Today Amazon announced the launch of their music download service. It is aggressively priced to compete with Apple itune and it is DRM free.

From FT:

Amazon is the largest online seller of physical CDs. Its new downloads will be “DRM free”, meaning that they can be accessed by both iPod and MP3 players, and be easily copied or burnt on to users’ CDs.

Certainly DRM free music/content is the best option for consumers that want to play their music/video on their devices without being constraint by the specific device, OS or platform. And in case the service where you bought the music/content closes, you could risk to lose your music and videos. This has happened when Google had stopped to sell their DRM-protected videos. Additionally, Sony has closed its digital music stored based on proprietary format and will open its portable media players to other formats.

And the trend shows that:

• Wal-Mart to offer DRM-free music
• Apple to offer DRM-free music
• Amazon to offer DRM-free music

Comments from:

• Bruce Schneier on DRM
• John Battelle on DRM
• Steve Jobs on DRM

Interesting post by Marc Andreessen in his blog about Internet platforms or The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet.

Platform is an overloaded word nowadays. He gives this definition of platform first:

A “platform” is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

Marc goes on and describes three different levels of Internet platform, in short:

• A Level 1 platform’s apps run elsewhere, and call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services — this is how Flickr does it.
• A Level 2 platform’s apps run elsewhere, but inject functionality into the platform via a plug-in API — this is how Facebook does it. Most likely, a Level 2 platform’s apps also call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services.
• A Level 3 platform’s apps run inside the platform itself — the platform provides the “runtime environment” within which the app’s code runs. Examples are Salesforce.com, Ning, Second Life.

The Level 3 platform is the interesting one by making a new range of applications and development possible.

Since I do not want to rewrite his text, read more from his post…

Why Zebras don´t get ulcers is a very well written and fascinating book on stress and stress management written by Stanford University neuroscientist and biologist Robert M. Sapolsky.
Sapolsky is able to write about the psychology and physiology of stress and still make the content clear to people that are not biologists.

The Economist on Google, from the article: It is rare for a company to dominate its industry while claiming not to be motivated by money. Google does. But it has yet to face a crisis….

And John Battelle writes in his blog, it seems they’ve done their, er, book reading.

1. Employment security
2. Selective hiring of new personnel
3. Self-managed teams and decentralization of decision making as the basic principles of organizational design
4. Comparatively high compensation contingent on organizational performance
5. extensive training
6. Reduced status distinctions and barriers, including dress, language, office arrangements, and wage differences across levels
7. Extensive sharing of financial and performance information throughout the organization

The list above comes from the book, The Human Equation, building profits by putting people first, by Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer.

Even though the suggestions seems conventional wisdom, the general trend in the industry seems to have a different approach to management. Indeed, Professor Pfeffer explains and gives examples of how great companies adopt and benefit from those practices.

Interesting is also his latest book written with another Stanford professor, Robert Sutton: Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management.

Robert Sutton is also the author of the good book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilised Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.

This is the title of the invited talk I will give at QA&TEST 2007, the 6th International Conference on Software QA and Testing on Embedded Systems 17-19 October – Bilbao, Spain.

The talk is based on a paper I had presented at ICSEA 2006, the International Conference on Software Engineering Advances, IEEE. However, the speech will extend the content presented in the paper and will present some additional thoughts I have had to address the optmization of dynamic memory management systems in the context of embedded real-time systems and software product families.

One of the outcomes is the journal paper, Software performance tuning of software product family architectures: two case studies in the real-time embedded systems domain, which extends the ICSEA paper by considering software product family architectures.

The MobiLife Book is the result of the European project MobiLife in which Nokia and many other European Universities and companies have contributed.

The books provides the architectural framework and a discussion on mobile services. During the project we had interesting applications and demo dealing with context-aware, mobility, multi-modal interfaces and privacy and trust. The paper presented at PIMRC 2007, which I have written with my colleagues at Nokia Rearch Center presents some of the challenges and opportunities in this domain experienced during the MobiLife project.

A very interesting article on CNN money on the facebook economy.

How to turn social networking sites in money making machines is what many companies are trying to do. At the moment only a few web sites are able to monetize the phenomenon using essentially advertising banners. The article describes with a rich set of examples the way different companies, applications and services have generated revenues.
There is nothing obscure but just simple rules to take into account if you want to enter the arena of social networking.

A nice report on mobile social media, their potentials and business cases has been published by Santtu Toivonen Senior Research Scientist at VTT . This report has been created by interviewing several people (including me) .

Apparently, social networking sites are also making money. From the ZDnet blog of Larry Dignan (executive editor of ZDNet) and reported also by Marc Andreessen in his blog, some news from MySpace website:

News Corp. said its Fox Interactive unit, which largely consists of MySpace, turned a profit of $10 million on revenue of $550 million for the fiscal year ending June 30… News Corp. chief financial officer David DeVoe said the revenue figures exceeded the company’s internal benchmarks. News Corp. had projected MySpace revenue to top $500 million this fiscal year.

The results include revenue from MySpace’s deal with Google to monetize search results. DeVoe said that Fox Interactive is expected to benefit more from the Google deal in fiscal 2008. Officials said that Fox Interactive as a whole should be able to approach annual revenue of about $1 billion. This growth would come from the Google search deal, international growth on the Web and better monetization. News Corp. is also benefiting as advertisers flock to social sites at the expense of portals…

“It wasn’t so long ago–24 months–when many thought we were embarking on a fool’s errand (with MySpace),” said News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.

He forecast that MySpace revenue alone will generate more than $800 million in revenue.