Nice job Jane!

We are pleased to announce that Jadam Kahn has just joined the MyStrands team as Director of User Experience.

Jadam has most recently been running RocketSurgeon - an experience design firm with a focus on digital media - where his clients included Universal Music, Apple Computer, Hitmaker, Steveland Films, Sikora Films, and many others. He also is a thought-leader in the “music 2.0″ space where he analyzes products and trends in the Rocketsurgeon Music 2.0 Blog and Directory.

Prior to running his own firm, Jadam worked as the Manager of User Experience for Music Now which was eventually purchased by AOL. While there he participated in building what was often reviewed as the leading-edge subscription service in terms of user experience and community features as well as doing some work on the Winamp media player.

Jadam studied neurobiology at Cornell University, and received his Masters of Fine Arts degree from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago where he concentrated on visual communication and art and technology.

We are very excited to have Jadam on the team - even if he is all the way out there in Chicago.

We are proud to announce that MyStrands is partnering with MobileMonday Madrid and Barcelona.

MobileMonday is a community of mobile professionals. The open community promotes the mobile industry and fosters cooperation and networking among industry people and their companies by providing opportunities for personal and virtual contacts.

Next November 12th event will cover experiences from the UK Mobile Market. The UK has one of the most active emerging markets in next generation mobile data services, together with France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

No, this has nothing to do with that joke “How many is a Brazillion?”

So, what would 10k Brazilians do with their phones at a party? They would party. They will party.

Yes, this Saturday 10,000 people are expected at Planeta Terra Festival 07 (Plannet Earth) in Sao Paulo, an explosive festival combining local and international bands and DJs, attractions, contests and more.

If you are lucky enough to attend, the organizers are asking that you take your mobile phone with you. Why is that? partyStrands will be there!

Kaliya Hamlin talks about her brainchild, She’s Geeky, as an opportunity for women in technology to discuss the unique issues women face in the digital age. Kaliya started her girl-geek crusade in order to make the online world a better place for women users. If you missed She’s Geeky* on the west coast (check out our previous post here), your next chance will be heading east!

Yesterday, Nokia hosted its annual Mobile Mash-Up event here in Palo Alto. Nokia’s CTO Tero Ojanperä kicked off the event with his fireside chat session, where he emphasized Nokia’s full commitment to creating a vibrant ecosystem of application and service providers on its platforms and devices. The rest of the event was testament to that indeed with a lineup of 13 startups (including MyStrands) all doing groundbreaking work in mobile applications arena. The applications presented covered an impressive range from stress management games that react to signals coming from a physical sensor that the user applies his/her thumb on to avatars that mimic the user’s facial impressions.

On behalf of MyStrands, I showcased our award-winning MyStrands Social Player, which combines media management functionality with community oriented taste sharing use cases such as “What music are my friends listening to?”. In alignment with the growing consensus that successful Mobile 2.0 applications should create synergies with web and desktop use cases MyStrands Social Player’s integrated capabilities that leverage its users’ online profiles and music listening habits on their PCs was very well received.

IMO Nokia has come a long way in walking the talk when it comes to having a more user centric model instead of an operator centric one. Given the fact that millions of Nokia devices are sold worldwide untethered to any given operator there is good reason to believe user adoption of 3rd party applications can accelerate as more advanced and viral functionality are introduced with the handsets. The N series and especially N95 has packed together a powerful set of those capabilities already but the price points are still out of reach for a larger portion of the demographics. At this stage I expect the early adopters to take the lead and be the ultimate judge as to what applications add value to their life and which ones are really worth raving to those friends that are left in the 20th century when it comes to mobile entertainment and productivity savvy. Without a doubt, the race has just begun!

Atakan Cetinsoy, VP Business Products, MyStrands