“The users of a new music business website have given the band Second Person £26,000 - but they’ll be lucky to see a return on their investment.

On a near-weekly basis we’re told that the record company is a moribund beast and the “digital revolution” has made labels as anachronistic as wooden teeth. The argument runs that the business model is broken: find an act, pay over the odds to sign them in a bidding war, throw millions at them in cross-eyed and frivolous marketing spend, watch them limp into the lower end of the charts, drop them, find a new act and repeat until the shareholders mutiny. …”

read more at:

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - music: Sellaband’s music business revolution won’t work

Apparently my recent remarks regarding homebrew mobile phone communities were right on the money:

I’m announcing the formation of the “Silicon Valley Homebrew Mobile Phone Club.” Our purpose is to provide support and guidance for individuals building their own “convergence devices.” We’re going to have monthly meetings where we discuss designs and applications with the idea that two heads is frequently better than one. Don’t toil in solitude, trying to get your latest wireless hardware hack to work.

Links: Announcement, The Open Phone Proposal
Preliminary site: telefono.revejo.org

And Stacking Fault points to a number of people already active in the field in the insightful overview Build your own mobile phone.

LONDON (Reuters) - A group of the world’s mobile operators and handset makers said on Thursday they are to join together to develop an open-source Linux-based operating system that could to be used in phones by the end of 2007.

Mobile network operators Vodafone and NTT DoCoMo and handset makers Motorola, Samsung, NEC and Panasonic, said they would form an independent not-for-profit group to share the costs and speed up mobile software and handsets and cut the number of operating platforms on the market.

I’m curious what this will do for the homebrew/customization scene. Ideal scenario: a (usable!) open source operating system for cellphones. Think about how many times you heard someone complain about sucky phone menus — and then imagine what would happen if people would finally be able to do something about it.

This goes way deeper than Palm OS or Symbian in terms of the possibilities — if nobody screws this up it could spawn a wave of mobile user interface innovation, and create an infrastructure of experimentation where 20 year old kids can innovate in a slow-moving industry.

If you put the right tools into the hands of people who are actually using a system, and who aren’t pulled back by business interests, amazing things can happen. Think of Firefox/Flock, of OpenWRT, or even Napster.

(Yeah this isn’t necessarily the motivational factor for these companies, but you can’t develop a Linux derivate without open sourcing the result — so people will have access to a significant part of crucial sourcecode.)

Link: Mobile players form Linux platform pact - Yahoo! News, Slashdot | Cellular Companies Join to Improve Linux

Making things is part of being human. Whether you make bikes, kites, food, clothing, protocols for biology research, or hack consumer electronics, a good way to show “How-To” is critical. Instructables is a simple and fast way to share projects with a mixture of images, text, ingredient lists, CAD files, and more. Show your colleagues how to operate a machine, show your friends how to build a kayak, show the world how to make cool stuff. Instructables leads the way in Open Source development for “Stuff”.

Link: Instructables: step-by-step collaboration

Great machinima spoof of last year’s gorgeous Sony Bravia ad. This video is a trailer for the upcoming “Mine 2″, a short movie by Swedish machinima group Snoken Productions using the Battlefield 2 game engine. The predecessor, “Mine“, was released in Summer 2005 and quickly became popular among European gamers and machinima lovers for its pop culture references, refined production values, and because it’s darn funny.

Reminiscent of machinima’s most popular outlet to date, Red vs. Blue, Mine consists of loosely connected war episodes and humorous dialogue in contemporary Iraq, and among other things includes a spoof sequence of Disney’s “The Lion King” and a number of references to Monty Python sketches.

Mine 2 is still under production, a release date has not yet been set.

Watch the Mine 2 Trailer
German Interview with Noken of Snoken Productions