Mozilla in Asia

As some of you saw on the Foxkeh blog and the Mozilla blog, the Japan team has launched a new promotional campaign called Discover Shiretoko in collaboration with the non-profit Shiretoko Nature Foundation of Hokkaido, Japan.

The Discover Shiretoko site itself showcases four stories which show how both Shiretoko (the UNESCO World Heritage Site in Japan) and Shiretoko (the code-name for Firefox 3.5) have a number of commonalities and, as my colleague William Quiviger said more eloquently than I did,

“aims not only to inform the public about the philosophy, mission and activities of Shiretoko Nature Foundation and Mozilla, but also to make clear that the power of many can change our environment’s future.”

Please visit the site to see the stories about Firefox and Shiretoko.

To promote this collaboration between Mozilla and the Shiretoko Nature Foundation, we worked with the Yasuaki Kakehi Laboratory, of Keio University to create interFORest, a site where participants can receive a banner to promote Firefox and Shiretoko on their own websites and blogs as well as see the other promoters. (Those of you who are keen will note that we worked with Dr. Kakehi’s team last summer to promote Firefox 3.0 as well.)

The interFORest site is pretty interesting so I wanted to point out a number of features of the site that are described on the about interFORest page but that might not jump out at you immediately unless you knew to look for the features.

On the home page of the interFORest site (see image above, also known as “Bird’s Eye View”, it shows a virtual map of the Shiretoko peninsula of Hokkaido, Japan):

Click through to any tree to get to the “Close up view“:

Then click on the tree again:

Also we’ve made a point to build the interFORest site with web standard technologies, specifically Canvas, which is currently unavailable in Internet Explorer. If you visit a site that is hosting a Discover Shiretoko banner with IE, you get a sad Foxkeh who hopes you will visit with a browser that supports Canvas, which would be Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

We’ve already seen a number of Japanese Internet media sites pick up the story:

「知床の自然もFirefoxもボランティアが育てる」—MozillaがWebサイトDiscover Shiretokoを開設

樹が育つ不思議なバナーで広めよう！世界遺産「知床」と「Firefox」の感動ストーリー

Mozilla Japanと知床財団、環境保護を訴える共同サイトをオープン

知床財団×Mozilla Japanによる「Discover Shiretoko」キャンペーン

モジラジャパン：クリックで木が育つ　知床環境保護のネットプロモーションを開始

Mozilla Japanと知床財団は6月23日、共同で「Discover Shiretoko」キャンペーンを実施すると発表した。

Mozilla Japanと知床財団、新感覚のネットプロモーションを開始

Firefox 3.5と世界遺産・知床の関係　樹木が育ち、森になるバナーをどうぞ

In addition to these Japanese media, in the first 24 hours since the launch of this campaign, we’ve had over 500 sites join our promotion, which is wonderful.

This promotion runs through August 31, 2009 but may be extended if the community deems it important to do so.

Please visit Discover Shiretoko, sign up for a banner at interFORest and help us promote Shiretoko and Firefox.

Mitcho’s presentation on the localization of Ubiquity at Tokyo 2.0 last night is up on Vimeo: Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

Slides here on SlideShare

I’m attending the 2009 MSC Malaysia Open Source Conference.

See more photos at Facebook | Sumardi Shukor’s Photos – MSCOSCONF2009 – Conference Day 1

For some background on this event, Yoon Kit has a good overview of how far the Malaysian government has come but also has some good constructive criticism for the organizers of the event. I highly recommend his blog post at Open Malaysia Blog – MSCOSCONF.

In the morning of the first day, I gave a presentation in the Community Track. I was scheduled to talk about Firefox 3.5, Fennec and Bespin, but at the last minute I decided to change my presentation to focus on HTML 5 and web standards. I did not want to come off as just focusing on Mozilla software so I decided to re-do my presentation to this:

Open Source Powers the Open Web: HTML 5, JavaScript, and the importance of open web standards (download in OpenOffice Impress format or pdf format.)

In the afternoon, I was on a panel discussion about open source and innovation.

Can Open Source bring about your next Innovation Breakthrough ?

Panel Speakers
1.Dato’ Dr. Kamaljit Singh, GIRC
2. Tengku Farith Rithaudeen, SKALI
3. Gen Kanai, Mozilla Corp
4. Ang Chin Han, Bytecraft

MODERATOR: Dr. Raslan Ahmad, MOSTI

Download my presentation in OpenOffice Impress and pdf.

I sometimes use Slideshare, and if that’s what folks would prefer, I can upload the presentations to Slideshare but I spent a portion of my presentation slagging Flash so it seemed a bit strange to then go use Slideshare (which is all Flash.)

I’m happy to take questions via email or via comments to my blog.  Unfortunately the network connection at the conference was not as stable as I needed it to be to demonstrate some of the heavier open video demos, so if you came to my presentations, please download them to see the links to the demos I wanted to show.

In a recent post at Ken Kovash’s Blog of Metrics regarding Firefox in Latvia passing 50% market share, Indonesia was ranked at 63% market share. With such a love for Firefox, it’s also great to see that Indonesia has finally had it’s first Mozilla event last month.

Romi Hardiyanto, Mozilla’s localizer for Bahasa Indonesia, led an afternoon of presentations on Add-ons for Mozilla at ITS Surabaya, a university in the second-largest city in Indonesia. Romi has a great write-up of the event, Mozilla Day at ITS, at the brand new Mozilla Indonesia blog.

A photo of the students

HΛniF: Hadits, Now in Firefox

Photos from the event are available at Romi’s Flickr, Aini-san’s Picasa and Kiki’s Facebook.

I would like to take a moment to thank Romi Hardiyanto, Mozilla’s tireless Bahasa Indonesia localizer for Firefox who, in addition to localizing Firefox for Indonesians, is also working to spread Firefox farther in Indonesia. Thank you Romi!

This event would also not have happened without the support and coordination of Nur’ Aini Rakhmawati of ITS Surabaya who hosted the event. Thank you Aini-san!

Thank you also goes to Mary Colvig who provided support from Marketing/Events.

Since there has been so much interest in Add-ons in Indonesia, we would like to explore the possibility of doing a similar or related Mozilla-focused event in Jakarta later this year, after the launch of Firefox 3.5.  If you would like to have a Mozilla event in Jakarta, please feel free to comment and leave your email so we can contact you.  We are looking for people in Jakarta who would volunteer to help us with some of the organizational work to create such an event.

Here is Romi Hardiyanto’s presentation on Add-ons (in Bahasa Indonesia, not English.)

Here is Kiki Ahmadi’s presentation on the PureZilla add-on.

Thank you Romi and Aini-san and everyone who made Mozilla’s first event in Indonesia a success!

While not directly browser-related, this news is Japan and Unicode-related, so is tangentially interesting.

Markus Scherer, Mark Davis, Kat Momoi, Darick Tong (Google Inc.) and Yasuo Kida, Peter Edberg (Apple Inc.) are proposing to add 674 characters to the Unicode standard in order to support emoji in Unicode.

As of December 2008, there are 110.4 million cell phone users in Japan (about 87% of the population), and about 90.6% of the cell phones are 3G-enabled for internet use. Emoji are widely used, especially by people under 30. However, a June 2007 survey of 13,000 users — 80% of whom were 30 or older — found that even among this older group, 78% “often” or “sometimes” used Emoji in emails. Respondents reported using a wide variety of Emoji, including Emoji for faces, emotions, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals, etc. Especially among younger users, email is mostly or exclusively used on cell phones instead of computers. Among cell phone users, 90% use email primarily on cell phones, and 60% use email exclusively on cell phones. Emoji have been used on Japanese cell phones for 10 years, and there is no evidence that use of Emoji is decreasing.

Proposal for Encoding Emoji Symbols

I know this data to be true and yet it’s still a stunning fact: 60% of cell phone users in Japan use email EXCLUSIVELY on cell phones and 90% of cell phone users in Japan use email PRIMARILY on cell phones. This is a stunning fact, and the key is that mobile carriers in  Japan do not support SMS. Mobile phone messaging in Japan is email.

It’s interesting to see Google and Apple cooperating here as both Google and Apple have a need with the iPhone and the Android device that’s planned to be launched by NTT DoCoMo this year for emoji support.

via What Japan Thinks.

Japanese programmer and blogger, Yusuke Kawasaki, has a nice post looking at various efforts around 3D in the browser with JavaScript and Canvas since 2006: The history of JavaScript’s 3D tech development.

Before most of popular browsers start to support canvas “3d” context, we JavaScript developers have struggled how to implement to enable 3D by JavaScript without any extensions like Java, Flash, etc. Here is a part of the history of JavaScript’s 3D tech development.

Kawasaki-san also covered Satoshi Ueyama’s recent work on 3D in JS and Canvas back in February, if you had missed it: Incredible JavaScript+Canvas 3D demos from Japan!

Ueyama-san, the programmer who made those 3D demos, is the same programmer who did those Gecko reflow videos (Japanese) that were widely blogged about and discussed at Doug Turner’s blog: What is a reflow?

EDIT: Unfortunately those reflow videos are no longer available at Google Video (grrr). I’ll see if Ueyama-san can upload them to a different video hosting site.

EDIT 2: Gecko reflow videos have been moved to Youtube thanks to Ueyama-san!

Gecko Reflow Visualization – google.co.jp

Gecko Reflow Visualization – mozilla.org

Gecko Reflow Visualization – Wikipedia

Karl Dubost, who has recently left the W3C, has a proposal for Data Independence And Survival Best Practices that he is looking for feedback on. If you are interested in this topic, please take a moment to consider his proposal and provide feedback to him (not me.)

A few weeks ago, Franck Martin emailed me to let me know that a group that he is working with is localizing Firefox into Fijian. If you’d like more information or would like to contribute to the Fijian Firefox, please contact Franck at Avonsys.  We look forward to have Firefox in Fijian as an official localization in the near future.

Firefox in Fijian

The team is made up of ICT Officers Navishkar Rao, Atama Seru and Rupeni Joji lead by Chief Technology Officer, Franck Martin.

Rao says that a Fijian translated version can be useful in Fijian language studies and can be a great introductory tool to web browsing, “especially for those that may not have a great grasp on English”.

He adds that those unable to understand English will be able to navigate their way around the worldwide web just as easily as any other English speaking individual.

“We’ve just torn down the language barrier, allowing Fijian speaking users the privilege of navigating the web.”

Avonsys makes an alpha release of the world’s first ever Fijian Web browser

Ancient proverb: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Surprising news from South Korea – Google and Yahoo working together.

The Korea Times: Google, Yahoo United in Map Services.

This would be unheard of anywhere else in the world where Google and Yahoo are the fiercest of competitors. However in Korea, where Naver is the market leader (75% market share), and Daum second, Google and Yahoo are not relevant for most Korean web users (with perhaps the exception of Flickr, which is available in Hangul, and YouTube. UPDATE: not even YouTube is popular in Korea.)

The two global giants have been stressing the need for creating an “open environment” in Web services, obviously to compete with Naver’s massive walled garden, and Google Korea managing director Lee Won-jin said his company’s partnership with Yahoo is an extension of those movements.

“Korean Web portals have a reputation for their closed services, and this has been hurting innovation in the Korean Internet industry,” Lee said.

“The sharing of content between us and Yahoo could mark an important first step toward an open Web environment in the Korean Internet sector and inspire innovation,” he said.

Personally, I think the fact that there is only 1 web browser used in Korea is a larger issue than anything related to specific content.  How do you launch next-generation web-based applications if the only browser you can code for is IE6/7?  For example, maybe you have a new mapping application that has embedded videos (where have I heard this before?) but tests show that the service is significantly slower in Internet Explorer, even the shiny newest version. As a web/web apps developer you know there are browsers that are significantly faster or more standards-compliant or have add-ons functionality but your users in Korea can’t use anything but IE, because nothing in Korea works besides IE for any website that requires a secure connection.

So Korea, which was the earliest nation to launch real broadband, is now stuck in a sea of Microsoft-only operating systems and software.  What kind of Internet is it when you can have 1 Gbps broadband in Korea with no choice of operating system or web browser?

If Korean Internet businesses were truly interested in an “open environment” in Korea, they would work together to change the monoculture of the web browser in Korea.  Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer That Koreans are forced to use a particular computer operating system and web browser for the Internet is the true “walled garden” of Korea.

Mozilla’s fearless leader, John Lilly, is profiled (with his NSID beard) in the LA Times in both the Business and Technology sections.

The Stanford University-trained computer scientist is chief executive of Mozilla, maker of the Firefox Web browser, which broke Microsoft’s hold on the market so it couldn’t dominate the Internet the way it does computer operating systems. About 95% of Web surfers used Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in 2004; now 20% use Firefox, and other companies are offering browsers that are smarter and faster than ever before.

Browsing the career of Mozilla CEO John Lilly

“I spend more time in my browser than I do in my car. You should spend at least as much time choosing which browser you use as which car you drive. It’s your lens onto the Web. Just like the lenses in your glasses, it affects the way the Web looks to you. As we see more and more of the world through the Web, the characteristics of the lens matter more than ever.”

HOW I MADE IT: JOHN LILLY – Mozilla chief John Lilly is fired up about making a better Web browser