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President Obama helps kick off our new summer campaign

22 de abril de 2013 by erica with No hay comentarios »

Hacking at the White House: introducing Maker Party 2013

We’re extremely excited to be participating in today’s White House Science Fair—and even more excited to have President Obama help us kick off our new summer-long Maker Party: thousands of community-led events around the world to celebrate the amazing things we can make and learn thanks to the Web.

Webmaking at the White House Science Fair 

Today, Mozilla joined President Obama at the annual White House Science Fair, celebrating the student winners of science, technology, engineering and math competitions across the United States.

Mozilla and Hive kids at the White House Science Fair

Cathy Lewis Long from Sprout joins Zainab Oni,   Senque Little-Poole, and Mark Surman at the White House Science Fair

A student member of Mozilla’s Hive Learning Network project—16-year old Zainab Oni from MOUSE in NYC—was honored for her contribution to a wrist-mounted Arduino circuit, which helps visually impaired diners find their food. 15-year-old Senqué A. Little-Poole, from the Sprout Fund‘s Hive Pittsburgh chapter, was also honored, for his research on how to use anti-virus cells to cure diseases.

Mozilla’s Executive Director Mark Surman also was there, to talk about our efforts to teach technology skills and, with the help of the White House, to kick off Mozilla’s big summer-long campaign: Maker Party 2013.

Introducing Maker Party 2013

This summer, from June 15 to September 15, Mozilla and the National Writing Project will host dozens of partners from around the world in a giant global Maker Party. Thousands of events will celebrate the amazing things we can make and share on the Web — from video remixes, to apps and webpages, to DIY robots.

Maker Party 2013 will be the second annual summer-long party Mozilla has thrown focused on Web education and digital literacy. Last year’s campaign, the Mozilla Summer Code Party, included more than 700 community-led events, with more than 10,000 participants across 80 countries. This year the party will be much bigger—with 40+ big-name partners currently signed-up, and more to come.

Who’s coming to the party?

Maker Party 2013 is a big tent affair. We’ll be joined by dynamic start-ups, non-profits, institutions, and tech companies, including Black Girls Code, California Academcy of Sciences, DIY.org, Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, Intel, NYC Department of Education, and the Sesame Workshop. Together, we’ll be engaging more than 500,000 people to learn and make things thanks to the web. A full and growing list of the organizations joining the Maker Party is available at webmaker.org/party.

“This is a global party — and you’re invited,” said Mozilla Executive Director, Mark Surman.  “Mozillians are people who make things, and we’re part of a growing global community of people who feel the same way. That’s why this year’s party isn’t just about learning to code, but celebrating the huge range of learning, making and creating the Web makes possible.”

How to get involved:

  • Get more involved. Take part in our new “Teach the Web” open online course, and connect with other like-minded people around the world.
  • Spread the word. We’ll be tweeting our announcement live from the White House using the #MakerParty hashtag. Join in!

Mozilla’s Maker Party is a part of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Summer of Connected Learning. 

Gearing up for the Next Chapter

10 de abril de 2013 by Mozilla with No hay comentarios »

Looking towards the future of Firefox OS

Today we are announcing changes to our executive leadership team as we build up our pivot to mobile and build upon the foundation that’s now in place to accelerate into the opportunities in front of us.

Where we started

Mozilla has always believed that the Web needs to be a place where anyone can access information, communicate, create and collaborate without boundaries or restrictions.

Firefox was introduced for desktop computers in 2004 at a time when the Web was being held hostage to proprietary interests. Under the leadership of Mitchell Baker, Brendan Eich and others, Mozilla put individuals in control of their experience for the first time, and helped shape the future of the Web for the public good as an open standards-based platform for innovation.

Pivot to mobile

In 2010, it was clear that while the desktop was an important target platform, that the future is mobile. And there was an opportunity to move people to the center of their connected experience and unlock untapped potential for innovation by enabling the Web as the platform.

With a deep background in mobile, Gary Kovacs was enlisted as CEO in October 2010 to lead the organization and establish the framework to accomplish these goals. Over the past two and a half years, we’re incredibly proud of what we have accomplished:

Building mobile DNA deep into the organization, with the launch of Firefox OS, HTML5 apps and Firefox for Android, while also creating the global, operational structure to support market growth.

Delivering at the speed of the market and competition: Firefox desktop is faster, more secure, more stable, evolving faster; launched important services with Persona and Sync and Apps marketplace and added new partnerships.

Trusted consumer advocacy in public policy debates with SOPA/PIPA, DNT and more.

At Mobile World Congress 2013, we showed the world that Mozilla was now fully a mobile organization as we announced rollout plans for Firefox OS with broad industry support and commitments from 20+ partners to bring devices to market.

Aligning for the future

With a solid foundation now in place, Mozilla is entering an exciting phase – as we launch mobile devices with our partners around the globe – and a reinvigorated mission in protecting the Internet freedoms for the next 2 billion people coming online in the coming years.

To gear up for this next chapter, we are announcing the following Mozilla Corporation leadership changes:

  • Gary Kovacs, having accomplished the goals and objectives he and the team set out to achieve, will be stepping down as CEO later this year but will continue to provide vision and leadership as a member of our Board of Directors. An executive search will begin immediately for his replacement.
  • Mitchell Baker has expanded her role to become our Executive Chair as she returns to a deeper involvement in Mozilla’s daily activities. She will also focus on ensuring that organizations and individual contributors have the tools they need to make meaningful contributions to unlock the potential of the Web.
  • Brendan Eich will continue his recently expanded role as Chief Technology Officer & Senior Vice President of Engineering, managing the organization’s product and platform engineering teams.
  • Jay Sullivan, previously SVP of Products, has been appointed Chief Operating Officer. Jay will continue to drive Mozilla’s product strategy and roadmap, to lead the product and user experience teams, and to lead the Firefox OS program. He will also take a broader role in managing Mozilla’s continued evolution and growth.
  • Harvey Anderson has been appointed SVP Business and Legal Affairs. In this new role he will have oversight for the apps marketplace initiative and continue to lead mobile and strategic partnerships, public policy, and legal affairs. He will also continue to serves as Corporate Secretary.
  • Li Gong has been appointed Senior Vice President, Mobile Devices, and will be tasked with leading our global work advancing the adoption of Firefox OS on mobile devices, including engagement with our device partners, as well as delivery and support for our partners. Concurrently in the role of President, Asia Operations, he is tasked to broaden the presence of Mozilla within the mobile ecosystem in the region, outside of Japan. He remains CEO of our subsidiary companies in China and Taiwan.

Mozilla is uniquely positioned to bring the full power of the web to the next 2 billion people coming online, and our public benefit nature means that we can continue to invest in the Web as an open and neutral playing field for everyone, giving both commercial players and individuals around the world the opportunity to create and innovate. Our focus will continue to be embracing this uniqueness and expanding our efforts to be the catalyst of positive change in Web ecosystem.

For more information:

  • Quote from Gary Kovacs: “The past two and a half years have been pivotal in the evolution and rapid growth of Mozilla,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO. “I am very proud of our accomplishments as a team. In our mission to empower the next two billion Web users, we’ve made great advances in desktop and mobile and in our ability to lead at the pace of the market. With this solid foundation and a strong team in place, this is the right time for me to announce the transition plan and a vote of confidence in the abilities of the leadership team. I am grateful for the privilege of leading this organization during this period of rapid growth, and I look forward to helping guide Mozilla’s impact on the future of mobile.
  • Quote from Mitchell Baker: “Gary’s leadership has been hugely important in helping Mozilla develop deep mobile outlook and capabilities. I want to thank Gary for all the contributions that he has made to the project during this period of our evolution. I believe that we have an incredibly strong team and organization in place to lead us in writing this next chapter of Web history,” said Mitchell Baker, Executive Chair, Mozilla. “Together we will also strive to embrace our uniqueness and non-profit core, and grow with our partners and community in new ways.”

Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine

3 de abril de 2013 by beich with No hay comentarios »

Mozilla’s mission is about advancing the Web as a platform for all. At Mozilla Research, we’re supporting this mission by experimenting with what’s next when it comes to the core technology powering the Web browser. We need to be prepared to take advantage of tomorrow’s faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures. That’s why we’ve recently begun collaborating with Samsung on an advanced technology Web browser engine called Servo.

Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web. To those ends, Servo is written in Rust, a new, safe systems language developed by Mozilla along with a growing community of enthusiasts.

We are now pleased to announce with Samsung that together we are bringing both the Rust programming language and Servo, the experimental web browser engine, to Android and ARM. This is an exciting step in the evolution of both projects that will allow us to start deeper research with Servo on mobile. Samsung has already contributed an ARM backend to Rust and the build infrastructure necessary to cross-compile to Android, along with many other improvements. You can try this now by downloading the code from Github, but it’s just the beginning.

Rust, which today reached v0.6, has been in development for several years and is rapidly approaching stability. It is intended to fill many of the same niches that C++ has over the past decades, with efficient high-level, multi-paradigm abstractions, and offers precise control over hardware resources. But beyond that, it is *safe by default*, preventing entire classes of memory management errors that lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities. Rust also features lightweight concurrency primitives that make it easy for programmers to leverage the power of the many CPU cores available on current and future computing platforms.

In the coming year, we are racing to complete the first major revision of Rust – cleaning up, expanding and documenting the libraries, building out our tools to improve the user experience, and beefing up performance. At the same time, we will be putting more resources into Servo, trying to prove that we can build a fast web browser with pervasive parallelism, and in a safe, fun language. We, along with our friends at Samsung will be increasingly looking at opportunities on mobile platforms. Both of these efforts are still early stage projects and there’s a lot to do yet, so now is a good time to get involved.

To take a look at what we’re doing and contribute to the projects you can download and try the recently-released Rust 0.6 or check out the source for Rust and Servo on GitHub. Then come participate in the development process on the Rust (https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev) and Servo (https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-servo) mailing lists.

- Brendan Eich, CTO, Mozilla

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