Besides sharing awesomely cute firefox (a.k.a. red panda) cubs with the world, the Firefox Live project was intended to raise awareness of the species and their endangered status. To help achieve that goal, we partnered with the Red Panda Network on a contest that asked people to submit short videos detailing a natural area they’d like to preserve, with the winner receiving a 15-day panda trek through the forests of Nepal with the RPN team.
We received a bunch of great clips that were full of creativity and passion, and are proud to announce Andre Lewis as the winner. Andre is an aspiring wildlife documentary filmmaker, so we’re looking forward to seeing some great footage from his trip later this year. (Here’s his winning video.)
Also, Firefox Live will be closing down this Thursday after more than 500,000 hours of total cub-watching. It’s been tremendous fun seeing Spark and Ember become Internet sensations, but they’re full-grown now and the time has come for them to move on to even bigger and better things. In this case, their new job is the rather important task of helping ensure the survival of their species!
Under the recommendation of the Red Panda Species Survival Plan, Spark will be heading to the Cleveland Metropark Zoo and Ember to the Lee Richardson Zoo in Garden City, Kansas, with the goal of having cubs of their own next year. Although the end of an era is always a little bittersweet, this is a happy moment for the future of red pandas.
Huge thanks to Sarah Glass and the Knoxville Zoo for all their help and great work, and to all of you who watched the cubs (possibly at the expense of more traditionally productive activities) and participated in the project. If you’d like to continue to support Spark, Ember and red pandas in general, we recommend any of the following:
On June 14, 2010, two female firefox (a.k.a red panda) cubs were born at the Knoxville Zoo in Tennessee, and as of today, they’ve officially joined the Mozilla community. To meet our newest (and cutest) Mozillians, visit www.firefoxlive.org. For the next few months you’ll be able to watch these baby firefoxes play, live and grow via a 24 hour live video stream.
Red Pandas are endangered animals, and these particular cubs are the most vital captive firefoxes to the bloodline of their species. Just as Mozilla works to build and protect the open Web, we also support the preservation of key natural ecosystems and hope that Firefox Live will raise awareness of the pandas’ threatened status. (Learn about Mozilla’s other conservation efforts here.)
You can also help us name the cubs! Right now they go by the rather utilitarian names “cub #1″ and “cub #2″, but you can add your suggestions for what they should be called on the site. And, that’s just the beginning – over the next few months we’ll be providing more ways for you to interact with them, support firefoxes in the wild and increase awareness of Mozilla’s mission.
Although the cubs are fun to watch pretty much any time, they’re especially active and entertaining after they’ve been fed – usually around 9 a.m., 12 p.m. and 4 p.m. EST. Also, there are six different camera angles to choose from, so if they dart out of view you have several other options for following the action. Enjoy!
We want to make sure that Firefox t-shirts (and other Mozilla swag) are always readily available to community members around the world who want them. So, as we think about the future of the Mozilla Store it’s really important that we get ideas and input from as many people as possible.
If you have a minute, please take this short survey about the Mozilla Store. Your feedback will be a huge help!
We have good news for late holiday shoppers in Europe (or, really, anyone on that side of the Atlantic who’s looking to get some Firefox gear this winter): our UK-based Mozilla Store is offering a series of “packs” that bundle items together at a discounted rate.
The results from the Mozilla Creative Collective’s “Firefox Goes Mobile” design challenge are in, and I’m happy to announce that the winner is “Pocketfox”, by Yaroslaff Chekunov. As the official emblem of the upcoming mobile version of Firefox, we’ll be using this image as an avatar on social networking sites, on mozilla.com, on t-shirts and more. It makes a great addition to our portfolio of Firefox imagery!
Yaroslaff, who is based in Krasnodar, Russia, cites as his design inspiration, “the Firefox itself, your approach to the web-site execution, and of course my wife who always brings up new ideas.” Be sure to check out his other Mozilla work as well as his general portfolio.
The four runners-up in the challenge were Mauro Henrique de Bulhões Fidelix’s “Hot Navigation”, Emmanuel John Y. Villar’s “One Mask One Family One World”, Joyce Schellekens’ “Firefox All Around the World” and Eric Yeoung’s “MobiFox”. Interestingly, these designers all hail from different countries (Brazil, the Philippines, the Netherlands and Indonesia), which speaks to the incredible diversity of our community. Many thanks to them, and to everyone else who participated, for sharing their time and talents with Mozilla.
We’ve also launched a new challenge at the Creative Collective: “Five Years of Firefox”. Help us celebrate Firefox’s 5th birthday by creating designs based on this milestone. The possibilities are practically endless, but should generally focus on recognizing what a great accomplishment this is for the Mozilla community and what it’s meant for the hundreds of millions of people who use Firefox. The winner will be featured on this blog, turned into desktop wallpaper and t-shirts, and more.
The submission period for “Five Years of Firefox” ends on December 9th, but don’t wait to get started. Visit the design challenge page for more details, and we can’t wait to see what you come up with!
We just launched a big new feature on the Mozilla Creative Collective: design challenges. The idea is to give our creative community the opportunity to make meaningful contributions to Mozilla by focusing everyone’s efforts on a particular topic. We’ll be hosting these design challenges roughly once a month, and we’re kicking things off with Firefox Goes Mobile.
The goal of the Firefox Goes Mobile challenge is to create the official promotional emblem of the mobile version of Firefox (which is getting closer and closer to release). The winning image will be used on everything from websites like mozilla.com and addons.mozilla.org to schwag like t-shirts and stickers, so if you’re a designer it’s a great way to get involved and make a big impact on a really important project.
To sum up, we’re asking you to abstractly represent mobile-themed concepts like convenience, connectivity and innovation in a simple, yet easily understandable graphic…basically telling the mobile story with a single image. Not an easy task, but of course that’s why it’s called a challenge! There are more details about what we’re looking for on the Firefox Goes Mobile page, so if you’re thinking about getting involved definitely read through those first.
The submission period lasts until September 30th (with voting extended through October 7th)…we can’t wait to see what the Mozilla community comes up with!
When we launched the Fastest Firefox campaign last month, our goals were to help spread the word about Firefox 3.5′s performance upgrades and give the broader Mozilla community a chance to have a little fun by showing off their own speediest talents.
With that in mind, I’m happy to report that we received almost 250 videos from Firefox fans around the world and, with the help of our friends at Nobox, have put together a compilation of our favorites. As an added bonus (and a follow-up to our videos from the world’s fastest clapper, sport stacker and banjo player) it features an introduction from Fran Capo, the world’s fastest talking female.
Lastly, big thanks to everyone who took the time to send us a clip, and especially to those whose clips we used. I don’t have everyone’s names, but here are the ones I do have: Fran Capo, William Blanc Dit Jolicoeur, Channy Yun, Charlie Bright, Daniel CJ Cruz Chan, Brandon Woo, Luke, Nicholas, Joshua Z, Chris Hofmann, Luke Anderson and Refael Ackermann. Your help is very much appreciated, and your t-shirts are on the way!
The team here at Mozilla has been working hard on creating features, enhancing performance and adding other awesomeness to Firefox 3.5, and we’re very excited about sharing it with the world.
Alix Franquet and Rainer Cvillink recently tracked down a bunch of Mozillians to find out which aspects of 3.5 they’re most excited about, and the results are pretty interesting. Definitely check out the video (and see how many faces you recognize).
Earlier this month we launched a new project called Fastest Firefox to help spread the word about Firefox 3.5′s dramatically upgraded performance. As with most things at Mozilla, public participation is a key goal, and we’re hoping to get a bunch of community-created videos of Firefox fans showing off their speediest skills.
To contribute, just record a short video of you or your friends doing something really fast – anything from folding clothes to playing ping pong – then visit www.fastestfirefox.com to upload. We’ll edit our favorites into a single clip, and if we use yours you’ll get a supercool Firefox 3.5 t-shirt (plus the satisfaction of helping the open web and spreading Firefox, of course). The only catch is that the submission deadline is June 28, so time is running out.
But, in our quest to show how fast the new Firefox 3.5 will be, we want even more videos. So, if you or your friends have a talent for doing something quickly – anything from riding a bike to eating a pizza to writing code – send us a short clip. We have a snazzy new Firefox 3.5 t-shirt waiting for you if your video makes it into the final Fastest Firefox compilation.
The only catch is that the videos are due June 28, so don’t delay! And if you need some inspiration, check out this Fastest Firefox submission from community member Daniel CJ Cruz Chan…his talent for one-handed Rubik’s Cube mastery is most impressive.
The results from the Mozilla Creative Collective’s 
When we launched the 