This is a poorly written article. Google and Yahoo! were late to the Korean market. The US search giants focused on Japan first.
The Thai community of Firefox localizers is very busy these days.
Last week they held a localization party called “House 2.0” where they worked to finalize most of the localization needed for the upcoming Thai Firefox release. This is very similar to the German Mozilla community who recently also held a “Hack’n'Cook” event. I am looking forward to the Thai locale release.
UPDATE: Molecularck has an overview of the House 2.0 Firefox Thai l10n sprint and blognone has a nice overview in Thai Firefox 3 Thai localization sprint วันที่ 2 และ 3
Firefox Thai Locale!, originally uploaded by pittaya.
1st Thai Firefox 3 on GNU/Linux (very pre-release), originally uploaded by arthit.
Firefox 3 Thai Langpack pre-alpha 1, originally uploaded by kengz.
John Markoff of the New York Times has a good piece on ‘hybrid’ organizations of which Mozilla is a good example.
They’re often referred to as “social enterprises” because they pursue social missions instead of profits. But unlike most nonprofit groups, these organizations generate a sustainable source of revenue and do not rely on philanthropy. Earnings are retained and reinvested rather than being distributed to shareholders.
The new companies, like thousands of Silicon Valley start-ups before them, typically begin as small groups of intensely motivated people dedicated to the goal of building a product or service.
The best-known examples are efforts like the Mozilla Corporation, which maintains and develops the Firefox Web browser, and TechSoup, an organization that was started two decades ago to connect technology experts with nonprofit groups. It now distributes commercial software to nonprofit groups in 14 countries. (Mozilla’s mission is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet, which it considers a social good.)
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.
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.
Links of note today, March 26th.
Some links I enjoyed today…