless network in the US (based on geographic extent presumably, not on total number of subscribers) it’s not that well known because its main markets are in the “flyover states.” ...

In part 2 of my series “Sympathy for the labels” (see also part 1) I discussed the concern of labels that selling through eMusic lowers overall profitability by diverting sales away from the iTunes Store and other higher-priced outlets. Note that I’m referring here to labels that are realizing at least some profit from eMusic sales. As I wrote in part 2, labels that are losing money on every track sold through eMusic, e.g., due to fixed per-track mechanical royalties, should not be selling through eMusic, period. However even if a label’s eMusic-related sales are profitable, the label might still have a legitimate concern about whether those sales are supplementing sales through other services, or displacing them. ...

In my previous post I discussed the difficulties that independent labels were having in adapting to the new landscape of the music business, and whether eMusic management was being sufficiently sensitive to that fact in their dealings with labels. Beyond the emotional aspects of the indie labels’ issues with eMusic and the music business in general, there are also some serious questions as to whether the current eMusic model is an overall plus or minus for labels. There seem to be three related but distinct concerns here: ...

I previously commented on the Billboard article about labels’ unhappiness with eMusic, although I got some of the facts of the article wrong—an obvious reminder that I need to sleep on eMusic news before writing about it. The article was the subject of much comment on the eMusic message boards, to which I contributed in a small way. Having had some time to think since then, I’m ready now to expand my comments. ...

David Pakman (CEO of eMusic—but you already knew that, right?) has traditionally confined his public comments to press interviews. However in the wake of reports about some labels being dissatisfied with eMusic, Pakman has chosen to bypass the press and take his case directly to eMusic customers using 17 dots, eMusic’s official unofficial blog. His points are pretty much what you’d expect: customers don’t want DRM, they do want music to be less expensive, and the music industry needs to recognize these facts and adapt to them. I’ve previously commented on these points, and will do so again, but I thought for this post it’s more interesting to look at the why of Pakman’s post as opposed to the what. ...

This is my report on my activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending May 4, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I did this past week: Grants and related activities. I completed paperwork on two more accessibility-related proposals. Next action(s): Finish paperwork on the grant proposals resulting from the Summer of Code submissions for which we didn’t have slots. Do a blog post summarizing our accessibility-related efforts, as well as a brief meeting report on CSUN and G3ICT. ...

I don’t normally do breaking news, because frankly I’m just too busy to keep track of what’s happening every day in the music business. However I’ll make an exception just this once given its potential importance: Billboard (in a story picked up by the Washington Post) is reporting that three out of eMusic’s top six 60 labels are considering pulling out of the service either wholly or partially (i.e., not offering newer releases). According to eMusic’s label page, the top six labels by downloads are Merge, Naxos, Matador, KOCH, Anti, and Fat Possum. Given its focus on low-cost offerings I think we can conclude that Naxos will not be among the defectors. Also, it’s possible that Fat Possum will be one of the defectors, since otherwise the story would have read “three out of the top N” where N was some number other than six. Hypebot previously named KOCH as being unhappy, so it may be a second defector. I don’t have time now to speculate which of Merge, Matador, or Anti might be the third. (OK, it’s clear now why I don’t do breaking news: because I can’t even read the breaking news articles, and make stupid mistakes like mistaking 6 for 60.) ...