More from India, now in Kanpur

Arun and I just arrived at the IIT Kanpur and were welcomed by a crew of students led by Shanshank Chintalgiri and Surya, whose last name I didn’t catch.  Surya actually came 2 hours by car to pick us up in Lucknow at the airport.  We had a brief lunch at the Campus Restaurant and then went to the lab where we will host our three-hour workshop tonight.  At that, Arun will lead a sure-to-be spillover audience through a series of exercises where students will demo Bespin (Mozilla’s experimental Web IDE) and run through other exercises with SVG.  We anticipate spillover because last time this team hosted a kernel hacking session, they expected 50 and almost 400 showed up.

Now for some side-candy related to India. I’ve posted picture below that shows some interesting Firefox usage statistics here. These were sent to us by Chofmann to use as a talking point for the various conferences where we will present about Firefox growth.  Chofmann’s commentary:

“This one shows a great pattern of growth over 2008 almost doubling the number of active daily users from 600k to almost 1.2M current. The challenge to the students is to see if they can double the number of Firefox users again in 2009…”

Please keep in mind a few things about these stats:

1. They are a tally of anonymous pings we receive on our update server.
2. The active daily user (ADU) number translates into a higher number of actual end users that is some multiple of the ADU figure. We don’t know that multiple for India and make a guess.
3. The dip right around the year-end 2008/year-beginning 2009 is an IT glitch getting fixed.

Tags: community building, India, planet | Categories: India