Mozilla in Asia

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

Chang-Won Kim calls for an Asia-wide Internet conference in 2008:
An open letter to Asia’s web industry people - What do you think about AsiaWeb 2008?

But I don’t think I’ve seen many “pan-Asian” web conferences so far. So I think we could imagine a conference where things like these are happening…

- Keynote speeches being made by well-known tech entrepreneurs in China, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Hongkong, Taiwan, etc. as well as a host of internationally renowned speakers.

- An international launchpad where new ventures in Asia can showcase their newest products (Think TechCrunch 40 or the Demo). English translation will be provided - we all know English-speaking skills and product-development skills are two different sets of skills. VCs are more than welcome to join.

- Panel discussion between professionals from different countries where different web cultures and business environments can be compared, perhaps in search of some universal success strategies across the Asian web industry.

I think language is one hurdle but I think English will end up being the defacto language of such an event.  More importantly is location, sponsorship and organization.  That will be the challenge.  Japan only had a “Web 2.0″ event in 2007 (many years after the first “Web 2.0″ event in the US) and the Japan event was very different than any of the US ones.

I would be happy to see such an event happen and would do what I could to make it happen, but I think finding an appropriate site, an organizer and anchor sponsors is critical (and a full-time job for a team of people.)  Even if discussions started today, 2008 may be too early for such an event (if the goal is to make a very large event.)  I look forward to such an event but I don’t see any of the current incumbents (event organization incumbents) stepping forward for such an event.

Last week about 50 of the Mozilla Korea community members got together last week to share their thoughts on what Firefox means to them over dinner. Channy Yun, who is the lead localizer for Firefox in Korea and also works tirelessly to support the Mozilla community in Korea organized the dinner and shared with me some photos. Channy said,

“attendees introduced themselves with a ‘For me Firefox is [ ].’ panel. Each person explained the relationship between Firefox and oneself. And we had a late dinner together. I explained how to join the Mozilla community activities and Mozilla’s open web mission.”

There were some wonderful thoughts associated with Firefox for these Korean community members. For these Korean Mozilla community members Firefox has multiple meanings for them including, “a means of livelihood“, a “dream“, represents “Freedom“, represents “Opportunity“, or “vision“, or is as important as “Oxygen“, or represents a “challenge“, or represents “Standards“, or is “a lone wolf“, or is a “teacher“, or is the “beginning“, or even “Pride.” For some, Firefox was for them even a “pet“, a “girlfriend“, or even “Neo of the Matrix.” (Does that make Microsoft the Matrix? )

Thanks to Channy for his tireless efforts to make Firefox the best browser for Korean users and thanks to the Korean Mozilla Community for sharing your thoughts on what makes Firefox important for you. The browser market is quite challenging in Korea for historical and technical issues, but it’s clear that the Mozilla community is active and engaged.

KoMoCo Annual Party 2007 [Flickr.com]

For those of you who remember the Firefox Flicks contest, Mozilla Japan has been working with the artists’ network Loftwork and Sony’s video hosting service eyeVio to create a similar contest in Japan: the Get Firefox Video Award. The contest opened at the beginning of October and registration closed on Dec. 10th.

For those of you who don’t read Japanese, I’ll provide you a few links so you can get to the parts of the site that have the videos you may want to see.

The video gallery link is the fourth one on the left menu from the top. This brings you a page of all of the videos in a random order.

From the top tab, you can select also “video” or “cg/anime” which sorts the videos into those two types. Hayashi-san, who runs Loftwork, had told me to expect more computer-generated or animated videos when we were planning this contest and lo and behold, she was right!

On the gallery page, underneath the top tabs are 4 tabs (from left to right) for “random”, “popular”, “new” and “home town”. So you can sort the videos via these secondary tabs.

On each individual video page, there’s a small green box with a fox paw mark. That’s our voting button. If you like the video, please click the button to vote for it. Once you vote, you’ll be able to leave a comment on the video in the comment box. You can’t comment until you vote. We are giving away an award for most popular video so please do vote/comment for your favorite videos.

Finally, we’ll be announcing the winner of the video contest next week on December 18th at a party in Tokyo’s club Super-Deluxe. If you’re in Tokyo and would like to attend, please register from the home page.

If you’d like to promote our contest on your blog or website, please use one of the icons or blog widgets that we’ve provide at our “spread” page.

Last week John Resig, Mozilla’s JavaScript Evangelist, was in town to speak on Tamarin and ECMAScript 4 (i.e. JavaScript 2) at Adobe Max Japan, as well ‘The Future of JavaScript‘ an event organized by Mozilla Japan and supported by the JavaScript user community of Japan, Shibuya.JS. A few photos from John’s presentations are available on my Flickr account. The Adobe event had about 100 attendees and the Mozilla Japan event was sold out in less than 3 hours with 106 attendees. This was the second event we’ve done with Shibuya.JS (the first being Mozilla 24 where they had a very popular presentation.)

After John’s presentation, Yoshinori Takesato of Cybozu Labs presented a Shibuya.JS Digest. Yu Kobayashi, Hiroshi Shimoda of Clear Code, and amachang of Cybozu Labs also presented on the state of affairs of JavaScript in Japan and did a Q&A with Resig.

A few people in the audience blogged about the event including Jun Kaneko of Six Apart, naoya_t-san, nitoyon-san, and kawasaki-san.

共有と多様性 : The Future of JavaScript：Goodpic

Shibuya.JS×Mozilla Japan のイベントに John Resig が登場！

The Future of JavaScript メモ - てっく煮ブログ

紫ログ:The Future of JavaScript - livedoor Blog（ブログ）

We also had about 270 people watching the video stream at ustream.tv.

There are a bunch of photos from the event up on Flickr tagged ‘shibuyajs‘.

AtmarkIT (mainstream web media) covered the event:

大幅に機能を強化するECMAScript

Let me take a moment to highlight amachang-san’s presentation, ‘Fast JS XPath Engine for IE (and Safari2)’ which he has online at http://amachang.art-code.org/ejohn/

amachang uses jQuery and JavaScript to make a really cool browser-based presentation that looks a lot like Keynote but is online and searchable, etc.. The arrow keys (left and right) step through the presentation slide by slide. The up arrow key shows 20 slides at a time in a 4×5 matrix, and in the matrix mode, you can look at the next 20 slides by using the side arrow keys. The down-arrow key brings you back to the presentation slide. I highly recommend you try it- it’s quite cool.

As I had mentioned earlier in September, John Resig, Mozilla’s JavaScript evangelist, is speaking in Tokyo on Thursday at Adobe MAX Japan, and on Friday at “The Future of JavaScript” that Mozilla Japan has organized with the help of Japan’s JavaScript user group, Shibuya.JS.  Mozilla invited Shibuya.JS to Mozilla 24 earlier in September and we are happy to have their support for this event in November.  Unfortunately the talks are both sold out at this time but John will be posting his slides as he usually does.

I will be speaking briefly at the PopOut! 2007 event at Suntec City in Singapore on October 4th. If there are any Mozilla community people in Singapore, I would be happy to meet you at this event. Please leave a comment at this blog if you would be attending PopOut!

The companies that will be presenting at PopOut! 2007 include:

• Bezurk
• Quaffs
• ZopIM
• BookJetty
• Recruit.net 

As the 2007 Adobe Max Japan website has just been updated, you can see that John Resig will be speaking on “Tamarin and the Browser Scripting Revolution” on September 1st here in Tokyo. The session description is as follows:

Adobe releasing their ActionScript Virtual Machine as open source software to the Mozilla Foundation has sparked a browser scripting revolution. In this talk we’re going to look at all the new features being developed on top of the Tamarin JavaScript engine, including ways to embed Tamarin in other browsers. We’ll also look at the new JavaScript 2 language and how that’s being used in Firefox 3 to create some impressive applications.

I believe this is the first presentation on Tamarin in Japan and I think John will be covering some of the exciting new efforts like ActionMonkey, IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey. John writes more about all of these at his blog.

The video from Robert O’Callahan’s presentation in Auckland is up now. Chris Double also does a demo of offline browsing in FX3. Very cool to see Mozillians in action in New Zealand.

The Auckland Web Meetup: June Meetup - Robert O’Callahan from Mozilla on Firefox

Peter Junge has a post on the OSS World Summit 2007 in Guangzhou for ZDNet Asia’s Open Source blog.  This post was merely listing who spoke and what they spoke on.  I hope Junge has some interesting opinions about the event for his next post.