Archive for July, 2013

Barcelona has a couple of large music festivals in the spring.  The largest is Sonar, which takes over *both* of the FIRAs, including the gigantic one that Mobile World Congress just moved to in 2013.  It includes a range of activities.  Another is “Primavera Sound,”  a multi-stage, multi-day event that covers an immense area of renovated waterfront on the northern end of Barcelona.  The day we went to Primavera the shows started at noon or so and continued until 5:30 am the next morning.  This being Barcelona, there are tons of shows schedule for 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 am.  This being an odd and cold winter, it was jackets and fleeces and hats to fend off the cold wind from the water and prepare for the threat of rain.

Sometime while waiting for the 4am shows to start my husband and I wandered through the vendor stalls.  It was odd — other than food, drink and a huge number of cigarettes (it is still very surprising to me, still a Californian at heart, to see how much smoking is a part of daily life here), the only item for purchase were all small print runs of posters, mostly band and venue posters.  It was fun to see: there were no mass produced items, and so we saw the return of serious, low-volume speciality printing.

One set of prints caught our eye — it was a set of eyes, not a musical print but interesting.  Here they are: For those of you who are familiar with Terri Prachett’s “Only You Can Save Mankind” these remind me of the captain, although her color palate is different.

We ended up in an instant, totally comfortable conversation with the proprietor of this stall.   As we talk I am repeatedly drawn to a particular poster, very ornate, for some reason I couldn’t quite place. Here’s what it looks like:

After a while we learn the proprietor of the stall is from Berkeley, CA.    That explains it — I was born in Berkeley, grew up in the town next door, went to college and grad  school in Berkeley, understand the vibe and often like the people.

Eventually it’s time for our show to start and so he, his wife, my husband and I say our “we’ll-come-by-and-visit-you-once-we-move-back-to-California” good-buys. We get along so well he pulls out his good, special business card.  Immediately I see it says “monkey.”    I say “there’s a lot of monkeys in the world.”

He responds “Yes, I made a JaegerMonkey t-shirt for Mozilla a while back.”  My husband and I stop, stunned.  Our son wears his JaegerMonkey t-shirt regularly  (actually, it started off as my t-shirt but we both realized  immediately it would become his.) There is JaegerMonkey inspired artwork, album covers and even music floating around our house, thanks to the kids  who have been drawn to the JaegerMonkey t-shirt.  On a recent trip to the coast one of my son’s friends spent the trip making an 8-bit, mine-craft like JaegerMonkey image ….

My husband points to the small Firefox button he has pinned to his jacket and describes my role.  The print-maker shows off the t-shirt he’s wearing, which is the test print for the new Mozilla shirt he’s driving down to our offices when he gets back to California.  We all stand around stunned for a bit.  I don’t  have the new Mozilla t-shirt, but thanks to this odd meeting we’ve not the copies of the prints above.  You can find the prints at the monkeyink website.

Firefox OS is launching today.  With that in mind, it’s a good time to recap why Mozilla builds products, what our products represent and how our products relate to our goals.

Mozilla’s goal is to build openness, innovation, and opportunity into online life.   One of our biggest levers is of course building products.   We build products that provide a great user experience and engender openness, innovation and opportunity into the technology of the Web itself.

Firefox has done this in many ways.  Firefox was a pioneer in the world of open source consumer products, in open techniques for feedback, support, and quality, just to name a few examples.  We have always built Firefox to give developers huge opportunities for innovation in areas they care about.  We do not seek to control the ways developers can innovate, or the way people take control of their software.

As a result, Firefox helped usher in a whole new era of Web computing, bringing new experiences for users and new freedoms for developers.  Today Firefox continues to pioneer new technologies and features that benefit users.  Some recent examples include features such as Do Not Track, which allows people to tell websites they do not wish to be tracked around the Web, and our Social API that makes the browsing experience more personal and customizable.

With Firefox OS we hope to do something similar with the mobile computing environment.  We want to bring the power of the open Web to this world.  We want to bring the same kinds of flexibility, opportunity and freedom to this computing environment that the original Firefox brings to the desktop.  More specifically, we want  Firefox OS to:

• Prove that the Web is the platform, surprise people with what HTML5 is capable of on mobile devices.
• Advance adoption of mobile Web standards and APIs across the industry, including on other operating systems.
• Spur developer innovation; break the mold of what a mobile app is capable of.
• Make the open Web accessible to more people.
• Spur competition in making the Web the platform for mobile computing.
• Excite people.
• Provide a powerful, exciting and open alternative to the current closed ecosystems.

You’ll note that I haven’t included something like “we want to ship X numbers of phones.”  Ultimately, we want enough people choosing Firefox OS to confirm we’ve built a great product and to move us toward  a more open mobile computing platform based on the Web.    Our goal is to provide an alternative that has a deep and exciting user experience based on openness, choice and competition.