Mozilla in Asia

This news is a few weeks old but I was pleasantly surprised to hear that a Firefox add-on, built by a team called kekeke, was the winner of the 2008 Yahoo! Kimo (Taiwan) Open Hack Day. If anyone has any more information about the team who won, or the add-on that was developed, please leave a comment.

The winners, kekeke, wrote a Firefox extension which allows users to select any keyword on any website and receive a summary of several Yahoo API search results (Flickr, Map, Knowlege Plus, and Lifestyle), without opening a new browser window. More relevant results will display in a stronger colour and users can save for later, or share results with friends.

I’m in Taipei, Taiwan today to speak at COSCUP 2008 (Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters), one of Taiwan’s leading OSS events.

Today, I’ll be speaking about Firefox 3.1, the new TraceMonkey announcement, and will do a quick overview of the major Mozilla Labs efforts. Tomorrow I’ll speak about Fennec, Mozilla’s mobile project.

Hope to see you there!

MozTW.org, the wonderful Mozilla community in Taiwan, is hosting a “Firefox Party 3.0” on July 19th in Taipei. I wish I could be there! I won’t mention the awesome anime robot.  If you are in Taiwan, don’t miss it!

I’m catching up on some older info so there’s some articles from last week here but all relevant to Asia.

• Firefox 3.0.0.x Intel Mac build
• Firefox lzyc build: Firefox G4/G5/Intel optimized build for Mac OSX.
• フォクすけはクリエイティブコモンズが適用されたぬいぐるみ Foxkeh is a Creative Commons licensed plush toy
• AOL Launches Taiwan Portal: AOL? In Asia? That’s very 90’s.
• Rumor: Former Kingsoft CEO Joins Browser Company: English / Chinese
• Asia’s Fight for Web Rights: excellent Rebecca Mackinnon essay in the Far Eastern Economic Review.
• Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang says company is ‘committed to freedom of expression’
• Yahoo’s Yang: No easy answers in China Net-censorship debate

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

Seth Spitzer and Seth Bindernagel and spent last weekend in Taiwan for the 2007 Taiwan Blog BoF as well as the Open Source Developers Conference Taiwan. I’ll write a more detailed post on both of these but first please enjoy a video of the famous Takahashi-san, developer of the Takahashi-method presentation style, in action taken by Miyagawa-san of Six Apart. Presentation spoken in English, slides in a mix of Chinese and Japanese, location Taipei.