I’m catching up on some older info so there’s some articles from last week here but all relevant to Asia.
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.
Yahoo! Japan has launched their re-designed home page (it launched earlier this year actually) and the Firefox for Yahoo! Japan is showcased (scroll down, on the left.)
If you are a Yahoo! Japan user, this version of Firefox ships with the Yahoo! Japan toolbar installed and should be helpful.
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.
