Board of Directors Presentation 2007Q1 – Part 3/3

[Continued from Part 1 (Vision) and Part 2 (Technology)]

Let’s talk products.

Products is what it’s all about. Technology is really fun to work on, and it’s extremely important for us to continue to push the envelope of what’s possible on the web and on mobile phones. But all of the technology, when it works, should be truly invisible, exposed to the world only through a sanitized viewport that is a product. As we say on the MyxerTones website, “the technology is mvisible.”

The focus of our entire company is the product currently called MyxerTones (with the Tones part giving off a kinda shimmery semi-opaque vibe like the picture of Marty in Back to the Future when he was in danger of never having existed). But we really have three distinct families of offerings, because the people we sell on our services can be divided into three main groups: web surfers; independent artists; and partners.

Web surfers are people that are interested in getting mobile content. These are people that we market to with “make your own ringtones” types of advertisements, and the people that we’re really going to start selling MyxerMagic to. They’re normal people – not power users, not content owners, piercings optional, etc. They have a run-of-the-mill phone from their carrier, and they want to get some cool stuff on it. They’re the people that get the most attention from the product team, because they’re the people with the biggest numbers.

The Independent Artists is meant to include anyone from a local band to a small record label that might manage, say, a few dozen acts. We have specific functionality baked into MyxerTones to support the kinds of things that these guys want to do – mainly connect with their fans to build loyalty by giving out ringtones/wallpapers, etc., but sometimes sell their own content for profit. The piercing ratio is definitely a lot higher in this group than the other two. We built MyxerTags and FanLists especially for these guys, and we have some other things in the works (geotargeting, MyxerTunes, etc.)

It turns out that most of our artists identify themselves as HipHop/Rap, with Rock following not too far behind. We also have reasonable showings in Country and Latin categories.

Finally, the Partners bucket represents everyone from PohDunkBands.com to [LARGE PARTNERS]. There’s obviously a lot of variation in the kinds of services various partners want, but the constant stream of partner requests we get into our mailbox every day (honestly) is a real indication that we have an opportunity to make some turnkey products that target these guy’s wishes to add mobile functionality to their own websites.

I’d like to point out that, while we will likely talk about [BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES] at this meeting, those types of partnerships are not the kind of thing the products team is overly concerned with on a day to day basis. We are much more interested in bringing value to users at the other end of the size spectrum. That is, we’re trying to support the millions of people with audiences in the low thousands or hundreds, as opposed to going after the biggest companies out there. We believe in the long tail, be they musicians or small website operators or someone else. The key is making everything as simple as possible, completely turnkey from our website, requiring no human interaction.

This is directly analogous to how we don’t really care about going after the Madonna’s and U2’s of the music world – sure, we’d like to have a couple more big names in the “partner” bucket to add to our credibility in the business world and visibility in the “real” world, but our success is only going to be assured when we have products that appeal to the much larger aggregate of the smaller guys out there.

As Executive Vice President of Products, a fancy title I just last week created and am trying out today for the first time to see how it fits – I’m mainly concerned with defining the feature sets that we should deliver in the products we build to address the real needs and desires of our various constituents (product management), overseeing – and participating in – the development of the actual bits that make up the features (product development), and working to ensure that we expose the merits of our products in the best possible light to the largest possible market (product marketing).

The current state of things is that product development (and I include QA, support, and IT operations in that bucket, mainly because it’s all handled primarily by Bill) is as healthy as it could possibly be in an organization of our size. Product management, which is mainly myself, could perhaps benefit from another worker bee to spend time, for example, fleshing out partner programs. But the need for a high level product marketing person isn’t as clear as it seemed a while ago.

We have a PR firm handling traditional PR, and while we weren’t overly impressed with the results of PR efforts last year, we do feel that we’ve made a lot of progress and are pretty well positioned to start reaping some very tangible benefits from our PR efforts in the coming year (news stories, bylines, speaking engagements, etc.). We have a part-time (but in-house) PR/Marketing consultant that is helping PR considerably, while at the same time helping to hone the marketing message more effectively.

And we had the VP of New Media at [A LARGE RECORD LABEL], while viewing the MyxerTones website look at us and say “obviously you guys are marketing experts.” I’m sure there will be more discussion on this as we go forward, but marketing is building a brand, and our brand is definitely building.

Enough organizational talk. Here’s what’s going on with our products.

We released MyxerTones 2.0 just a few scant months ago. The traffic grew that day, and hasn’t stopped growing since. I think it’s funny that we call it MyxerTones 2.0, even to this day, because we’re probably on like the 200^th version of the website that we’ve deployed to production. That’s the way we like to do things – we try to update the website every week or two, which might not seem like a big deal to some of you, but the difference between this type of development environment and one in an enterprise software company (how many years did Vista take?) is staggering.

What this means is that we can really quickly bring new features and bugfixes to the site, which keeps things fresh for the users. It’s awesome to be able to write some new code and have it live on production two days later.

So what are some of those features? MyxerTones is the best place to make and share mobile content. I’m going to save the statistics for Bill, but I can certainly tell you that it’s probably one of the most popular places to make and share mobile content anywhere. We’ve been innovating like made in the last quarter; after releasing 2.0, which was a complete redesign of the entire user interface of every page on the site, we’ve added: fan lists, comments, tags, search capability; image support; video support; MyxerMagic; artist profile pages; and that’s only what I’m able to recall off the top of my head. The site is alive with activity and change, and is really turning into a first class community site.

MyxerMagic, which I’ve alluded to, is the latest and greatest feature. It’s a tiny little piece of software that integrates into the web browser to add a “send to phone” option to every image on the web. It’s going to be huge.

MyxerFlix is what we’re calling video support in MyxerTones. While the first releases simply allow for the delivery of video clips that are manually uploaded from a PC, we’ll soon enhance MyxerMagic with video capabilities which will allow, for example, any YouTube video to be sent directly to a user’s mobile phone right from the browser. How sweet it that?

Finally, as a teaser, these are the things that I expect the labs to kick out over the next months. MyxerFlix is basically an extension of the system to support video content (up to 3 minute video clips) alongside images and ringtones. MyxerTunes will be OTA delivery of free or premium full-track, high quality audio. Given recent industry trends with regard to increasing bandwidth availability and more capable phones, we believe that 2007 is a practical year to offer this service.

Board of Directors Presentation 2007Q1 – Part 2/3

Continued from part 1 (vision)…

My next title is Chief Technology Officer. So let’s talk about technology.

First of all, we are unabashedly a technology-focused company. We make no apology for that, and we will continue to be a technology-focused company for as long we exist. We rely on our technological savvy to enable us to build the kind of compelling products we’re becoming known for. The novelty, reliability, simplicity, and sheer power of our products is dependent wholly on our technology.

We have a tagline on the bottom of our Myxer web pages that says “the technology is mVisible.” That’s a shorthand way of saying, yes, there’s a hell of a lot going on under the covers, but you don’t have to worry about that. We’ve welded the hood shut. Punch in your phone number and click “send to my phone” and we’ll do the rest. It’s invisible.

We’ve got a platform that can ingest content in virtually any existing audio, image, or video format, chew it up, and spit it out in a nice little package delivered to the doorstep of just about any phone on any carrier out there. We’ve got huge tracts of really cool technology that allow us to automatically identify the phone model of a requesting user and the carrier they’re with, we’ve got a database of phone characteristics that’s plugged into an automated feedback loop so that it stays constantly updated with new information, we have multiple messaging gateways giving us redundancy and flexibility, we basically have this whole content preparation and delivery thing down. That is soooo last year.

We leverage web services extensively in our platform, and intend to do so even more in the future. Already we depend on Amazon S3 for storage and backup, mBlox web services for delivering premium content, Google Maps for geocoding, RSS feeds from Blogger for our news capability, and I’m sure I left off a couple in there somewhere.

We believe that companies that embrace the loosely-coupled, scalable nature of cloud computing are going to have tremendous advantages over companies that fail to take advantage of them. And that advantage is coming a lot sooner than some people may think.

We work with what’s there, in terms of software. Forcing a local installation of software on a user’s PC is a definite disadvantage for any company, and requiring special software on the phone is about 10x worse. Aside from the logistics of actually developing the software and testing it on all supported platforms, there’s the huge hurdle of getting users to actually install it successfully. It’s just not worth it. See point #1.

In our short history, we’ve already created an impressive track record of innovation. Building on the core Myxer platform, we’ve developed innovative technologies like MyxerTags, allowing our users to effectively host their own ringtones from their website or MySpace profile page; MyxerCodes, allowing automatic shared use of the MYXER shortcode for mobile originated content purchases; dynamic delivery, providing the possibility for ultra-personalized content to be delivered through our system by our partners; and most recently MyxerMagic, which promises to make all web content just one click away from being mobile content.

We’re just now rolling out core support for video delivery, the technological challenges for which are mainly architectural (spreading the CPU load efficiently, storing and caching files, etc.) in nature rather than innovative. I expect the next jaw-dropping technological advancement we’ll make is when we delivery the MyxerMagic + MyxerFlix technology that will let anyone with MyxerMagic send any video they see online directly to their mobile phone.

We’ve filed for patent protection with claims covering aspects such as the core architecture and the (really smart) way we harvest metadata about a song unknowingly contributed by one user and use it to improve the experience of subsequent users that use the same song. Most recently, we’ve crafted claims around the recent MyxerMagic and dynamic delivery inventions.

We have a regularly scheduled process with our IP legal team when we file provisional applications that cover our newest innovations, and convert previous provisional applications to full-fledged utility applications when appropriate.

So from a core technology point of view, we rock. We have probably one of the most robust mobile content delivery platforms available anywhere; we have unique technologies that take full advantage of the internet; and we have a group of awesome engineers churning out a lot of really cool stuff every day just waiting for the right time to spring out of the labs.

Inventions and the core technology that power our platform are only part of my concern as chief technology officer. High on my list of priorities is the scalability and reliability of our platform. Operating a website is serious business, especially when it gets the kind of traffic that Myxer is now getting.

Our website scaling plan is built to support the business model we’ve developed. The business model has conservative growth estimates that require the website to support ten times the current user load in the next year. That’s ten times as many visitors to the site, ten times as many ringtones delivered, ten times as many SMS messages sent, ten times as many files to store, ten times everything. And because the business plan estimates are conservative, we’re very likely to need even more capacity than that.

Late in the year, it became obvious that disk storage was a real bottleneck for us. We didn’t have enough local storage to hold onto the hundreds of gigabytes of files we needed to operate the site, and every time we needed to expand the amount of storage it required physical changes to our production facility. So, embracing the web, we built our own hierarchical file system based on Amazon’s S3 storage solution, to effectively give us infinite disk storage scalability at extremely reasonable rates. Following our commitment to automate everything automatable, this new system will basically operate on autopilot from now on; as local disk storage becomes sparse, files that haven’t been touched in a long time are simply deleted. If they are needed again in the future, they are retrieved from Amazon’s servers over the backbone without anyone ever knowing what happened. It’s really cool stuff.

What’s even cooler is that we built the system so that it can recover from a complete local disk failure, or even an obliteration of our production facility. If, for example, the great state of Texas (where our production facility is located) is swallowed up by a giant rabid sinkhole, we can bring up a new web server, point it at a backup database server, and the new web server’s local disk will be populated with all the files it needs from Amazon, as it needs them. We haven’t tested the bit about swallowing up the production facility yet, but the other stuff seems pretty solid.

Other scalability growing pains will come in the areas of page serving and transcoding CPU. The next few months will see us bringing up our web capacity with additional web servers and potentially a dedicated transcoding server or two to handle the CPU-intensive tasks of translating input media into the various output formats needed by our target devices. We’re also planning to mirror our front end web servers for extra capacity as well as fault tolerance.

Continued in Part 3 (Products)…

Board of Directors Presentation 2007Q1 – Part 1/3

Presentation to the

Board of Directors

of

mVisible Technologies, Inc.

 

 

Myk Willis

Founder, CTO, EVP Products

2 Feb 2007

 

[Note: this is based on the original presentation script, and not an actual transcript. Also note that some confidential information has been excised where necessary by contract.]

First of all, I’d like to welcome everyone to the first really formal board of directors meeting for mVisible Technologies, Inc. I guess it’s still not really all that formal, but this is the first time I remember wearing shoes at a director’s meeting, so I guess we’re moving more in that direction. Quite a few more lawyers here than I remember, too…

Let me start by saying that it is truly an honor and a privilege to be addressing my fellow board members, my fellow shareholders, and my friends (some of you are all three), all of us compatriots and companions on this crazy journey into the uncharted waters where the mobile industry meets the internet.

As I sat staring at Microsoft Word last night, trying to figure out how to segue from here into the meat of my soon-to-be-written presentation, an email dropped into my inbox announcing IDC’s estimate that over 1 billion mobile phones were sold last year alone. Holy crap. That’s a lot of ringtones!

Unfortunately, that didn’t make for a very good segue, so I’ll have to engage the abrupt gear-shift method instead, before I run out of time.

In preparation for this meeting, in true corporate America style, I whipped out PowerPoint and started building the scaffolding for my presentation. The handy little outline view on the left side makes it really easy to craft a perfectly balanced presentation – the intro slide, the agenda slide, the 3-5 slides for each item on the agenda, the summary – in about 5 minutes, leaving you plenty of time to simply fill in the bullet items at your leisure (for example, in the backseat of Bill’s car on the way to the meeting).

You may note that we’re still on the intro slide, and so you may be quietly wondering to yourself, if not quite concerned about the matter, precisely how many items are there on said agenda slide to follow?

Let’s cut to the chase. I’m the founder of mVisible, so I get to talk about the Vision (capital ‘V’) of the company. I’m the chief technology officer, also, so I’m going to spend some time talking about the state of the technology we’ve been growing. Finally, I’m responsible for Products, so I’m going to talk about our product management, development, and marketing activities.

Now might be an appropriate time to point out that mVisible doesn’t have a Vision statement, nor for that matter do we have a Mission statement. If you vaguely remember seeing some such thing in a document resembling a business plan for mVisible that may or may not have been distributed prior to our recent Series A funding round, well, I’m sorry to report that you must be mistaken, because we don’t have a business plan either.

So this part of the slide deck should go pretty quick, right?

The truth is, we do have a vision (and a mission, and a mantra), but instead of being some suitable-for-framing holy words that we mount above all of our desks (and put at the beginning of our PowerPoint presentations), our vision is a living being; an amorphous, low-frequency life form that lives inside us and uses us, the host being, to shows facets of itself from time to time; in late-night emails from conferences; in spontaneous comments to reporters or analysts; in job interviews; at the bar of the Wynkoop Brewing Company in Denver, CO; in the products we build.

I’ve collected an assortment of mission- and vision-like emissions from my email Sent folder that will hopefully prove useful to show what we’re about. I’ll warn you in advance that I plan to spend a fair amount of time on this topic, because it’s extremely important to our success as a company.

“Myxer is a startup company founded with the intent of revolutionizing the manner in which people use technology for personal communication. Myxer is focused on bringing powerful and unique capabilities to the mass-market through existing wireless devices.”

10/1/2004

 

So even at the very beginning, in fact before the very beginning, we can see that our core beliefs (and even our trademark rights to the Myxer name!) were well-established.

 

“[Our mission is] to develop innovative enabling technologies and products that empower individuals through mobile phone technologies.”

10/1/2004

 

Innovate, enable, empower: these concepts were baked in from the very beginning of our company, and they continue to be what drives what we do.

 

“We’re working to fulfill the promise of the mobile phone as the first truly personal computer.”

11/10/2005

 

I used to hammer on that truly personal computer theme a lot, but it might have lost some of its luster after being co-opted by H-P’s new “the computer is personal again” ad campaign. Because that’s exactly the opposite of what I mean. The idea I’ve always tried to conjure up with that phrase is that what we’ve previously called personal computers are anything but. Sitting at a desk in a back room of your house, staring at a bulky computer screen – is that personal? The mobile phone should not be treated as a shrunken-head version of an IBM PC. It is a conduit that has the potential to enable communication and entertainment in a very personal way. But to reach that potential to be truly personal, we – as an industry, as a company, as individuals – have to rethink every application and try to unlearn a lot of how we did things when the computer was on a desktop.

Obviously, this is a very high level idea, which is why it’s in the Vision part of the presentation and not the “features coming soon” part later.

 

“We have a vision of a mobile internet in which everyone is empowered to use, produce, share, market, and sell content and services unique to the mobile platform, and we’re creating valuable products in pursuit of that vision.“

11/10/2005

 

Now this is something that’s a lot more concrete and I think we can all appreciate how we’re making dramatic progress on this front. The fact of the matter is, we are delivering on this vision every single day, when thousands of bands use our products to share or sell their content through Myxer.

 

“I have visions of cheeseburgers dancing in my head.”

ScottK, 7/4/2005

 

Now, I just had to use this quote from ScottK, from an email in which he was expressing glee (I think) upon some milestone achievement or another. I still have no idea what this means, but it’s obviously a vision, right?

 

“everything’s mobile”

1/7/2006

 

This is what Kawasaki-San would probably refer to as a mantra. It’s a tight little phrase that is meant to be repeated in a barely audible, semi-conscious manner, several times a day, to help maintain focus on what’s important to our company. The MyxerMagic product feature, which we’ll speak about later, is a direct bloodline descendent and concrete incarnation of this mantra, and many more offspring are in the works.

 

“Myxer is about […] leveraging the respective strengths of the internet and the mobile phone to make digital content easily discoverable and accessible anywhere you are”

1/25/07

 

This is a very recent glimpse of our vision in which you can see our product bias toward digital content leaking through. While perhaps this statement would be too limiting for a traditional Vision statement at another company, the fact that we are content to allow our vision to live and breathe means we can embrace it fully without losing our understanding of larger goals waiting to be achieved after this one is accomplished.

 

Now, before jumping into my next topic, technology, I do want to talk very briefly about the industries we’re involved with. We like to think that we’re positioned at the center of three more or less distinct industries:

The Mobile Industry – what an ugly mess.

The Music Industry – what an ugly mess.

The Internet – what a beautiful mess!

 

While the mobile industry struggles under the sheer weight of the carriers;

While the music industry struggles with how to stay relevant in a world where musicians can get their digital content to their fans without requiring the distribution that labels have historically provided;

The web continues to produce a beautiful, if fractured and unpredictable, steady stream of innovation, built on an open network. Today’s web applications are flourishing because of the ‘openness’ of web 2.0, and we’re right in there. It’s a great time to be writing software for the web, there’s a lot of excitement, there’s a lot of expectations.

…continued in part 2…

Transparency

Now is the time in the calendar quarter when I’m supposed to have my presentation for the Board of Directors of mVisible Technologies, Inc. ready for binding and distribution to the other board members. Of course, I haven’t even started this yet.

This quarter, I’ve decided that I’m going to do something different. I’m going to make my presentation not just to the board, but to the whole world. While most companies consider the kind of internal information I present to be highly confidential and all that, I am a firm believer in transparency in my business. I have two primary reasons for this.

First, I believe our success is dependent almost entirely on our ability to execute as opposed to protect. Our execution is not hurt at all by exposing to the world what it is that we’re trying to do, what we’re doing well, and what we’re having problems with. In fact, I think going open kimono keeps you focused on the important goals, and insures that there is never discord between the company’s publicly-stated goals and those of internal operations.

Second, I believe that the mobile industry (in which we mainly operate), is doing a disservice to itself and to consumers by operating in such a short-sighted and protectionist manner. It’s been going on for a long time, but I’m reminded daily (see Verizon’s latest round of intentionally crippling their phones) of how the carriers practices are retarding the growth of a healthy industry. We’re committed to bucking that trend. The mobile industry needs to be dragged – kicking and screaming, most likely – into the internet age of open, free market competition based on merit rather than history.

Anyhow, I’m getting a little sidetracked. Hell, why wait til I’m done with the next presentation. I’m going to follow up this post by publishing my presentation from last quarter’s meeting to see how it’s received. It would be really cool if this kind of thing started to be the norm for businesses in our space. I think it would help us to advance the industry for the benefit of all.

Pricing of mobile content

I had an interesting discussion yesterday with Lucas Hrabovsky, CTO of Amie Street.  If you don’t know Amie Street, they’re a new independent music store that has a rather unique pricing scheme.  Songs start out free, but gradually rise in price as their popularity increases.  It’s a pretty nifty algorithm, and a hook that’s gotten them plenty of press.

I was talking to Lucas because we’re working on a way for MyxerTones and Amie Street to work together to provide the same kind of variable pricing scheme for mobile content (ringtones) as is currently provided for full track desktop downloads.

In a world where Steve Jobs all but set the global retail price of a digital full track download at $0.99 (oh, he’s just added a $1.29 option for DRM-free tracks…more on this later!), the variable pricing model of Amie Street offers quite a contrast.  But, as I pondered pricing issues with mobile content (thanks to Lucas for a follow-up email that piqued my interest),  I realized that neither the fixed price model of iTunes nor the variable price model of Amie Street really allows the artist any control over the retail pricing of their products.  While I have heard justifications offered up for why fixed pricing is a Good Thing for the Consumer and the Industry, none have been really compelling, and I think it’s really a regrettable accident that isn’t helping anyone.

At MyxerTones, we have a fixed retail price for each ringtone or other mobile content item, but we’ve always let artists choose what that retail price should be.  Let’s call it artist-controlled pricing.   Artists can either give away their content for free, or they can choose to charge between $0.99 and $2.99 per download.  We did this because, well, we had no idea what the right price for an arbitrary piece of mobile content should be, and we suspected different content was worth a different amount of money, so we figured we’d let the artist do whatever they thought was best.

What do they choose?  Well, perhaps not surprisingly, the majority of the content available from the MyxerTones catalog is made available at no charge, as this pacman chart shows:

This means most of the ringtones are used as promotional content; artists create them, then send out MyxerTags in bulletins to their fans on MySpace, or give out MyxerCodes at their shows, so that their fans can load them onto their phones in a show of support.  It’s a great use of mobile technology to connect bands with their fans, and we’re happy to provide these delivery services for free, based on on ad-supported model.  There’s probably similarly poised PacMan chart on some MySpace presentation somewhere, that shows how many bands are chosing to give away their songs as downloads from their profile pages.

But a relatively large percentage of our artists choose to monetize their works by charging for the ringtones they offer . Of this premium (non-free) content hosted by MyxerTones, the distribution of retail prices (chosen by artists) looks like this:

So we see that, more than half the time, artists are chosing the lowest (non-free) price for their content, which is $0.99.  Second in line is $1.99, probably owing to the popularity of that price point for ringtones on the mobile operator’s deck.  Together, those two prices make up more than three quarters of all items; the rest are variously priced up to $2.99.

What’s interesting is that when you look at the actual transactions taking place on MyxerTones, the items being purchased by consumers don’t match up with this pricing distribution at all.  In fact, more items are sold at $1.99 than at any other price point, despite the fact that far more less-expensive content is available on the site:

(Note that this pie chart sizes each slice based on the total number of transactions at the given price point, not based on the total value of those transactions.  This data is from the first three months of 2007.)

You can see the discrepency between what artists are most often asking for their ringtones and what consumers are actually paying when you look at a histogram that compares the two side-by-side:

Despite having only half as many items priced at $1.99 than at $0.99, there were more sales at this higher price point than at the lower. There’s a bit of hypothesizing going on here, but I think what this data means is that, for those people willing to pay for premium mobile content, the difference between $0.99 and $1.99 is relatively unimportant. Presumably, the higher priced content is more desirable in some way (higher quality, more established artist, etc.), but prior to this analysis, it wasn’t clear to me that people would be willing to shell out two bucks for something they really want, even when they can probably get something they just want for half the price (and tons of other stuff completely free on the same site!).

It also leads me to believe that a lot of MyxerTones artists could do better, revenue-wise, if they chose a higher price point (such as $1.99), for their mobile content.

Of course, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics, so one has to be careful about jumping to any firm conclusions with this data.  But what strikes me is that this quick and simple analysis I’ve just done on MyxerTones mobile content pricing and resultant consumer behavior is possible only because we allow artists to set their own prices, and cannot be effectively performed on the dominant pricing models for full-track downloads.  Whereas I was able to take a half hour of work and come up with an optimized trajectory for revenue generation (“encourage more artists to charge $1.99 for their content instead of $0.99 and it should increase their (and our) total revenues”), the music industry is handcuffed and blinded by their existing pricing model.  It certainly seems careless of them.

I’m no economist, but I think a healthy, reactive free market in which prices can float and adjust based on the wisdom (or whim) of crowds, including half-baked analysis like this – will ultimately benefit the industry more than any pricing structure enforced from the top down.

Of course, fixed pricing is probably far from the biggest problem preventing the music industry from continuing its download spiral into lower and lower sales numbers.  The biggest problem is DRM, and it looks like that problem’s finally going to get some attention.  Hopefully I’ll be able to give it some attention here shortly.

For now, Amie Street’s variable pricing is novel and has a lot of benefits, especially for emerging artists.  It isn’t quite a free market, and the feedback loop is rather limited, but it’s certainly a great experiment and I’m looking forward to working with them and others, and playing our part in evolving the economics of mobile content.