But if you want to save money and time, you can head over to JamLegend, where you can play along with “Ticket to Ride” or any other song, for free.

What’s the catch? Well, there are a bunch: For instance, you need to own whatever song you want to play, and you’ll have to upload a copy of the tune (in MP3 form) to JamLegend, which will store up to five songs at a time.

And JamLegend is no Rock Band–instead of a high-end console game featuring “real” fake instruments and expensive animation, it’s a relatively crude Web game you play with a keyboard.

Oh. And the “play your own music” feature the company is promoting today could end very soon, maybe even today. The year-old start-up hasn’t run the idea by the big music labels–Warner Music Group (WMG), Sony (SNE), Universal Music Group and EMI–and odds are that at least one of them is going to growl about this.

If they do, says CEO Andrew Lee, he’ll back down fairly quickly. “The music industry has reached a point where they don’t always send out a cease & desist [letter] whenever anyone tries something,” he says. “But if they do send out a C&D we’ll definitely abide by it.”

But give Lee and his two-co-founders credit: This is a smart stunt that should get their year-old start-up some well-deserved attention. And it makes a fine point, too–there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to play Rock Band, Guitar Hero, or any of the many knockoffs with music you own.

Especially in the form that Lee is doing it: While JamLegend offers a multiplayer game, the only way you can only play with your uploaded songs is by yourself. There’s no “sharing” going on here. And in the end, that’s really not going to be that much fun; the whole point of these games, as far as I can tell, is to play them, karaoke-style, with a bunch of your pals (drinking doesn’t hurt, either).

Lee acknowledges this and says he’d be happy to work out something with the labels that lets him expand the use of their music. That’s already happened, on an ad hoc basis: A handful of the 600 songs his game features come from little-known artists signed to Sony and Universal, whose promotional staffs have asked JamLegend to incorporate the tunes.

But Lee says that when he’s talked to the labels about wide-ranging pacts in the past, he’s been told he doesn’t have enough reach or money to cut a deal. He has about 800,000 unique monthly users, and the three-person company, sprung from Washington, DC-area incubator LaunchBox Digital, has raised about $500,000 in angel funding. Let’s see if his bid for attention changes that.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t seen what the Beatles edition of Rock Band looks like, take a gander here. Personally, I find these uncanny valley renderings unpleasant, but I’m probably not the target demo for this stuff anyway. And great songs are great songs, so maybe it will do as well as everyone hopes.

(Happy Birthday, Ben!)

Last week, after much delay, longtime Internet exec Julius Genachowski (pictured here) was confirmed by the Senate as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

It is an important role for the future development of the Web, of course, although it took a dog’s age into the new Democratic administration to approve him.

Hopefully, he and the other commissioners can soon get to work on a wide range of major digital issues, such as a national broadband plan that does not cost Americans a fortune.

Genachowski, a close tech adviser to President Barack Obama, was seated along with Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Republican appointee who was confirmed for a second FCC term.

After the Senate approves two others–Democrat Mignon Clyburn and Meredith Attwell Baker for the GOP–in the next month, it will round out the five-member panel.

(The other FCC commissioner is a Dem, Michael Copps, who has been acting chairman while Genachowski got approval.)

Genachowski, a former FCC staffer, was most recently working as a VC at Rock Creek Ventures and LaunchBox Digital. But he is best known to many in Silicon Valley as a top exec at IAC/InterActiveCorp. (IACI).

He is likely to make his debut to chair his first meeting this coming Thursday, and it is a humdinger of dull:

According to the FCC’s Web site, the July open meeting, held in Washington, D.C., will consider three items:

1.) Amendment of the Commission’s Rules to Provide Spectrum for the Operation of Medical Body Area Networks: The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to allocate spectrum and establish service and technical rules for the operation of Medical Body Area Networks to monitor patients’ physiological data.

2.) Amendment of Service and Eligibility Rules for FM Broadcast Stations: The Commission will consider a Report and Order concerning changes in the FM translator rules to allow AM broadcast stations to rebroadcast their signals on eligible FM translator stations.

3.) Amendment of Part 101 of the Commission’s Rules to Accommodate 30 Megahertz Channels in the 6525-6875 MHz Band: The Commission will consider a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking addressing whether to provide licensees with authority to operate on channels with bandwidths up to 30 megahertz in the Upper 6 GHz band and whether to extend conditional authority to two additional channel pairs in the 23 GHz band, as well as an Order addressing a related waiver reques.

But the site also mentioned that “the Meeting also will include a presentation on the status of the Commission’s process for developing a National Broadband Plan.”

Now, that is something BoomTown would like to know about since this country is effectively still in the dirt-road period, in terms of high-speed broadband access for Americans.

But, of course, the cost of what we do get–which is very substandard compared to a lot of other countries–is also very pricey.

Let’s hope Genachowski–who has a lot of other issues on his plate, especially as the media industry undergoes drastic reconfiguration too–can do something about it.

In a related note, Lawrence Strickling was also OK’d to run the telecom division of the Commerce Department, which is the agency with the dough ($4.7 billion in government funds) to help the create this supposed Internet infrastructure boom with the FCC.

I remain dubious of any movement in the arena, but still hopeful.

And, until there is some action from Genachowski, here is a highlights video from an onstage interview Walt Mossberg and I did with former FCC chairman Kevin Martin–along with Verizon (VZ) Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam–at the sixth D: All Things Digital conference in 2008.

Here is the D6 video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090629/welcome-to-the-fcc-julius-now-get-to-work-on-a-national-broadband-plan-please/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090113/genachowski-to-head-fcc-maybe-he-can-finally-fix-my-broadband/ http://allthingsd.com/20090113/genachowski-to-head-fcc-maybe-he-can-finally-fix-my-broadband/#comments Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:02:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=8398

Finally, someone who might actually understand the Internet will be taking charge of the thus-far lackadaisical government body that plays the largest role in spurring its growth.

The Washington Post is reporting that Julius Genachowski (pictured here) will be tapped to take on the always controversial job of chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Sources with knowledge of the situation also confirmed the appointment, which will be announced in the next few days, to BoomTown.

Genachowski has previously worked for the FCC as its chief counsel under former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt. But he is better known to Silicon Valley as a longtime Internet exec at Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI).

He is now a founder of a Washington, D.C.-based venture firm called LaunchBox Digital, which has invested in a plethora of unusually trendy Web 2.0 companies.

One of its investments, the social news aggregation service Socialmedian, was recently acquired by the German-based business networking site Xing for $7.5 million.

And Genachowski is also a co-founder and managing director of Rock Creek Ventures, another venture firm, and a special adviser at General Atlantic.

Perhaps most notably, he went to law school with President-Elect Barack Obama.

Thus, Genachowski worked the tech sector tirelessly for Obama’s election, along with organizing the campaign’s successful social-networking and online fund-raising campaign.

He was also clearly on the short list to be America’s first chief technology officer, which might be too light on policy-making and too heavy on pontificating for Genachowski’s tastes.

As top telecom and, really, Internet regulator, Genachowski will have a lot more power and even more on his plate, including the rocky shift from analog to digital television, now set to take place next month, as well as dealing with net neutrality and a range of other key Web issues.

But top of the agenda will likely be how to make real Obama’s promise to drastically improve broadband access across this nation and lowering prices.

The slow speeds and high costs are an appalling legacy of Washington regulators and politicians, who have lived too long and too deep in the pockets of big telecom companies.

That has made the U.S. exactly what Softbank founder Masa Son once called in an interview I did with him at a D: All Things Digital conference: the “Third World of broadband.”

Hey, Julius, you’ll fix that, right?

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