When I last commented on the subject of Amazon.com and digital music I had some rather scathing things to say"). Now, according to a Hypebot article Amazon is rumored to be rethinking its former idea of setting up yet another DRM-hobbled would-be competitor to the iTunes Store, and considering selling DRM-free MP3 tracks under a variable pricing model. Assuming that the rumors are true (not always a safe assumption), what conclusions can we draw from this? ...
How come I didn’t know about this before? Jon Strunk, a product manager at eMusic, not only has a blog (is he the only person at eMusic with one?), he’s also been doing some interesting (albeit unofficial) projects mashing eMusic up with other music-related services. His latest post is on mashing up eMusic and Pandora and is well worth checking out; as you play tracks in Pandora it displays eMusic content related to the track and/or the artist, including a link to download the track if you’d like. (Based on the “Radio” listing in the mashup, a mashup of eMusic and Last.fm is also potentially in our future. I’m looking forward to it.) ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending December 15, 2006. As with last week, the report is very short because most of my time was taken up with internal matters. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Grants and related activities. I submitted one major accessibility proposal to the board for their consideration, plus some other smaller proposals in other areas. ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending December 8, 2006. The report is somewhat skimpy because most of my time was taken up with internal matters with the board and related items. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Grants and related activities. Henri Sivonen is making good progress on his Foundation-funded project to prototype an HTML5 conformance checker; to keep track of what he’s doing, check out the conformance checking category on the WHATWG blog. ...
One of the more interesting magazines I read regularly is the Stanford Social Innovation Review, dedicated to (in their words) “strategies, tools, and ideas for nonprofits, foundations, and social responsible businesses.” The Fall 2006 issue of SSIR had an article “The Other CSR” (also available in PDF format with the original figures) that I found quite relevant to Firefox and the work of the Mozilla project in general, and I thought it was worth discussing its key ideas and their implications. ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending December 1, 2006. This was another short week due to taking three days off for vacation. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Grants and related activities. I’m happy to announce that the Mozilla Foundation is making a grant to the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre at the University of Toronto to help improve Thunderbird accessibility. ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 24, 2006. This was a short week due to the Thanksgiving holiday. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Grants and related activities. Håkan Waara has been working on a Foundation-funded project to improve the accessibility of Firefox on Mac OS X. The work has been difficult because of underlying problems with Apple’s accessibility infrastructure on OS X, so the Foundation is funding an extension of Håkan’s work to allow him to make some more progress. For more information on the current state of the work see Håkan’s report. ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 17, 2006. Most of my time this week was spent at the Firefox summit and traveling back and forth to the meeting. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Firefox summit. I don’t have much to add to what others have written about the Firefox summit, two days of which I attended last week; it was great seeing people in person, especially for someone like myself who works remotely and doesn’t spend lots of time at Mozilla HQ. For more in-depth discussions of the summit, see the blog posts by Mitchell Baker, Chris Cooper, Alfred Peng (part 1, part 2, and part 3), J. Paul Reed, Robert Sayre, and Justin Scott (day 1, day 2, and days 3 and 4). ...
This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending November 10, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Tamarin project. This was the major event of the week (alluded to in last week’s report) and accounted for the bulk of time I spent on Foundation-related tasks. I did a Tamarin blog post, an Adobe-internal webcast for Adobe employees, lots of press interviews, and other writing and responses related to the announcement. ...
By now the press release has gone out announcing Adobe’s contribution to the Mozilla project of open source code for their ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), and Brendan has blogged about it. I’m not directly involved with the project itself but have spent a few days reviewing press materials and doing press interviews, so I’ve had a chance to think about the significance of this announcement and what it means for the Mozilla project and for the web at large. Here are some of my thoughts. ...