Category Archives: Conferences

Mozilla at Mobile World Congress 2012

March 5, 2012 By in Conferences, Fun, Mozilla, Places, Technology 4 Comments

The Mobile World Congress at Barcelona this year was the first trade show that Mozilla has participated in. This is new territory for us, but given that 2012 marks the year where mobile devices will far outnumber desktops & laptops, it was clear that Mozilla has to play a central role in promoting an open ecosystem for mobile devices. However, we’re a small, community-driven software company, so putting on a professional face at a trade show like MWC to tell the world that we’re serious about our enacting our mission in the mobile space can be very intimidating. Especially when you’re sharing the floor with established industry giants; Huawei, for example, had a whole city block reserved for their “booth”. Other carriers, OEMs, and hardware manufacturers had an equally large presence at the show. At the beginning of the week, what we mostly hoped for was to sneak in, show our wares and gauge interest. What we actually got exceeded our wildest expectations.

We setup our booth at App Planet to showcase many of our products that are relevant to the mobile space: Boot 2 Gecko, Firefox on Android, the Mozilla Marketplace, and Mozilla Persona. There was a continuous stream of people, on all four days, interested in checking out demos of our various products, which meant non-stop talking for booth staff! One of the things we’re really proud of is that our booth was manned by Mozilla staff who directly work on the very same products we were show-casing. This made for some very authentic demos, and we left no question unanswered.

Boot 2 Gecko

On the first day, we made an announcement that we would be partnering with Telefónica to release an open web device, a phone based fully on HTML5, powered by Boot 2 Gecko. This really resonated with almost everyone at the event, and set the tone for the following week. I had several people come up to me at our (rather modest, what I thought would be almost unfindable) booth and ask for a B2G demo, which kicked ass (and was only finished on Sunday night, most of us only saw the working phone on the first day of the show!). One gentleman from the press even commented that it was the only news worth writing about.

This is the kind of response that really energizes the entire team and validates a lot of our thinking in the mobile space. In a world that is dominated and controlled by vertical silos like those built around iOS and Android, our call for a more open eco-system is something that many at MWC were able to understand as being important, and potentially disruptive. Imagine being able to install apps from not just one marketplace, but several, or even just being able to navigate to a web page to install an app, without a gatekeeper or a middleman.

Everyone (including myself) was blown away with the performance of B2G on the demo phones, running apps like Cut the Rope (which was recently ported to HTML, CSS & JS, thanks to Microsoft) just as smoothly as the native counterpart. Our demo had a little view source button, which you could press when you were on the home screen, the dialer app, or anywhere else; and it always put a smile on the audience’s face. This is really a phone made of the web, for the web.

Mozilla Marketplace

The natural transition from the B2G demo happens when someone asks “how do users get apps on the phone?”. Mozilla is going to be running a marketplace for apps written using HTML5 technologies. Our marketplace is already open for developer submissions, and we hope to have a consumer beta ready sometime by the end of Q2 this year.

We showcased some of our awesome partner apps that have already been submitted to the marketplace, running on a variety of different platforms: Android phones, tablets; Mac and Windows computers.

We’re going to have an awesome, community-driven app store (built on the same principles, and even the same code-base as our add-on marketplace), but it will by no means be the only HTML5 app store in town. We encourage, and even support, other companies wanting to setup their own stores; and developers are always free to self-publish apps on their own websites (adding an ‘install’ button to your website is really simple!). We’re going to be supporting paid apps on our marketplace, and also provide an in-app purchase API (credit cards supported via PayPal, and we’re also trying to support carrier billing in some countries); but because apps are built using the same web technologies used for building websites, developers are always free to setup their own payment systems.

It’s a really open eco-system, bringing the flexibility and distributed nature of the web to the app world. If you’re interested in the technical details of how this all works, I wrote a post sometime ago explaining it all. A very common question I received was “is there an SDK I can use?”, or “are there standard UI widgets we’re expected to use?”. The answer is that, this is not just another app store, developers will use the same technologies as they do today to build websites, with a few tweaks here and there (to support multiple screen sizes, and to support offline usage, etc.) to make an app. You can use any of your favorite JS frameworks, UI widgets and server side frameworks to build an app. Again, an app marketplace made of the web, for the web.

Firefox on Android

We also had lots of visitors to our booth who were either fans of Firefox and just wanted to say thanks (we love you all!) or were former Firefox users who now use a different browser (we love you too!).

The original version for Firefox on Android was built using the same front-end code (XUL) as on the desktop and had some performance problems. We’ve since re-written the entire UI to be much more smoother, and really focused on improving startup speed. We had some amazing demos of Firefox on Android phones and tablets that showcased all of these improvements, and more.

We also had a chance to demo some of the cool new WebAPIs that we’ve introduced (many of them driven by the needs of B2G!): such as camera access, accelerometer, vibration, etc. I think most of our visitors were very pleased with how far Firefox on mobile has come, with competitive performance and a smooth browsing experience. We look forward to pushing the latest nightly version into the Google Market on Android as soon as possible so everyone can get their hands on them! (If you’re an impatient daredevil, just head to the nightly page to download the latest & greatest).

That’s not all

Mozilla Persona came up a lot in conversations, as identity is the binding glue for all our projects. Enabling a really simple sign-in process on not just websites but also devices like B2G phones; while respecting user privacy and choice, is a high priority for us. We were able to do demos of a Persona based login to the Apps marketplace but also explain to everyone interested about how this is not just another login system like Facebook Connect, but rather a federated and distributed system for identity. Keep up with the latest developments in this space on the Mozilla Identity blog!

During the same week as MWC, Gary announced Collusion at TED U, an add-on that lets you discover who’s tracking you online. With the recent debate around user privacy, especially in the mobile space, it wasn’t surprising that there were quite a few people who were interested in Collusion at MWC. I was able to give a few demos of the add-on in action on the desktop computers, but unfortunately we didn’t have a version working on our Mobile browsers (something we hope to fix in the near future). It was awesome to be able to demo this at MWC and show to the world that user privacy comes foremost at Mozilla (Firefox was also the first browser to implement Do Not Track).

All in all, this past week has been pretty exciting for all of us. Firefox brought openness to the web almost a decade ago and played a key role in shaping the web to where it is today. However, as the world is changing and becoming more mobile, we’d like to bring the same values and principles with us into this new realm. At MWC, we showed the world that Mozilla is a serious player in the mobile space. We made a lot of promises, and we loved the response; now is the time to execute. I hope that at the next mobile world congress, we will have lived up to all our promises and have a pretty compelling demonstration of what we accomplished in 2012.

The web is the platform. And Mozilla is leading the charge. Onward!

Heading to Prague…

October 1, 2009 By in Conferences, FOSS, Mozilla, Places 1 Comment

I’m off to the beautiful city of Prague, or “Praha” as it is known locally, for the European MozCamp of 2009. Memories from the MozCamp last year are still fresh, and I’m definitely looking forward to this one!

On Friday, we’re going to be hosting a Labs Hackathon on Jetpack. This is your chance to get to know more about the framework that’s so easy to use that your mom could write an extension with it. Maybe not your Grandma though, you do need to know a bit of Javascript ;) The hack session will last as long into the night as needed for you folks to come up with amazing ideas for Jetpacks and implement them. Drew Willcoxon from the Firefox team and I will be on hand all day to help you, so feel free to come and poke us. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that there’s Free Pizza involved.

On Saturday, I’ll be giving a talk on Weave. With 0.7 just released, we’ll be taking a look at our current state, what’s in store for the future, and maybe a few cool demos. We’re also especially interested in engaging with addon developers to see what Weave can do to make it easier for them to add sync functionality to their addons.

Be there!

FOSS.IN/08: Summary

November 30, 2008 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Gentoo, Glendix, Hacks, Mozilla, People, Plan9, Programming 2 Comments

As a developer, I have to say that FOSS.IN/08 is possibly the most productive conference I’ve been to until now! In just 5 days, I’ve got more things done than I have in the last 5 months :-)

Let’s start with the Beacon workout: Nandeep joined us via VoIP and we got started almost immediately, thanks to the dynamic nature and small size of our project – we didn’t have any infrastructural trouble as a few other C/C++ projects with huge codebases and complex build systems did. We had a list of 6 tasks in mind, and we managed to complete 3 of them. Salil Kothadia got started with writing a PDO data backend, and promptly submitted the patch to us next day. Thanks Salil, hope you continue to contribute to the development of Beacon (thereby increasing the development team size by 25%)!

I also attended Philip’s workout on porting HTML::Template to Javascript. As mentioned on the Wiki page, we mostly worked on the design during the first half or so, and then moved on to writing a skeleton for the whole framework. I think this is an extremely interesting project, and am very happy to be associated with its birth. Hope we can continue the momentum and work until it is finished.

Perhaps the biggest take-away from the conference for me was the ability to give a lightning talk about Glendix, with several kernel hackers present in the audience. Christoph then kindly offered to review some of the patches during the workout. Even the possibility of Plan 9 binary emulation being considered for inclusion into the main kernel tree is amazing, let alone the fact that I got the guidance of an experienced kernel hacker for a good 2 hours! I think the effort was largely successful – I now have a better idea of what I need to do in order to get a kernel patch in order, and also got a few hints as to how I can implement the missing bits.

My primary focus at the conference was to give a talk on Mozilla Labs and Innovation. I think I managed to stir up a decent amount of interest in the various Labs initiatives. I covered the different ways in which members of the community can contribute, specifically focussing on Weave, Ubiquity and the Concept Series. We even covered how easy it is to actually write an Ubiquity command. I now look forward to increased participation by the Indian Mozilla community in Labs projects. Don’t forget to thank Mary for all the goodies!

All this, apart from regular conference happenings like catching up with old friends, making new ones and free swag (great mugs and t-shirts this time around) makes FOSS.IN/08 one of the most successful conferences I’ve been to so far! I can’t wait for the 2009 edition :-D

Glendix on the Web!

November 27, 2008 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, Glendix, Linux, People, Plan9, Programming 1 Comment

Glendix has been making the rounds on the web lately, with coverage from OSNews, Reddit, and even a Russian site, Linux.org.ru. It’s really motivating to see some buzz around the project, giving me the extra boost needed to push the completion of a usable release!

Some of the major obstacles that have to be crossed before making a beta-quality release are the completion of critical synthetic filesystems – especially /net and /draw. We also have to work out the kinks with per-process namespaces and union mounts. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get Rio running as a WM before an official release; if not, Plan9Port‘s Rio and WMII are good candidates.

The biggest criticism of Glendix seems to be the reasoning that Plan9 user-space tools are somehow superior to their GNU counterparts, and several people have asked us to substantiate our claims. At this point, however, I don’t think that it is really important, or even relevant. Even if Plan9 user-space tools aren’t somehow better – I think it is generally a refreshing idea to see Linux combined with a user-space other than GNU.

We’re at FOSS.IN this year, where a large number of kernel developers have gathered; and I hope to get some of their valuable input on the problems Glendix currently faces, and maybe even write some code to solve them :-)

Thanks for all the community support and critical comments, they are all very vital feedback for the project and are much appreciated!

FOSS.IN 08: Mozilla Labs, Beacon and Glendix

November 24, 2008 By in Conferences, FOSS, FOSS.IN, India, Linux, Mozilla, People, Plan9, Programming Leave a comment

FOSS.IN 2008 begins tomorrow!

It’s going to be really interesting to see how the departure from the ‘07 formula works out.

I’ll be conducting a Workout on Beacon, the web-based GuideXML editor on Day 4 (Friday). If you’re interested in contributing to a next generation AJAX powered web application and are familiar with Javascript with a bit of PHP or Python, I highly recommend dropping in!

There will also be a talk on Innovation and Mozilla Labs on Day 5 (Saturday), where we’ll take Weave as a case-study to see how ideas are incubated at the Labs. I’ll be talking about how you can contribute to the various initatives at Mozilla Labs. Or maybe you’re just curious about the future of the web and how you can help shape it. In any case, you want to be there (*hint* there will be goodies *hint*)!

Two Glendix hackers, myself and Shantanu are also going to be at the event, and there’s a whole day dedicated to Linux kernel hacking. I’m planning a lightning talk on Glendix during the gathering,  and hopefully we can gather enough interest to get some work done on some of the project’s priorities!

See you at India’s largest FOSS event :-)

IWP9 2008

November 3, 2008 By in Conferences, FOSS, Glendix, Places, Plan9 2 Comments

Continuing with my travel spree, I made a trip to Volos, Greece and back for the 3rd International workshop on Plan 9. I was to make short presentation on Glendix, a paper on which was selected for the workshop.

Being a brown single guy in his early twenties, traveling around Europe is not exactly fun. Just saying. I got picked out not once, not twice, but THREE times for “random passport and security checks”. Once in Munich on my way to Volos, once on the streets of Athens, and finally on my way back at the Frankfurt airport. Not that I’m complaning, they were just doing their job; but really, they need to get better at profiling.

Athens is a really nice city, though it reminds me of India: crowded trains, chaotic traffic and sketchy bus stations. I knew most of the Greek symbols, thanks to high school Math courses, but pronouncing them wasn’t easy. Thankfully, the people at the counters in the Airport, Bus and Metro stations knew English. After a 5 hour bus ride, I reached Volos in the wee hours of Thursday. After around 3 hours of sleep and about 30 minutes of slide preparation, I was set for my talk.

Considering I was at a Plan 9 conference, talking about integrating it into Linux, my talk was very well received. Certainly beyond my general expectations: I got some really excellent questions, comments and general observations, and most importantly, a lot of help on the current issues that Glendix faces. All the other talks during the conference were extremely interesting as well, I was particularly fascinated by the concept of “Upperware”, the Inferno port to Nindento DS, and the Mrph morphological analyzer. Do check out the entire conference proceedings.

It was great to finally meet all the Plan 9 and Bell Labs folks in-person, especially: Sape Mullender, Charles Forsyth, Bruce Ellis; not to mention the IRC regulars uriel, quintile, sqweek and fgb!

The return trip was a bit more scenic, thanks to it being afternoon. After spening the night in Athens, I was back in Amsterdam the next day. More adventures followed, but that’s for another blog post.

Nothing like a trip to IWP9 to humble you!

P.S. Cool Glenda goodies for sale at Cafepress :-)

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