Impact Mozilla

Mozilla is proud to announce “Fox For All” as the grand prize winner of Impact Mozilla.  “Fox For All” was authored by Phani Kumar Vadrevu and Uttam Byragoni of India.

In total, more than 5,000 people cast a vote for their favorite plan.  While “Fox For All” received the most votes, there were several finalists who finished as close runners-up: “How Do You Firefox?” finished in 2nd place (Chicago Booth student team), “Surf On Your Own Turf” finished in 3rd (Haas business school student team), and “My Firefox” by Bruno Fleurquin of France came in 4th.

We’re extremely grateful to all ten finalists.  The degree of hard work and the diversity of ideas contributed by the teams far exceeded all expectations.  Impact Mozilla also succeeded in reaching out to groups not traditionally part of the Mozilla community (e.g., MBA students).

So, where do we go from here?

With respect to our winner, we’ll soon start engaging with Phani and Uttam to discuss possibilities for the implementation of their plan.  For our other finalists, we’ll be sending out swag as a token of our appreciation.  Impact Mozilla has been a wild success, and it couldn’t have happened without the enthusiasm of the community and strong efforts by all participants.

A slight adjustment to our recent update…

We’ll be announcing the winner of Impact Mozilla on Monday.  Thanks for your patience, and we’re excited about soon sharing the forthcoming news!

For those curious about the results now that voting has closed… we’ll be sorting through the votes tomorrow (Thursday) and announcing the winner on Friday.  The response and participation far exceeded all expectations, and we’re excited to soon announce the winning plan.  Stay tuned!

Impact Mozilla has reached its final phase – and now it’s your turn to determine the winner.  After a month of hard work, all ten finalists have returned with their developed strategies and complete marketing plans.  Here’s an overview of how things will play out:

• To judge all ten entries, simply go to impactmozilla.com/vote
• Please consider giving yourself at least an hour to read through multiple plans and to carefully consider all finalists
• The entry with the most votes wins Impact Mozilla
• Voting is open to everyone.  Only one vote per person is allowed.
• Voting closes on Wednesday, December 17th
• Mozilla then intends to execute the winning idea in early 2009

Please feel free to use the comments space on this blog to discuss your thoughts or to share your opinions on particular plans.

And Lastly, congratulations to our ten finalists for their impressive efforts!

Just a quick update to highlight today as the deadline for our ten finalists (good luck!).  We plan to have the voting page launched on Monday, Dec. 8th, with voting open until Wednesday, Dec. 17th.  Please check back at www.impactmozilla.com for details.

Before getting to the details, there some broad themes we’d like to highlight about the Impact Mozilla submissions from phase one:

• More than 300 entries were received
• Many different groups, both within and beyond the Mozilla community, contributed heavily
• The breath of submitted ideas was eye opening and great to see.  While most focused on pure marketing approaches, many revolved around Firefox product changes, partnership alliances, and Firefox add-ons.

With that said, unfortunately, we could only select ten marketing plans to move onto the final round of Impact Mozilla.  The Mozilla marketing team carefully considered all submissions.  We started by reading through all entries, eventually sorting the stronger ones into a group of semi-finalists (about 35 were in this group).  We then took these semi-finalists, stripped them of all personally identifiable information (we wanted to do as much as possible to avoid any biases from entering into the process) and shared them with a group of a dozen internal judges who hadn’t yet seen the submissions.  In the end, due to both the quality and quantity of great entries, *many* difficult decisions had to be made in the process.

Congratulations to the list of finalists below!

1. Jeremy Glassenberg
2. Percy Cabello
3. Bruno Fleurquin
4. Luke Baxter
5. Alex Polvi
6. Phani Kumar V and Uttam B
7. Andrew Stein
8. Roberto Michelassi, Elena Gorelik, Mischa Lumiere, Eileen Buenviaje, and Jason Williams (student team from The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business)
9. Mohsin Afzal, Naveed Alam, Deval Delivala, and Feng Yuan Xu (student team from Haas School of Business)
10. Pejman Pour-Moezzi, Ornwassa Siamseranee, Harvey Villarica, and Jacqueline Yuen (student team from Haas School of Business)

And please remember – you will be deciding who ultimately wins this challenge.  Once the finalists return with their comprehensive plans in early December, we’ll be hosting a public vote to determine the grand prize winner.  Stay tuned for details.

The initial submission deadline for Impact Mozilla was last Friday, 10/24.  There was a flurry of activity as we received more than 60 submissions on Friday alone.  The team at Mozilla is currently sorting through all entries and our judges will soon be selecting teams to move onto the final round of the challenge.

We’ll have another update in another week or so.  Stay tuned.

A parental consent form (required) is now available over at our Discussion Forum:
http://groups.google.com/group/impact-mozilla/files

Thanks!

Since our previous discussion, a couple other common questions have arisen…

Question: What is the age requirement?
Answer: As outlined within the official rules, “Contest is open only to individuals who are at least 18 years of age (or 20 years of age in the case of Japan).”  For those interested participants under the age of 18, we are working on making a parental consent form available.

Question: How many plans can I submit?
Answer: As outlined within the official rules, “Only one Entry per Entrant.”

For our initial post, we want to take a moment to highlight some frequently asked questions and answers…

Question: Can I submit Firefox product or feature ideas?
Answer: The focus of this competition is on pure marketing ideas.  Specifically, we’re hoping to see plans that address strategies and tactics around retaining *existing* users of Firefox (i.e., those who have already downloaded and installed the browser).

Question: Can I participate on my own? If I participate as a team, is there a size limit?
Answer: You can participation either on your own or as a team.  Please keep in mind that there is a single grand prize, so if a team were to win, it would be up to that team to split the prize amongst themselves.

Question: When I submit my plan, what format should my submission be in?
Answer: The choice is up to you as to how you present your idea to us.  As outlined here — impactmozilla.com/basic.html — we’re asking participants to craft a two page summary of their marketing idea.  Any form of submission (e.g., word document, powerpoint slides, text within an email message, etc.) will be considered.

Question: Is there a budget for my marketing plan?  Can I suggest a super bowl commercial (or other relatively expensive advertising channels)?
Answer: We’re suggesting a $10,000 budget limit for the creation and execution of your marketing plan.  You’re allowed some flexibility here as we don’t want to exclude potentially brilliant ideas based solely on small or large budgets.  A super bowl commercial is a good example of something that is beyond the means of this competition.  That said, if you can come up with an ultra creative, Mozilla-like way to make something like that happen on a shoestring budget, we’ll listen.