Some weeks ago, I was greatly surprised to receive a kind invitation from Mozilla to join the Mozilla Summit 2008, the great all-Mozilla meetup at Whistler, BC. To say I’m thrilled to meet some of the great good guys who make the Mozilla project a reality is an understatement.

But, as usual I’ve waited ’til the very last moment to share this with you (I’m at Philadelphia waiting for my 6 hours connection to Vancouver, after a 4 hours ride from San Juan, Puerto Rico), but hopefully I will be able to share some of the experience of talking about the future of Mozilla and even a release with you all, as Firefox 3.1 alpha 1 is expected to be released tomorrow, driven by Mike Beltzner, directly from Whistler.

So, what do you want to know? If you’ve ever wished to be there at some Mozilla event to learn or ask someting please let me know and I’ll do my best to get it for you.

Mari, Percy, and Cami, I already miss you! :(

Whether you want to help other Firefox users, learn about the tools available to help others and the innards of some Firefox 3 features, or talk to some of the main drivers of Firefox 3 and Mozilla, Support Firefox Day is for you.

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Earlier this month, Ziff Davis business oriented publications, eWeek, CIO Insight and Baseline, published its list of the Top 100 Most Influential People in IT which “looked for people who not only had a tangible track record of IT success, but also have far-reaching influence, the ability to effect change and a deep level of engagement in developing emerging technologies.”

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Ten years ago, following an astonishing announcement on early January, Netscape opened the source code of Communicator 5, Netscape’s suite of Internet applications, effectively starting the Mozilla Project. Read the rest of this entry »

Music, film and web festival, South by Southwest starts tomorrow. You may join some mozillians who will participate in panels starting next Monday.

Aza Raskin will be at Core Conversation: Designing for “Oh No!”. Monday 10 @ 11:30 - 12:30pm.
Brendan Eich will be at Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again panel, sharing views with Opera and Microsoft folks. Monday 10 @ 2:00-3:00pm.

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Ten years ago, Netscape announced it would release to the public the code of its flag ship product, Netscape Communicator 5, making it an open source product. The action came at a time when Netscape was still the dominant web browser: 65 million users and 90% market share in the educational segment according to Netscape’s own accounts. But Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was grabbing share at a furious pace thanks to it being free (at a time Netscape was about$30) and specially the fact that it came bundled with Windows 95 and upcoming Windows 98 (released on June 1998).

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TechCrunch reported today that Mozilla has hired Aza Raskin and two other founders of Humanized, a Chicago-based software development company with a deep emphasis in user interface innovation.

For example, Enso, Humanized flagship product, is a launcher that quietly stays behind the scenes that you can access pressing and holding down the CapsLock key to bring a command line to launch applications, documents, perform simple calculations, minimize/maximize/switch windows, perform a Google search and other common tasks. Coincidentally (or not), Enso was made a free product today. Read the rest of this entry »

Former Mozilla Corporation Chief Operation Officer, John Lilly, has been appointed CEO, succeeding Mitchell Baker on the role.

Mitchell will remain as Mozilla Corporation and Mozilla Foundation’s Chairman.

On a blog post, Mitchell explains that the announcement is more about a title change, since in practice, John has been performing CEO tasks for a while now: “John and I have been unconsciously moving towards this change for some time, as John has been providing more and more organizational leadership. It is very Mozilla-like to acknowledge the scope of someone’s role after he or she has been doing it for a while, and this is a good part of what is happening here.”

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Henry Blodget, a stocks analyst for Silicon Alley Insider, published today an exercise on how the Mozilla Corporation could go public. The theory:

• With a current profit of $35 - $100 million after tax he values it in the range of $1.5 - $4 billion for an IPO (Initial Public Offering).
• It could happen this or next year.
• It would generate a boatload of money. Stock options will be distributed among core contributors with a four years vesting to ensure their continued participation.

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As part of the Mozilla project efforts to improve support for Firefox, it unveiled yesterday its Live Chat option. It comes as a third tier of support that follows the Firefox Knowledge Base, a complete rewrite of mozillaZine’s Knowledge Base that started on past July and the Support Forums opened a few months ago and currently in beta status.

Users who have tried live chat  with any provider in the past should recognize it as the most effective way of providing support: one on one.

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