I feel like I tend to hear about new web services before most of the country. Somehow, Jajah has reached two million users without me hearing a peep out of them. Has anyone used Jajah? How do you compare it to Skype?

Apparently, one of the things Jajah enables: you provide it your phone number and someone else’s phone number and it rings you both, connecting the call. At the least, I like that innovation is occurring around all these phones we have. Being attached to a computer to make cheap calls is not pleasant. Or, is it a bad thing that innovation is occurring around what we know as a phone today, meaning that consumers will continue to be saddled with the cost of phone service when there are cheaper ways to communicate by voice? If anything, I think plays like Jajah, Jangl, and Grand Central will provide pressure on incumbents to innovate on service and reduce costs. As an aside, I think Grand Central has a great name for what it is, although I believe Minor used to use the name for a different business. Maybe it’s a good thing that business didn’t work out.

I’m fond of raw innovation (e.g. Skype), but I’m perhaps equally fond of innovation around existing infrastructure (e.g. Jajah). Jajah’s creative offering reminds me of another piece of genius underway in Texas: powering the city during the day with energy generated at night from wind and stored in a gigantic virtual car battery.

While we’re on the topic of innovation around what we know of as phones today, I’m a big fan of the service I receive from SunRocket. Better sound quality than Skype without the irritation of expiring credits. And, I can use any standard cordless phone with it. To top it off, an annual contract is not required and they offer a plan for $10/month ($20/month is too much to pay for a home phone when already paying a fortune for mobile phone service).  If you decide to sign up and give them my phone number, I think they’ll give you something extra in return.

The record labels have stooped to a new low. I know—hard to believe, but true, and it’s happening in our own backyard. And what’s more disturbing than the actions of the labels is the compliance of the UC school system—UC Berkeley in particular. Before I get too far ahead of myself, let me set the stage.

CD sales are down for the seventh consecutive year, inciting panic among industry giants. While still profitable, their once-healthy margins are eroding rapidly, as they haven’t taken the time to innovate around a new business model that would capitalize on digital music. Instead, they are clinging to a faulty DRM system amid recent counterstrikes such as Steve Jobs’ appeal to eliminate the faulty system, and fellow industry giant EMI’s alleged move to offer its collection DRM-free.

So what is their solution? “Let’s sue college kids, because once they realize the penalties of sharing our music illegally, they’ll be sure to buy CD’s again or pay $0.99 per song, right?” Now even though I wrote it, I’ll not dignify this rhetorical gem with a response.

Here’s where the real sordid details come in. How do the labels know how to find the students? Surely their identity is somehow masked behind the guarded cloak of their university. Alas, it seems your esteemed university, the bastion of ideals and convictions, has been caught in bed with the unsavory fat (albeit much slimmer now) cats of the music industry (unless you’re affiliated with the honorable University of Wisconsin, which has maintained its principles in rejecting the overtures of the labels).

Now I’m not advocating the illegal sharing of music, or the circumventing of DRM, or anything else against the law. I was just trying to put my finger on the real problem in the music industry (before I was sidetracked by the shameful matter of privacy and your university). If the recording industry wants to make money from digital music, they are going to have to figure out how to give it value. They need to stop trying to lock up the music and develop a way to give it value again. I challenge you all to think about how this can happen. Is it additional content from the artists that is tied in with a new type of player? Is it the ability to deconstruct a song the way Nine Inch Nails has allowed through GarageBand? Is it song quality (probably not)? Is it tied into video games?

Whatever it is, I’m confident that music fans are not going to flock back to CD stores and fork over cash for tracks just because a few of their friends are getting sued. In fact, they’re likely to rebel even harder in the future. There’s no question the generation of listeners out there today is many times over more innovative than the morons that pass for executives in an industry deteriorating before our very eyes.

Slashdot is reporting that the RIAA is going after a 10 year old girl in Oregon.  Okay, we get it, pirating music is illegal.  But a 10 year old girl?  Whose mom is disabled and living off social security?  Gimme a break.

I wonder if the RIAA recognizes how evil they seem.

There’s a fascinating article in the most recent East Bay Express about Johnny Shaw, a homeless Berkeleyan who has produced a film about the many interesting characters and life in general on Berkeley’s streets. Johnny lives in a carport, gets his meals free from a local church, and doesn’t usually have more than a few dollars on him at a time. However, using a digital camcorder and a laptop, which he acquired through some interesting means, he’s created a film that’s gotten distribution through local retail and indieflix.com. A variety of film festivals across the globe are also requesting his film. The meat of the story deals with how Johnny will wrestle with the undesirable notion of playing in the normal rules of film production, not because it’s a typical story of selling out, but because Johnny’s central theme and creative flow is a direct result of his situation.

Finally, a serious competitor to Google in the search market.  I mean, if you can’t win a prize while searching, what’s the point?  And from Kevin Federline!
http://searchwithkevin.prodege.org/ 

(PS The site is powered by Yahoo)

Seriously? Well according to reports that came out of last month’s 3GSM World Congress, Sundance and gang reached out to several filmmakers to produce 5 short films (one of which is helmed by the directorial talent of Little Miss Sunshine) specifically for the mobile screen. The films were shown at the World Congress on both normal projectors and various mobile devices and utilize frequent close-up shots and different lighting effects to make films viewable on such a small screen.

Given India’s 900 billion person population, a fast growing mobile device market, and a film industry that somehow releases a gajillion movies with the same nine actors every year, Bollywood is planning to distribute its world famous genre of cinema to the mobile platform. Now I’m not sure how many of you have seen Bollywood flicks (my guess is three, Tony C loves him some Rani Mukherjee), but over its 9 hour runtime, a flick will showcase roughly 300 dance sequences that feature no less than 42,000 actors draped in colorful and sparkling attire while unloading massive amount of funk to an elaborately choreographed dance sequence with fireworks, shooting stars, rainbows, and elephants to boot. Oh and it somehow rains when it’s really sunny outside. Weird. Anyway, how Bollywood directors plan to show these films on your mobile device without it literally exploding boggles my mind.

Oh and Hungama Mobile and Roamware are the biggest players in the mobile Bollywood scene right now.

…brought to you by the geniuses at The Daily Show. I’d rather post the link to this clip on YouTube (you’ll see why) but since Jon & Co. are under the Viacom umbrella, I figured the clip will be deleted soon. That and because I fear the wily band of ninjas that Viacom might send after me.

In a completely surprising story, windows has been reported as being the most secure operating system over the last six months. The important metrics include:

• Windows had 39 vulnerabilities (12 ranked high priority) and MS took an average of 21 days to fix them
• Linux had 208 vulnerabilities, taking an average of 58 days to fix them
• Mac OS X had 43 vulnerabilities (1 ranked high priority), taking 66 days to fix them

The only bright spot for Apple is that they only had 1 high priority vulnerability, compared to 12 for Windows. I attribute that to Windows living at work, where there is valuable information. Mac OS X users, most of whom are at home don’t have nearly as much to protect. I have a feeling most hackers aren’t interested in getting access to and corrupting home movies and DRM’d music collections.

On the other hand, the 1 lone high priority security vulnerability might be the reason that Apple took so long to patch its OS vulnerabilities. Whatever the reason, Apple is touting its security as a competitive advantage, and they better deliver on this over Microsoft, else they could be kissing their status as “darling” goodbye.

I was at the Video on the Net conference today in San Jose, and by far the best comment of the day was made from the audience. It was during a panel on monetizing video, but in reaction to a previous panel that focused on the partnership between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

The Hollywood/Silicon Valley panel went over and over again about digital rights and content clearance: the same talk we’ve heard from Hollywood for years. While the panelists were clearly in favor of greater distribution for digital video, and recognized the huge growth potential, they couldn’t get away from the typical Hollywood “this is a threat” culture they have been steeped in. It’s all about protect and defend, not nurture and grow.

The comment from the audience (paraphrased): It sounds like Hollywood is so wrapped up in rights and clearance, they are suffering from “creative constipation.”

So, I came across this article tonight (while researching Red Hat of all things) about the troubles a Canadian phone carrier had after making pornography available to its subscribers. It reminded me of the important role pornography has had in technological innovation in the past.
Adult entertainment companies will find a way to sell to the mobile user, with or without cooperation from the carriers (Jenna is already selling ‘moan’ tones). Perhaps that trend will provide the necessary stimulus to raise our mobile bandwidth to levels found elsewhere in the world?

As described in another article, Blu-ray is looking like the next Betamax. Will Sony recognize a similar junction and adopt a different response this time? If not, I can see HD-DVD winning the format war with ease. Or, maybe getting porn in high def is not important to consumers and internet distribution (to their cell phone) is enough?

Which brings a bigger question…VHS and DVD came about prior to the broadband penetration we see today - will HD-DVD players be the new LaserDisc players with most consumers opting to get their movies into their living room through TiVos, SlingBoxes, iTVs, and Xboxes?  Will the demand for pornography again play a role in charting technology, affecting adoption of devices bringing internet distribution to the television screen?