Posts

I recently read Seth Godin’s book Small is the New Big—basically a collection of his blog posts published on dead trees. (I checked it out from the library, saving both my pocketbook and the environment.) One of the posts I found interesting highlighted the concept of the “free prize,” i.e., that little something extra you get from certain products and services: The Free Prize is the experience of service at the Ritz Carlton, when what you paid for was a good night’s sleep. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 23, 2007. 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 working with Aaron Leventhal to prepare an overall plan for Mozilla-related accessibility work in 2007 and 2008. Regardless of how this plan gets funded (and some work may not get funded at all), I think this will be a useful exercise to pull together all of the accessibility-related Mozilla activities into one vision and connect them with the wider world of open source accessibility. ...

As chance would have it, I was inspired recently to try to start blogging again about eMusic, after a few months during which I was busy with other things and just didn’t feel the urge to expound on things eMusic-related. Appropriately enough, this post is about how eMusic can bring a little excitement back into our relationship. As a download (as opposed to streaming) subscription service eMusic relies on the fact that a lot of subscribers aren’t necessarily that active in using the service: They don’t use their full download quotas, which raises eMusic’s revenue and profit per track and in essence subsidizes eMusic’s low prices for everyone else. At the extreme end of the spectrum eMusic no doubt has subscribers who (for whatever reason) don’t download anything at all, but just let eMusic continue to bill their credit card. Wouldn’t it be great for eMusic’s business model if everyone did that? ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 16, 2007. 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. This was a big week for Mozilla Foundation-funded projects. Charles Chen finished up his project to create test cases for WAI ARIA live regions; this work promises to help advance the cause of enhancing accessibility for web-based applications that make heavy use of dynamic updating, and is receiving some good feedback. Shortly thereafter Alexander Surkov finished his project to improve XForms accessibility, and we approved a new project in which he’ll work on implementing the IAccessible2 accessibility API for Windows in Mozilla code. IAccessible2 is an extremely strategic technology from the point of view of accessibility; for a more in-depth discussion see the newsgroup message by Aaron Leventhal and blog posts by Rich Schwerdtfeger of IBM and Peter Korn of Sun. We also approved another project for Gijs Kruitbosch to improve the accessibility of the ChatZilla IRC client; this is important for present and future Mozilla developers who use screen readers and other assistive technologies and who want to participate more fully in developer discussions. Finally, in non-accessibility news Henri Sivonen will be presenting at XTech 2007 on his Mozilla Foundation-funded work to create an HTML5 conformance checker. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 9, 2007. 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. Same as last week: I worked on grant proposals already received, and also prepared for our Mozilla Foundation presence at the 2007 CSUN conference. Next action(s): Have the board consider a new accessibility-related grant proposal. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 2, 2007. 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. Same as last week: I worked on grant proposals already received, and also prepared for our Mozilla Foundation presence at the 2007 CSUN conference. Also, Alexander Surkov is close to finishing up his Mozilla Foundation-funded work on XForms accessibility. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending January 26, 2007. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did these past two weeks: Grants and related activities. I worked on grant proposals already received, and also prepared for our Mozilla Foundation presence at the 2007 CSUN conference. Next action(s): One more grant proposal to consider, plus follow-up on stuff we’ve already funded. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending January 19, 2007. Note that this was an abbreviated week because I had to take some vacation time to handle matters related to our new house. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did these past two weeks: Grants and related activities. I worked on paperwork related to the grants I mentioned last week. I also got one more accessibility-related grant proposal to consider, and started preparations for our Mozilla Foundation presence at the 2007 CSUN conference. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending January 12, 2007, as well as for the previous week ending January 5. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did these past two weeks: Grants and related activities. I’m pleased to announce that the Mozilla Foundation will be making a grant to the Adaptive Technology Resource Centre of the University of Toronto, to help support development of accessibility enhancements to the popular Dojo toolkit. ...

Due to the holiday season my activities have been relatively light. I’ve therefore skipped doing a separate report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending January 5, 2007; see the report for the week ending January 12, 2007.