Mozilla in Asia

Intel® C++ Software Development Tool Suite 1.0 for Linux* OS Supporting Mobile Internet Devices
Free IDE for mobile linux development.

OECD Broadband Portal - Press release
Data on broadband growth.

Firebug 1.2 beta for Firefox 3 RC 1
Works with Firefox 3 RC 1! Might have a few bugs but please check it out.

Q&A with Isaac Mao on tech blogging in China: Censorship, and opportunity
Isaac was very helpful when we visited Shanghai in 2007 before we opened the Mozilla Beijing office.

Cisco Systems Denies Online Censorship Role in China
Cisco internal documents show otherwise.

Cisco Leak: ‘Great Firewall’ of China Was a Chance to Sell More Routers
Not surprised; very disappointed.

Cisco saw opportunity in “Golden Shield” to help fight criminals…and dissidents
Must-read from Rebecca MacKinnon on Cisco-firewall-gate.

cisco_presentation.pdf
Read and be depressed with me.

China’s All-Seeing Eye
Naomi Klein for Rolling Stone Magazine.

Open-Source File Format Is to Be a Part of Microsoft Office
Embrace & extend.

Report: JUI (Javascript User Interface) 2008 conference in Tokyo
Akky and Serkan have made Asiajin a must-read in 2008.

Firefox 3 Usability Survey
Isriya Paireepairit of the Mozilla community in Thailand would like your help with a survey he is working on for his university studies.

Metagold: A Research Blog about Nico Nico Douga
Fascinating English-language look into the hot video web service of Japan.

Economist.com Correspondent’s Diary - Tokyo food
Excellent Tokyo food blog.

Linux Foundation Opens Korean Office
The LiMoKr must be targeting enterprises or just the server market because the Linux desktop is dead in the water in Korea without support for SEED and Korea’s unique Windows/ActiveX-based encryption method.

ADDED:

.jp Registry report 2007
Lower fees, more coordination within Asian registrars, expansion of JP DNS servers, DNSSEC.  Personally, I am still on the fence with regards to i18nized domains.

• Mozilla For the Record - Vietnamese Language Pack FAQ
  If you are using the Vietnamese language pack for Firefox, please be sure to read this and take action.

• A failed viral ad: the Lenovo red laptop girl
  A fascinating look at a Lenovo ad campaign in China. It doesn’t look like a failure if everyone is talking about it.

• Browsers on the Move: The Year in Review, the Year Ahead
  Jeremy Keith reviews Mike ™ Smith’s presentation on the state of affairs of the web browser.

• The Mozillagumi’s 9th annual party will be held in Tokyo on May 31st. Presentations by John Daggett and David Tenser of Mozilla, Channy Yun of Mozilla Korea, Takagi-san of AIST, Nakamoto-san of OpenOffice.org, and a number of others. This event is free and open to the public but requires signup iirc.

• UCWeb, The Next Maxthon On Mobile?
  Gang Lu covers the crowded Chinese browser market.

• Top thirty cutest corporate mascots in Japan
  Self-explanatory.

• JPRS, CNNIC, NIDA (KRNIC), TWNIC have co-published a document looking at the support for IDN in browsers.

• We object to “Restriction of Harmful Information on Network Bill”
  The Wide Project, (a non-profit that works to promote the Internet in Japan), takes a stand against recent movements by the government in Japan to increase censorship of content on the Internet (a futile effort led by a clueless politician who wishes to blame the medium and not the users.)

Those of you who followed Mozilla in 2007 may remember our 24 hour global community event in September, Mozilla 24.

Mozilla 24 was an amazing continuous 24 hours of Mozilla events held around the world at Stanford University, Paris, Tokyo, and Bangkok all interconnected by live high-definition Internet video (and IRC). Mozilla 24 had presentations (with video) from Dr. Lawrence Lessig, Zak Greant, Dr. David Humphrey, Mike Shaver, Johnathan Nightingale, Atsushi Shimono of Mozillagumi, Masayuki Kanda of NTT, and a panel discussion on the future of the Internet with Mitchell Baker, Dr. Vint Cerf, and Dr. Jun Murai.

In Japan, Mozilla also held a music festival (photos tagged mozilla24 at Flickr) alongside Mozilla 24, the Firefox Rock Festival ‘07 (official photos). One of the community members here in Japan, Yuji, who is a car enthusiast as well as Firefox user, decided to theme his car with Firefox and show it off at the Firefox Rock Festival which was held in Tokyo to showcase a number of awesome independent musicians including Shonen Knife, Qomolangma Tomato, Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re, SLUGGER, MARS EURYTHMICS, Midori, 101a, marron, Kokusyoku Sumire, Naoya Yoshida * APO, AJI, オーノキヨフミ, and Taizo Jinnouchi.

Yuji decided to remodel his car recently so a few folks went to take video of the car on the highway.

A 708 MB mov file of the Firefox car is also available for download.

For those of you who understand Japanese, we also have two other interesting videos at firefoxccstudio.org with musician Keigo Oyamada (better known as Cornelius) and Mozilla Foundation board member Joi Ito discussing the changing state of music in the Internet age and the importance of the alternative licensing of artworks and music including Creative Commons.  Another video with Cornelius, Joi and musician Ryuchi Sakamoto also discusses similar themes.

Isriya Paireepairit (a.k.a. markpeak) Patipat Susumpow (a.k.a. keng) and Arthit Suriyawongkul (a.k.a. bact), are among the Mozilla community members in Thailand who are working to finalize Thai language support in Firefox. They recently held a bugday at the end of March and pittaya has some photos up on Flickr.  I see there are still some bugs open before we can launch a Thai localization but I’m hoping we can do so soon.

Update: Chakrad Chalayut has a great overview of the bug day here BugAThon at coffee world Silom Rd., and in Thai as well BugAThon ที่ coffee world สีลม.

Just a quick note to those of you who are in or near Boston.

Mozilla is sponsoring the first (?) conference on Internet memes: ROFLCon.

Mozilla Partners Up With ROFLCon

A number of friends of mine, including Anil Dash, Matthew Haughey, David Weinberger, and Joshua Schachter will be speaking so I highly recommend you go. I’m sorry to miss this one.

Last week Mozilla Labs GM Chris Beard was in Tokyo to present on the his view of the future of the web at ZDNet Japan’s builder tech day - open API & beyond event and the (Japan) Open Source Conference 2008 Spring.

Chris gave a presentation introducing Mozilla Labs, which was the first presentation of the Labs projects (Prism, Weave, Personas, etc.) in Japan.  Chris’s presentation was basically only images, and I don’t think we have video anywhere (unfortunately) so we’ll have to wait for the next Labs presentation for something people can download.  You can see most of the screenshots of the presentations in the photo galleries linked below.

News coverage:

• weaveでブラウザとWebサービスの融合を図るMozilla–builder tech day
• 【OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring】「ブラウザとOSの境界を曖昧にする」—Mozillaの研究機関が作る“Webの未来”：ITpro
• 「ブラウザとOSの境界を曖昧にする」、Mozillaの研究機関が作る“Webの未来”
• Mozilla Labsのトップが語る次世代ブラウザの姿 (go to the second page and click on the photo of amachang and Chris at the bottom)

Blog comments

• オープンソースカンファレンス2008 Tokyo/Spring 1日目報告 - SumiTomohikoの日記
• オープンソースカンファレンス2008(OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring)に行ってきました(1日目) - RX-7乗りの適当な日々
  
• オープンソースカンファレンス2008 Spring/Tokyo - なかむランチ
• OSC2008に行ってきた。 - 「 Firefox ×？＝！」を考えてみる、ブログ。
• Mozilla LabのChris Beard氏のお話 - ウィリアムのいたずらの開発日記
• OSC2008 での Chris Beard のキーノートスピーチ - えむもじら

Photo galleries:

• OSC2008 Tokyo/Spring
• Kazabana - 2008-02-29~03
• Open Source Conference Tokyo
• Mozilla Labs at Open Source Conference Tokyo 2008

Many thanks to Chris for coming out to Tokyo and thank you to all of the Mozillagumi volunteers for helping staff the booth and prepare the user questionnaire.  Thank you to CNet Japan for hosting and Six Apart Japan, Seki-san, David Recordon & Miyagawa-san for the initial event planning.

The owner of the Firefox Celica that garnered so much interest last summer at Mozilla 24 (original Flickr image, Asa’s blog, Neatorama) told the community in Japan that he was preparing to re-paint the car.  A few Mozilla community members went to take final photos and videos of the car.

2008-02-23.Firefox Car

Firefox Carさよなら撮影会

Chris Beard, VP of Mozilla Labs, will be in Tokyo this week for two speaking engagements.

On Feb. 28th, Chris will be keynoting at ZDNet Japan’s “builder techday: open apis and beyond.” David Recordon and Tatsuhiko Miyagawa from Six Apart will be speaking about open ID and the social graph (Brad Fitzpatrick, Read/Write Web, Google code repository.) Chris will be speaking about the “open web” from Mozilla’s perspective and will probably touch upon many of the subjects Recordon will speak about but also aspects of information that we keep in the browser and how we might share that as well. I’m afraid registration for this event is already closed.

On Feb. 29th, Chris will be keynoting at the Open Source Conference (Tokyo) - Spring 2008.  Registration (jp) will be closing soon so please sign up asap if you plan to attend.

Chris Beard will provide an overview of recent activities at Mozilla including information on exciting new Mozilla Labs development projects currently in the works. He will talk about his vision for the future of the Web and the role of open source in improving our online lives.

This is the first time for any presentation on Mozilla Labs projects in Japan and we’re very excited to have Chris in Tokyo.  Hope to see you at either of these events.

Christian Sejersen and Jay Sullivan from Mozilla’s mobile team will be in Tokyo on February 18th to speak at Mobile Monday Tokyo.  Unfortunately the event is not free (it costs 1000 yen if you pre-register) but it should be an interesting evening as Michael Smith from the W3C will also be speaking.  I hope to see you there!

This year I will be focusing more on evangelism of Mozilla in Asia and so I was glad to be able to accept an opportunity to speak about open source and Mozilla in Asia at the upcoming Lift 08 Conference in Geneva, Feb. 6-8, 2008.

My presentation as it stands right now will use Mozilla as an example of open source in Asia, looking at our situation in both East and South East Asia.  I will try to address Glyn Moody’s question about the weakness of GNU/Linux in Japan, and puncture some myths in the process, but I’m not sure there is a clear answer for this complex question.

I would very much appreciate any information you may have about the success or lack thereof of open source software in Asia.  Feel free to leave me comments here.

Also, if you are attending Lift08, please say hello and introduce yourself to me.  I look forward to meeting fellow Lift 08 attendees and hope to hear from others who are working on open source in Asia.

Jasmina Tesanovic and Gen Kanai added to the speaker program