Five Years of Firefox in Manila Done!

The Five Years of Firefox in Manila event was held yesterday and it was a great launchpad for the Mozilla Philippines Community.

I, along with Community coordinators Ren-Ren Gabas, Allan Caeg, and Mozilla Campus Reps from Colegio San Juan de Letran Calamba led by Joell Lapitan, came at 12 noon to make the necessary preparations at the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) in Makati City. Since the event was scheduled at 3:15, we had enough time to iron out the logistics and event flow. Also, we had great support from the AIM folks in the event management.

People started trickling in at 2:15 and the heart snacks were served. In line with the Philippine community theme, we had Filipino delicacies for the food. (Yum!)

We started a but late at 3:30 with around 70 people in attendance. The program proper was kicked off by Allan Caeg, who had a short welcome message and showed the “Light the World with Firefox” video:

Ren-Ren Gabas then had a short talk about the Mozilla Campus Reps initiative and I then followed up with the Five Years of Firefox in Manila talk and introduced the official Mozilla Philippines Community website and invited the people join.

Globe Telecom also showcased the Web2Mobile add-one where Globe subscribers can send SMS and MMS via the Firefox, with a very intuitive interface. This demo drew a lot of “ooooh”‘s from the audience. On a side note, the app will be launched soon and this was a project by a couple of Computer Science students from the University of the Philippines – Diliman. Then came the most awaited portion: the raffle.

I think most of the Firefox fans who came to the event really wanted the special edition Firefox shirts we gave away, but we could only give out five shirts. 🙁 Maybe we can have more in the future. 😉 But nonetheless, no one went home empty handed as we gave everyone little Firefox goodies.

If you ask me, the event was able to introduce the Mozilla Philippines Community in a nice way and it was able to make people look forward to the next set of events. 😀

A huge thanks to everyone who came and those who helped, I hope you will be a part of the Mozilla Philippines Community moving forward. 😀

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Here are some photos of the event, courtesy of Aja Lapus and Joell Lapitan:

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One final thing: props to my fellow bloggers/Firefox fans who were there:

• Juned Sonido
• Jane Uymatiao
• Rochelle Sy Chua
• Ia Lucero
• Eugene Alvin Villar
• JC John Sese Cuneta
• Marvin Beduya
• JP Manahan