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The Firefox Pizza

August 1st, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

One of the good things about the last Mozilla Philippines Community meet-up is the enormous Firefox Pizza.

The brainchild of Mozilla Student Reps leaders Joell Lapitan and Jun Barrun, the 30-inch pizza was the highlight of the meeting. The pizza itself was a great treat and the community members actually felt the pizza was too awesome to eat. (Well, we eventually gobbled that awesome pizza).

If our research served us right, this is the very first Mozilla Firefox pizza. There have been plenty of Mozilla Firefox cakes baked before, but no pizzas.  We hope that this creation will serve inspiration to other Mozilla communities in the world.

Updates on the meet-up will be posted soon. :D

Supporting New Mozilla Blogs

July 19th, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

I’ve recently written my entry to the Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs of 2010 Writing Project and I nominated a handful of new Mozilla blogs.

The first one is this site, the Mozilla Philippines Community site. I think the writing project is a good place to promote the local activities among the blogging circle and hopefully get the message of the open web to the local audience.

The next website is one of my latest faves. Rock Your Firefox is a blog that features cool and useful Mozilla Firefox add-ons. At the end of every month, the site creates a collection of the add-ons and publishes it on the Mozilla Firefox Add-ons site.

Mozilla Hacks is much more developer-oriented than the previous entries but it’s equally coon nonetheless.  It contains articles and demos of web technologies that may or may not be included in future versions of Firefox or other Mozilla software.

Finally, Mozilla Drumbeat is last Mozilla-related blog I nominated. From the site, it describes itself as “practical projects and local events that gather smart, creative people around big ideas, solving problems and building the open web. ” But simply put, it’s amashup of common activities (art, play, ideas) combined with web geekery. This received pretty good exposure in the 2010 Mozilla Summit and there’s pretty good reason for that.

I hope you find the time to visit and support the newer Mozilla blogs out there. Heck, if you can nominate them, then all the better. :D

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Just a quick note: To nominate the Mozilla sites, you must have a blog and:

  • Write a post with links to the sites you nominate, plus short descriptions. Then include a link to the contest page.
  • After writing the post, the person must go back the contest page and post a comment containing the permalink of your blog post with your nominations.

Mozilla Summit 2010: Day 3

July 15th, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

It was a great 3-day event and The Mozilla Summit 2010 concluded with a great wrap-up party. The great photo above was taken in the concluding event, with a great shot by Gen Kanai.

The day still had great sessions– I attended the ones focused on community participation, communicating well with media, Firefox 4 Beta localization, and community membership models. As you can see from the sessions and discussions I’ve joined, I’ve been putting a lot of effort in learning to make a better, more involved local community and I plan to apply the thing’s I’ve learned here.

Speaking of learnings, here are some of my takeaways from the Mozilla Summit 2010:

  • Stand For Something – What makes the Mozilla and Firefox brands effective is that they stand for something, particularly the Open Web. This should be the core for any community marketing activities and the rest will be supplemental pieces and activities.
  • Make the Message Local – I’ve realized that I’ve been approaching the Mozilla Philippines Community from an ineffective perspective. I think there should be more effort in making the language and the message more attuned to the local community, especially the language and the flavor. Expect a lot more “Pinoy”-themed activities from the Mozilla Philippines Community in the future
  • Strong + Simple = Sticky – Finally, the message to the community should be strong and simple enough to stick like super glue. Looking at the messages Mozilla has been communicating, it’s not really complex despite having deep technology underlying layers.
  • The Community should  feel awesome – I was thinking about the whole summit itself and it was far from the typical serious conferences. There were Rock Band and Wii Sports stations, places to relax, and areas to discuss while the sessions and keynotes were ongoing. I think these made folks more energized during the day, and not too sapped by the events closed. My point is that all these, along with the agenda items, made people feel awesome and resulted in awesome work.

As for areas for improvement, the weak points of the summit were the Buddy Quest activity, session hi-jacking (like a session that veers way off topic), and weakly organized Birds of a Feather meetings.

Over-all, the experience was great and makes me look forward to supporting Mozilla and help build the community stronger.

Mozilla Summit 2010: Day 2

July 9th, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

By the time Day 2 of the 2010 Mozilla Summit ended, I was very tired. But I was glad.

The second day of the biggest get together of Mozilla-folk this year was filled great activities, starting with great keynotes in the morning up to the very first Mozilla World Expo.

I also attended a talk that focused on the branding research done by a Search Engine 1. One of the funny things they found out was that some folks think that the current Mozilla logo looks like the Toronto Raptors logo:

versus

After the talks, there was a cool Mozilla Science fair where the cool projects were showcased. Then the big thing for me: The World Expo.

The World Expo is an exhibit of the different Mozilla communities all over the globe and that includes our community. We were given some space, plus an LCD display and a pair of speakers to share to the rest of Mozilla how awesome our country and our community are.

I created a slideshow of the Mozilla Philippines Community’s past activities, plus some nice tourism photos of the Philippines. I also set-up a sampling station of Filipino delicacies.  The best seller was the dried mangoes. :D

After packing-up at the World Expo, I attended a roundtable discussion with Mozilla Foundation Chairperson Mitchell Baker along with all the local community leaders. The informal session centered on Mozilla topics and local communities.

By that time, I was very tired. But it was well worth it as people liked the Mozilla Philippines Community booth and I got to interact with yet more Mozillans.

Mozilla Summit 2010: Day 1

July 8th, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

I’m here in Whistler, Canada with over 600 Mozilla employees, partners, and community leaders from all over the world and the first day was full of demos, technology, and things to look forward to in the future.

The started off with a nice breakfast here at the Fairmont Whistler Chateau and I sat with Gen Kanai, Cheng and Keng from the Mozilla Thailand Community, plus a couple of interns for Mozilla. The conversations were nice and that set the tone for the day.

The keynotes started and it was pretty cool. Personally, I found it nice that speakers didn’t rely much on slide decks, especially the talk by Mitchell Baker.

Then came the demos– they were simply mind-blowing. (If you follow the #moz10 hashtag in Twitter, you’ll read that a lot of people share my sentiments). There were stuff like 3D and graphics acceleration with WebGL, audio processing in the browser, a 3D movie rendered on the fly, processing optimization that will make Firefox 4 uber-fast, and neat Fennec stuff.

After the demos, we had an extended lunch break to let folks watch the World Cup 2010 match between Germany and Spain. Around that time, I took a nap because I was feeling the jetlag. (Manila is 15 hours ahead of Whistler).

I then attended the breakout sessions:

  • Moving from Local Events to Strong Local Communities – Great session run by event managers from Mozilla. This session had a great discussion on how to keep communities active, and I had great takeaways on event scheduling and topics. It was also a great intro to Mozilla Drumbeat. Here are the session notes.
  • Mozilla’s L10N (localization) Information Architecture – Another equally nice session by Seth Bindernagel, Christopher Howse, and Sta? Ma?olepszy. This session showed how the localization monitoring was optimized using sound information architecture methods.
  • The Mozilla Web Universe – A bit of a letdown of a session. It was a discussion centered on how to manage the 100+ websites affiliated with Mozilla. The session ended with an invitation to a potential Mozilla Web Task Force.

An hour after the sessions ended, everyone had dinner in various restaurants at the Whistler Village. I selected an Italian place and I got to serendipitously meet my Mozilla Summit Buddy. Dinner was OK, and I had a great discussion with the local community leaders from Brazil and Colombia.

I was very tired as the day ended. But Day 1 of the Mozilla Summit 2010 was a great start for an awesome event that it I’m looking forward to the next day.

Mozilla Firefox 4 Plans Revealed

May 16th, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments
Firefox 4: fast, powerful and empowering

Mike Bletznet of Mozilla shared details on the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 4. He used the terms “fast, powerful, and empowering” to desribe the additional features and updates to one of the beloved browsers out there.
The goals for Firefox 4 are, as stated from the blog:
  • Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast
  • Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
  • Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.
These features are quite relevant now, especially with HTML 5 gaining steam (*cough*Apple versus Adobe*cough*). Web Standards is always something Mozilla give focus on and Firefox 4′s attention to this is no surprise.
Another thing I’m looking forward to is the personal privacy features. Again, another hot topic with Facebook getting some heat, so this will be worth noting with Firefox 4′s release by the end of the year.

Browser Choice Screen: This Should be Global

March 10th, 2010 by Regnard Raquedan with View Comments

Microsoft Internet Explorer users in Europe now see a “Browser Choice Screen” where they can select which browser to use. This move by Microsoft is a result of the EU ruling last year that orders them to not make Internet Explorer the default browser and give folks in Europe a better way to know their options.

Interestingly enough, the options provided on the screen is randomized every time the page is loaded . I think  this is obviously an attempt to remove the bias and give a level playing field. As you can see from the screenshot above (taken from the “Microsoft on the Issues” blog), the browsers are given a brief description and the installation buttons are pretty obvious.

However, I think this feature should be rolled out globally. Yep, folks from Asia, North America, South America, Africa, and Australia should get a better option in choosing their browser. If Internet Explorer is good enough for them, then at least have folks opt-in.

My point here is the right to a clear path: isn’t ironic that we’re all inundated with information and applications that the clearest path is often obscured. In my opinion, the clearest path (in this case the Browser Choice Screen) should be enabled for all.

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