This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 20, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Board meeting. A big chunk of my time last week was spent preparing for and following up from a Mozilla Foundation board meeting. Next action(s): More follow-up from the board meeting. IP-related issues. I did some work for Daniel Glazman relating to finding an official name for his new HTML/XML editing application (which he refers to as “Composer” for now). ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 13, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: IP-related issues. I had some more discussions with folks about how to handle the SeaMonkey trademarks. Next action(s): More discussions about creating trademark policies for SeaMonkey, Sunbird, and other non-Corporation products. Grants and related activities. I attended the Mozilla accessibility summit in Cambridge MA to talk to the various people we’ve funded to do accessibility-related work, and get an update on accessibility-related development activities. It was a great event; for more information on what went on see Mark Pilgrim’s accessibility summit blog post. As noted in Mark’s post we also completed paperwork on funding XUL accessibility work by WebAIM; I’m glad that got done and we’re able to announce it to everyone. Finally, I’m happy to note that the Mozilla Foundation will be a sponsor of the W4A conference on accessibility next year. ...

By now many if not most of you reading this will have seen the news about the next version of Eudora being open source and based on Thunderbird’s technology. You may also seen some of the analysis of the announcement. I thought about writing up some analysis of my own, but rather than listen to me I think it’s better to let the Eudora developers speak for themselves. For my own part I’ll simply say that that’s it’s great to have the Eudora developers join the Mozilla community and the world of open source (in particular, I’m glad to see more developers with deep experience in the email space join the project), and I wish them the best of luck as they develop the next Eudora release.

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending October 6, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: IP-related issues. I did some trademark-related work for SeaMonkey, plus various other items. Next action(s): Look at creating trademark policies for SeaMonkey, Sunbird, and other non-Corporation products. Grants and related activities. I finished up paperwork for funding some more accessibility-related work, and will announce it soon. There’s also another grant proposal we’ve received for an unrelated area, plus we’ve gotten expressions of interest from a number of other organizations regarding applying for grants. ...

Here’s a weird one, perhaps even weirder than the eMusic deal with Westin Hotels: “Johnny Rockets Expands Music Initiative with Local Market Campaign.” For those who aren’t familiar with it, Johnny Rockets is a faux-retro hamburger chain, and now an eMusic business partner: Johnny Rockets will be expanding its branded music to bring the classic Johnny Rockets music experience to consumers and music fans in new ways. ...

My apologies for not posting in recent days; work has taken precedence. Here are two quick items to help fill the void for now: First, Pioneers of the Inevitable, the folks behind the open source media player Songbird, have just gotten $1M in venture funding. They’re also about to release version 0.2, but you knew that already, right? Second, since this is Swindleeeee!!!!! we have to have an eMusic tie-in, and fortunately Erik Staats came through for us, announcing his new eMusic extension for Songbird. The extension eliminates the most annoying (at least to me) feature of the eMusic web site, namely that listening to the 30-second track samples requires launching an external application (in my case iTunes for OS X). The extension still has a few rough spots (as noted in my posts to the eMusic message board thread linked to earlier), but it’s definitely full of promise. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending September 29, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: IP-related issues. I corresponded with Daniel Glazman about the naming of his proposed successor product to Mozilla Composer and Nvu, and agreed to help him with trademark-related issues as appropriate. I also got some paperwork completed relating to the trademark application for the SeaMonkey logo, and will be proceeding with that. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending September 22, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Grants and related topics. I concluded arrangements for a Foundation grant to Seneca College (of Toronto Canada) to support their Mozilla-related activities; you can read more about these activities on David Humphrey’s blog. Next action(s): Sort out administrative arrangements for one more project we’re planning to fund. ...

Harald Walker wrote me to note that eMusic seems to have changed its past policies regarding how it treats departing subscribers: Maybe something new from eMusic. As far as I know it has been possible in the past to stop the paid subscription for a while and activate it many months later without loosing your account data, which is important if you have to download tracks again (if eMusic still has them) and if you want to keep your lists. . . . ...

Yesterday I happened to read a blog post from Paul Kedrovsky containing some sage advice for companies competing in new markets: “declare victory early and often.” To quote him: Many markets are tippy—they want there to be a market leader—so you can self-servingly help things along by declaring your firm to be the chosen one. It strikes me that that is what eMusic has been trying to do, and with some success. Of course eMusic can’t declare itself to be the overall market leader in digital music—that title being reserved for Apple—but what eMusic has done is to unilaterally declare itself to be “the world’s largest digital retailer of independent music” and (more important) number two behind Apple in the overall digital music market, outpacing Napster, Rhapsody, and the rest. Some interesting points about this strategy: ...