Mozilla Trip To Pune, India
Over the next few days, it’s likely that Arun, Ragavan, and I will post a few write-ups about our trip, describing all that we did and doing a bit of a postmortem (a very popular Mozilla term that isn’t so literal here since we have so much growing and happening In India).
Our first big event was the three-day conference at gnuNify ’10 held in Pune. On Friday, February 19, we held an entire track to chat about Mozilla. Arun gave a talk on web standards that seemed to be a crowd favorite throughout the entire trip. Ragavan chatted about Mozilla Labs, and, since all of our Indian localizers are there, I invited Axel to join so we could chat about the new project “l20n” which I’ve blogged about in the past. The rooms were pretty packed, in some cases, standing room was the only option.
I was particularly pleased that about half of our localizers cut out of work early on Friday to see Axel and me. Not only did we chat about l20n, but we reviewed a new locale (मैथिली Maithilī), worked on moving Oriya out of beta status, and caught up in person with some of our most dedicated community members.
On Sunday, we held our annual entrepreneurs breakfast with local web entrepreneurs in Pune. Arun lead the morning with a detailed discussion about the Open Web, covering the following:
- The Open Web as a platform
- Future of video on the Web
- Device orientation events in Firefox
- Font issues on the Indian Web
- The geolocation API
- WebGL and 3-D graphics
At the end of session, we held a small workshop where we split the groups into teams of three and asked them to come up with entrepreneurial ideas that encapsulated all that we had discussed. The groups were given 10 minutes to come up with their ideas. Then, each team had one minute to present to the audience. We served as a panel, questioning about the idea, potential business model, etc. Of the ideas we saw, four stood out:
- A “Typekit.com” for indian languages – typekit.in
- e-learning classrooms for physically impaired – using video capabilities of HTML5
- A video mashup app – something like online maps with text to speech audio and video
- Using the geolocation API from Firefox – giving users local search results through a map website
Everyone’s ideas were great, but we selected these as standouts and gave the winning team some Mozilla stuff. We chose the e-learning idea. We offered to follow up on specific ideas and questions if anyone had them. The team that came up with the geolocation API use-case has already started their business and intends to experiment with the technology and promote Firefox on their local map website.
In conclusion, the event in Pune was a great weekend for us to kick off our Indian adventure. We landed into familiar arms since we presented at gnuNify ’09. Because of that, we saw many faces we already new and were able to really push our conversations to very technical levels and Mozilla-related ideas.
That was a great feedback about your experience.. Hope to participate actively in future with more innovative ideas..