This post is for any of the Japanese readers I have.
ZDNet Japanさんが弊社の Brendan Eich との対談ビデオを日本語字幕で出しましたので JavaScript に興味を持つ方、ぜひご覧下さい。
ITの歴史にイノベーションを巻き起こした技術者に話を聞くシリーズインタビュー「Super Techies」。このビデオでは、現在MozillaのCTOであり、JavaScriptを開発したことでも知られるBrendan Eich氏が、シリコンバレーでのプログラマーとしてのキャリアや、Firefoxの展望について語る。
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:
Photo galleries:
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.
As reported yesterday by Internet Watch (ja) and Broadband Watch (ja), Yahoo! Japan has renewed their software download center and is showcasing both a toolbar for Firefox (Yahoo!ツールバー Firefox版) as well as the Firefox for Yahoo! Japan (available for Mac or Win.) This is good news for all of the Yahoo! Japan users who also like to use Firefox.
Of the mobile phone network providers in Japan, NTT DoCoMo (Wikipedia) is the largest provider and has the broadest mobile network in Japan. DoCoMo provides Internet access services for those people who require PC-based wireless broadband access to the Internet via DoCoMo’s ‘mopera U‘ subsidiary.
Last week NTT DoCoMo’s mopera U annouced an add on for Mozilla Thunderbird which configures Thunderbird with the settings for mopera U. The user only needs to know their email address and password (the tool configures the other server/proxy/smtp/etc. information.)
Another major ISP in Japan, IIJ, has been distributing a customized Thunderbird for their users since 2006.
While the popularity of webmail is clear, there will always be a need for a mail client and I (and the many loyal Thunderbird uses in Japan) look forward to the actions of the new Mozilla Messaging organization.
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
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.
The Firefox 3 Beta 3 release today (Firefox 3 Beta 3 リリースノート) was covered pretty well by the Japanese Internet media. I hope a few other media will come out with reviews.
Firefox 3 Beta 3が登場 [ZDNet]
Firefox 3のβ3リリース [ITMedia]
Firefox 3.0のβ第3版が公開 - β2からの変更点は1300以上 [Mycom Journal]
Firefox 3 Beta 3レビュー [ZDNet]
UPDATE:
Firefox 3 Beta 3がセキュリティ機能を充実 [Larry Dignan's article translated]
Mozilla、次期ブラウザ「Firefox 3」のベータ3版を公開
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
Internet Watch reports, IE7日本語版、自動更新よる配布開始は「2008年2月13日」 (Japanese), that Microsoft Japan will push out the automatic upgrade to IE7 to Japanese users of IE6 on Feb. 13th, 2008. (The schedule was actually announced by Microsoft Japan back in May of 2007.) I checked to make sure that Feb. 13th, 2008 is not a Friday (it is a Wednesday.)
It’s interesting to see how long Microsoft Japan has delayed the automatic upgrade to IE7. The English version came out in Nov. of 2006 and it’s almost 1.5 years later that the Japanese version will be pushed out to the majority of existing Japan-based XP/Vista owners. I have a hunch they’ve used this time to work with Japanese web sites/services to update Japanese websites to support IE7. Why the Japanese launch is a full 3 months behind other locales is probably an interesting story we’ll never hear from the Microsoft Japan IE team.
Just today, the IE team in Redmond promised us an IE8 Beta in the first half of 2008. So just as Japanese users are getting introduced to IE7, they’ll have the IE8 Beta to enjoy as well.