The Mozilla Blog

Mitchell with Lisa Burda, granddaughter of Aenne, at award ceremony. DLD conference, Munich 2010.

Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, was awarded the Aenne Burda Award at the international Digital Life Design Conference in Munich, Germany. Mitchell is the fifth recipient of the award that honors successful, creative female entrepreneurs that are visionaries of the digital world. She received the award for alternative and transparent developments in software.

To quote from the press release issued by DLD-Conference: “Mitchell is a pioneer in the internet industry. The Mozilla Foundation calls for transparency and self-determination in the digital world and develops open-source software that allows everyone to contribute. With the popular browser Firefox Mozilla was able to take a significant amount of market share from the market leader.”

Mitchell Baker comments on receiving the award: “I am honored for the recognition, both personally and on behalf of the many thousands of Mozilla community members who contribute to Mozilla every day to bring innovation and self-determination to Internet life.  I am proud to receive this award and proud that hundreds of millions of people today trust Mozilla to make their digital world better.”

The award commemorates visionary entrepreneur Aenne Burda. The German business woman was a role-model for many of the post-war generation. Starting with a small publishing house, Aenne Burda created the world’s largest fashion publishing house.

Previous recipients of the award are Marissa Mayer of Google, Caterina Fake, Flickr-founder, Martha Stewart, TV-host and entrepreneur, as well as investor and internet pioneer Esther Dyson who presented the award to Mitchell together with Lisa Burda, granddaughter of Aenne.

Please join us in congratulating Mitchell for this award!

It has come to our attention that there are reports on the popular Thai forum Blognone, มีบริษัทไหน โดนคนจาก Mozilla โทรข้ามประเทศมาเช็คยอดคนใช้ Firefox บ้างไหมครับ, and from Mr. Paiboon’s blog เมื่อมีฝรั่งแปลกหน้าโทรเข้า ออฟฟิศของผม !!, of someone called ‘Edison’ calling Internet businesses in Thailand and using the Mozilla Foundation name. These callers are asking about how many computers in the company are using Mozilla Firefox and are connected to the Internet. Mozilla has no representatives named Edison and no representatives in Thailand doing any telephone-based market surveys. If you receive a phone call from a ‘representative of the Mozilla Foundation’ they are not a representative of Mozilla Corporation or the Mozilla Foundation.

Mozilla has done web-based surveys from the Mozilla website and other websites and does market research via email, but not via phone in Thailand. If you receive a phone call in Thailand from someone saying that they are from Mozilla, please do not provide any information and take their name and number and send it to press at mozilla dot com for confirmation.

Thank you very much for your support of Mozilla and Firefox in Thailand.

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.

If that sounds intriguing, definitely head over to the European Store and check them out:
* The Workout Pack
* The Champions Pack
* The Portable Pack
* The Office Pack
* The Good Morning Pack
* The Rainy Day Pack

Yesterday, Mozilla Japan shared the Discover Shiretoko campaign with the world!

Discover Shiretoko was born as a collaborative project between Japan’s Shiretoko Foundation and Mozilla Japan. Shiretoko is a national park in Northern Japan – it is also the codename for the latest version of Firefox. The campaign is designed to help more people learn about Shiretoko national park and the newest version of Firefox.

You can read a full post about Discover Shiretoko on Foxkeh’s blog.

Arun Ranganathan and Seth Bindernagel are just arriving in India to meet with our community and attend several events.  As you may or may not know – Arun is part of our Evangelism team and focuses on standards and open Web tools, while Seth focuses on localization.  Both have a ton of knowledge about the Mozilla project.  It’s going to be a  great visit thanks to our passionate and active community in India!

Where in India will Seth & Arun be you ask?

• Feb. 10th, New Delhi:  Seth and Arun will be joining MozCampDelhi organized by Mohak Prince, one of our great campus reps. There will also be a Mozilla Labs session on the news Concept Series.
• Feb. 12th – 13th, Kanpur:  The duo will be participating in the inaugural FOSSKriti at Techkriti.  Arun will be leading a workshop on Web development & Open Source technologies on the night of the 12th and then a HTML5 talk on Feb. 13th.
• Feb. 14th – 15th, Pune:  Arun and Seth find themselves at GNUnify where they will be leading a mini Mozilla Camp covering localization, Web tools and more.  On Sunday morning from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. they will be joining PuneTech.com for an open meet up.

We’ll post more details as they continue to evolve.  Hope you can make it out to meet them — we’re always looking for new campus reps and India-based members of our community marketing team!

Editor’s note: Mozilla Labs introduced the first of a series of Design Challenges on Tuesday, January 27, 2009, as part of the Mozilla Labs Concept Series.  See Pascal Finette’s, Mozilla’s open innovation catalyst, comprehensive post on the Mozilla Labs blog, excerpted here:

The Design Challenge is a series of events to encourage innovation, and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. Our aim is to provoke thought, facilitate discussion, and inspire future design directions for Firefox, the Mozilla project, and the Web as a whole.

For the inaugural edition of the Design Challenge, we’re focusing on highlighting the creativity of students: if you don’t know what’s impossible, you’ll accomplish it.

If you’re a student, help us answer the question: “What would a browser look like if the Web was all there was? No windows, no unnecessary trappings. Just the Web.”

March 1st, 2009 is the submission deadline for Initial Mockups. If you’re interested in participating, please see the Labs discussion forums for more information. If your school is interested in participating, please contact Mozilla Labs at conceptseries@mozilla.com.

Editor’s Note: Today we bring you a guest post from Felipe Gomes of Brazil, a winner of the Extend Firefox 3 contest.  Felipe is a newer, but very active Mozilla contributor. We asked him to share how he came to be involved with Mozilla.  Congrats again and thanks for all of your hard work, Felipe!

Hi all!  I’m Felipe Gomes, a computer science student from Brazil. As a geek, I’ve always appreciated and believed in open-source, and have tried to get more involved since going to college.  I began using Firefox add-ons when I started with web development, and that led me to learn more about the technologies behind Firefox and its platform. I learned XUL and JavaScript by reading, practicing and trying to run random ideas and experiments in the browser.

I had been following the Mozilla project for a while, but discovered how fruitful it is to be an active member earlier this year when I joined the Brazilian community.  I discovered that there are many passionate members all over the world who love Firefox and want to promote the culture and the browser, regardless of their city or country.  I’ve had the opportunity to interact with many community members this year when I gave talks about XUL and add-ons development.

It’s been very fun and rewarding to be involved.  During the frenzy of the Firefox 3 launch, I created a Download Day Countdown add-on, helped spread the World Record in Brazil and organize our local launch party! I also had the opportunity to work on the programming side, when I did some Processing.js demos and, more recently, submitted an add-on to the Extend Firefox contest.

I got involved with the Extend Firefox contest because when the betas came out it was clear that the browser was growing to a whole new level. There was just so much potential to explore in basically every aspect of the browser. And the Extend Firefox 3 contest was the perfect fit, encouraging developers to leverage the new potential that Firefox 3 brings.

To be one of the contest winners was a very special moment for me, and an honor, especially because of the number of great extensions that were submitted and chosen (I’m already using many of them!). The great responses, comments and suggestions that people have been sending in the last week made me realize that when you have an idea that you believe in, you really should work on it. Turns out, other people might like it and believe in your idea as much as as you do!

I’d like to thank all the nice people I got in touch with this year in Mozilla Brazil and the greater community: Marcio, Mario, Clauber, Fernando, Andrea, Mary and Chris. And congratulations to every developer who joined the contest! Let’s keep spreading the love for Firefox!

We broke the million mark for worldwide pledges to get Firefox 3 on Download Day thanks to all of your hard work!  Kudos to the Firefox community.  This is quite a feat.

It’s not too late to keep spreading the word.  Here are some easy ways to get involved:

• Plan or attend a Download Fest.
• Add our site badges to your blog, profile or website.
• Join one of our social networking groups.
• Follow us on Twitter.

Again, we’ll let you know the actual date for Download Day as soon as we can!

A huge thanks to everyone for pledging and helping spread the word!  We’ve exceeded 700,000 pledges to help set a Guinness World Record in less than a week!

Our dedicated community got to work quickly to support the effort from all corners of the globe.  Some highlights include:

• Over 16,000 people have joined the “Firefox World Record” Facebook group
• Abdul Azis of Indonesia created a Facebook application
• The team from Mozilla-Mexico created a “how-to” for registering a Firefox 3/Download Day party and is furiously spreading the word!
• Mattijs De Smedt of Belgium developed a Wordpress plugin
• Ehsan Akhgari took upon himself to track pledges vs. region populations

I could go on and on about all the great work everyone is doing!  Please post a comment if you’ve heard of any other cool things people are up too.  We’d like to continue highlighting all the hard work.

Keep it up!

The New York Times ad…Firefox Flicks…the Firefox crop circle…Operation Firefox…you name it!  The Firefox community is always up to some cool, collaborative way to declare their passion for Firefox.  What better way to do this than band together to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours?!

It’s a whole lot easier and safer than donning a beard of bees or underwater jump roping. All you have to do is download Firefox 3 when it goes live on Download Day — some time in June. In the meantime check out Download Day Headquarters and pledge to download Firefox 3.  We’ll let you know when Firefox 3 goes out the door, kicking off our 24-hour attempt.

Here are some other ways you can help in the run up to Download Day:

* Get the word out; tell your friends, your neighbors, your grandma, anyone and everyone to participate in Download Day.
* Host a party to download Firefox; you provide the people and we’ll provide the party favors.
* Put a Download Day badge on your blog, profile or website.

With your help the Firefox community can go down in history!  If you have any questions or ideas please drop us a line at worldrecord @ mozilla.com.