Glaxstar is one of a few software companies focused on developing Mozilla-based solutions. The Paypal extension, del.icio.us integration and Spread Firefox are among its most relevant products. I talked with Ian Hayward, Glaxstar’s co-founder about Glaxstar and its most recent release: Glubble, a Firefox parental control extension reviewed here in Mozilla Links.

Mozilla Links: Tell us about Glaxstar, what has it been doing?

Ian: Glaxstar began properly early 2004 after a personal R&D project developing upon the Mozilla suite. By 2004 I’d hired my first two employees working full time on the project. The project was based around my idea to put parental controls into the browser itself by personalizing the UI and functionality of the browser based on who was using it, i.e. adults or children.

During this time I flew to USA to meet the Mozilla team back in the days when they were in Villiars St. I think the Mozilla foundation comprised about 9 or so people back them, a cool place with the “soda can bridge”. Anyhow Mozilla liked what we were working on and of course as the year progressed we started to build on the Firefox code base, the idea was from the beginning not to fork the code, not to produce a “new” kiddy browser but to produce an elegant super-add-on that enabled a children’s version of Firefox to co-exist within the core browser, that could manifest itself on a sign in. The aim of course for me was to enable the forthcoming Firefox browser to appeal to families with small children.

From that point on I kept in touch with Asa and the folks at Mozilla and things kind of naturally grew from there. Firefox launched and as we all know spread like a bush-fire and as Firefox’s popularity grew companies started to look around for  teams who could produce add-ons and Glaxstar found itself working with companies like Nike and Google to author the Yoga.com 2006 soccer World Cup companion for Firefox which was a super success with over 2 million active users in a matter of weeks from launch. Some of the code from that now lives in the Personas extension by Chris Beard. We wrote the first official del.icio.us extension for them before they were purchased by Yahoo, and later on we worked with Yahoo to co-author the second Yahoo/del.icio.us extension while helping train their new in-house team.

So along the way we’ve been keeping busy working for blue-chip clients while not making a big noise about it and more work comes in via word of mouth and all the time.  We also ghost author Firefox Add-ons too. Up to the present day our most recent work was the official Mozilla eBay companion, we wrote that too, each time working very closely with the client and Mozilla’s razor sharp user experience team, we’ve learned a great deal from them over the years.

So in short, we share Mozilla DNA, everything we do has to benefit the growth and adoption of Mozilla open source technology because we believe in Mozilla’s mission and Firefox’s purpose to promote choice and innovation and freedom on the web.

I’ve been lead admin of www.spreadfirefox.com for past couple of years too and Glaxstar has maintained the site built on Drupal CMS. We recently helped rolled out a new version of the site. I think Mozilla is about to take community marketing to a new level. It’s great to see them growing over the years into a formidable size. One thing I can vouch for is that they have always been a formidable team. I think that’s what impresses we most about them. The passion of 9 or so people has maintained to a size of 90 or so and they are still essentially the same company as they were with the crazy “soda can bridge in Villiars Street. Glaxstar is now at 23 full time people and we are hiring like crazy at the moment, lets hope we can keep our culture steady too.

ML: Where does the name Glubble come from?

After many hours of painful discussions with many experts, my Glaxstar co-founder Willem called me up one day on the phone and said, “You know what, how about Glubble because it sounds like “Glubble”.

I went home and asked my almost-seven year old to spell it and she could, because phonetically the ‘gler’ (Gl) in Glubble is strong and the rest of the word sounds like bubble (which she could spell) so that was it, Glubble it was. No other reason really except its a hard word to say with a frown, easier to say with a smile :)

Do you plan to support other languages through localization?

Oh yes this is my hope. I hope people will rally round Glubble and come help us with other languages, the issue is not the localization of the software or web-app and sites that’s the relatively easy part. The issue is end user support.

I’m a big believer that if you ship a product in a local language then you should be earnest in helping people to use it too. If I only spoke French and I downloaded a French version of the software I’d probably be very disappointed to find I could not get any help by communicating with the company in French, especially if I didn’t speak English.

What would really like to happen is for people who want to help spread Firefox to families of young children and their friends would step up and offer to help moderate localized user forums, as soon as we can do that we can localize in their language.

I’ve seen first hand just how many really good people there are out there contributing in the Mozilla community, I see that people do care about doing things for the common good, Glubble is very much in that spirit.

What about custom Glubbles?

Ah yes, custom Glubbles, you see it already don’t you :) Yes custom Glubbles are coming, today parents can create one Glubble of their own, in the near future they will be able to create more (for free of course) and share them with other parents.

Moving on from that in the product development pipeline will come the ability for people to publish their own Glubbles into the Glubble library for other parents to choose from.  The publishing system will use a reputation rating system so that people can decide what they will and won’t trust for their children. There will also be commercial Glubbles, or I should perhaps rather say, professional/business Glubbles where companies can publish Glubbles and we’ll vouch for their authenticity.

Do you plan to make it compatible with Firefox 3 before final release?

Yes we do, we’ve already done a whole lot of research in preparation, we are not publishing builds on the nightlies because of the nature of the product being parental controls. Our QA is pretty stiff now and we can’t allow our “Golden Rule” to be broken by underlying bugs.

Do you plan to support OpenID or other identity mechanism?

Not at launch now but we want to. I believe identity is personal (sounds obvious right?) in a way most apps and commercial companies are yet to realize. I subscribe to the open-id mailing list and see weekly progress. It’s an exciting pioneer of the silo-less word.

I’m really interested in seeing how we can hook identity mechanisms into the  ’personalization engine’ that forms the basis of Glubble’s identity management for augmenting Firefox depending on who is signed in. We’ve already told Mozilla the personalization engine will be donated under MPL for free and open development, I’m looking forward to working with new peoples yet unknown to see how that works out.

Is Glubble, open source?

It’s going to be published largely under the MPL code license yes, open source is very important to us here at Glaxstar. There are parts of the code that handle client side data using SQLite that we are not sure yet if we can open source due to privacy policies, but we are paying lawyers lots of money right now to give us these answers. If it was 100% our choice it would all be open source.

Do you intend to make versions for other browsers?

We get asked this question all the time, I know your asking it in a different way Percy :)

But usually people ask it terms like this,  (imagine the big gruff business voice now) “Hey, you’ll need an IE version to get the most eyeballs right?” at which point I usually smile and say, “Well you know, let’s see. One thing I do know is that IE users don’t care which browser they use, they’ve never made the choice. Maybe with Glubble we can offer one more good reason to get Firefox and more IE users can join the other 150 million Firefox users who have made that choice already”

The short answer is we will see what users want. Glubble’s mission is to protect kids on the web by proving parents and cares with a fun, easy to use tool that lets them decide what their children see online.  It would be foolish in the long term for any idealism or personal choice of platform to stand in the way of that mission. But let’s see. The hope is that we can launch something that makes the adoption of Firefox part of it’s core mission. It’s cool to see companies like Stumble Upon do well. They started off with a Firefox Add-on and then the IE Add-on came later. Maybe we can break the mold and show a product can become successful on Firefox alone. Let’s see!

How is it intended for Glubble to drive revenue?

Well, first of all it’s probably best to make it clear that Glaxstar has been supporting itself with revenue from third party client projects, some of them quite large, and we’ve also got some good private investors on board who also believe in the vision and mission to provide free parental control for children on the web.

In the future we’ll build optional premium services into Glubble that deliver benefits to busy parents and their extended families. We have many ideas in the product pipeline, but for the core child protection that you see today, usage will be free. We’ve also provided many Glubbles for free too for parents to choose from.

What is next for Glubble? 

Focus on serving our early adopter user base. We had 40,000 families download and take the proof of concept beta for a test drive since June 2007. During this time the email feedback we’ve had (plus forum) has been invaluable for us in helping us shape a product that parents want to use. They told us it has to be about the fun and discovery online for their youngsters. They are tired of the scare tactics of parental control software trying to sell them something for 50 bucks that filters content without regard for values or culture, so we are going to continue to work hard on making Glubble better for them and their children.

We have a full time team of engineers who will continue to work on Glubble each and every day so expect to see some great improvements in the coming months as we help even more families online.