Update On Our Fellows: They’ve Been Busy

Feb 10, 2012

  • fellows
BigBlueButton

The team in Ottawa has been hard at work preparing for the release of BigBlueButton 0.8-beta-4. Highlights of the release include improving record and playback features, and providing better support for portrait documents (fit-to-width). The team is also proud of its new website > check it out!

CASH Music

CASH has already been working with some top-class musicians and is proud to release its first supported release this week. CASH 1.0 includes integration with Tumblr, social (e.g. Twitter, etc.) plugins, email verification tools (including adoption of Mozilla’s BrowserID authentication service) and lots more in the pipeline for a soon-to-be-released 2.0 (as in, this month).

CASH co-founders Maggie Vail & Jesse Von Doom will be hitting a few music tech vortices: first next week at the bi-annual SF Music Tech Summit, as well as the hallmark South by Southwest aka SXSW festival in Austin next month. Jesse will speak on the “What Happened To The Big Idea In Music Technology?” panel on March 14 and there may be other parties involved. Look out for this spot and some tweets for details as SxSW approacheth.

If all this didn’t prove people want to hear from CASH, more evidence in Innocent Words interview with Maggie Vail here.

Meemoo.

Congratulations to Forrest Oliphant, who obtained a full-time position at the Helsinki Media Lab to continue to develop Meemoo’s modules and technology. Last we heard, Forrest was going to be a DJ…”scratch” that: VJ… and test out using his modules as visual display tools on some rave crowds. Someone’s gotta do it.

OpenPhoto

Jaisen Mathai will be presenting to the Bay Area Linux Users Group (BALUG) on February 21st. He also had the chance to share on OpenPhoto recently with Linux Magazine recently; check out his interview here. Finally, be on the lookout for the iPhone app next month!

Synbiota

The Synbiota team is steadfastly progressing on what they are calling the GitHub of biotechnology: a BioCAD tool embedded within a social/collaborative framework to help foster innovation and collaboration among synthetic biologists. This certainly sounds impressive and important enough to allow them to make a splash at the International Genetic Engineering Machines (iGEM) competition beginning in May.

Building an Open Source Community & Business: Lessons from MongoDB

Feb 9, 2012

  • LearnFWD
  • MongoDB
  • community

We’ve shared key lessons on building community, ranging from global projects (like our very own Firefox browser) to nascent projects (like WebFWD Fellow OpenPhoto). Out in the marketplace, there’s an emerging ecosystem of companies that have pivoted, adapted and learned as they navigate the challenges of building a business atop an open source project.

10Gen is the company built to support the MongoDB project, an open source, non-relational document-oriented database. They make a great case study for open source entrepreneurs. In this session, Meghan Gill, MongoDB’s first non-technical employee, shares some of the challenges and tacks that MongoDB has taken to grow from zero to over 100,000 downloads per month.

Meghan walks us through the thinking behind MongoDB’s evolution, including:

  • Pivoting from being a Platform provider to being a database provider.
  • Getting people to “pay for free software” by developing revenue models around support, training and subscriptions, etc.
  • Treating support “as the most important marketing.”
  • Scaling their community by breaking it out geographically, achieving a multiplier effect: in Meghan’s words, “We see our community as a product manager.
  • Growing from zero sales reps to a position where they are now investing in their sales & marketing team over the past 1.5 years (12-15 sales reps worldwide today).
  • Managing and prioritizing large volume of users and lead flow that comes from being an open source project.

Meghan also suggests reading up on how JBoss grew its revenues from roughly $1M per year to $65M per year before its acquisition by RedHat.

Here’s a wealth of information on the ‘secret sauce’ that made this all happen. Be sure to watch Meghan herself:

Forming Your Company: Key Decision Points

Feb 8, 2012

  • LearnFWD
  • legal
  • investment

Congratulations! You’ve founded a cutting edge startup. You spend your energy creating your vision, collecting user feedback, charting milestones, recruiting awesome contributors, bringing on staff and branding your product or service.

Small wonder your first go at raising money throws you off guard. How’s a product visionary supposed to know about NQOs, dilution and Flexible Purpose Corporations, let alone how to make decisions around them? Arcane as these terms may seem, understanding them can have significant impact on your future success.

Help is here. Steven Levine, Partner at Fenwick & West LLP (whose clients include Dropbox, Square, Facebook, Twitter and some others you may have heard of) walked our teams through many questions that are best answered early in the incorporation process. Some of his guidance - including what state and even country to incorporate in - were surprising. For example, in making certain decisions, the location of your employees may be more important than the sources of your revenue.

As its blue-chip high tech client base would imply, Fenwick is in the thick of these kinds of deals and has lots of expertise to share. It conducts a quarterly survey of venture financings (available from their website). Even better, Fenwick has made itself available to answer any follow-on questions from our teams. The rest of us can check out Steven’s great presentation below.

Become a WebFWD Affiliate!

Feb 6, 2012

  • Affiliates
  • Promotion

To spread awareness of our growing global program, we rely largely on our Scouts, Mentors, Partners — and you! We are thrilled to announce that now you can support WebFWD directly and stay connected by becoming a Mozilla WebFWD Affiliate.

How does this work? Good news: it’s super easy. Just sign up to become a Firefox Affiliate. Once you’re signed up (BrowserID makes this part quick and simple), you can select the WebFWD logo in the “Mozilla” category, pick the logo size that works for your blog, website or personal page, and grab the custom HTML code to add to your page.

And ta-da: by adding this badge you become a WebFWD affiliate, increasing awareness of our open innovation program! The code ensures we can stay aware of all the love (and traffic) you send our way. It always comes back :) .

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Introducing Rockstart: Accelerating Open Innovation in the Netherlands

Jan 26, 2012

  • Partners
  • Rockstart

From the start, WebFWD has been a global program. Not long after launch, we expanded to the UK, Greece and Finland. Then, a month later we added a team in Canada. The inflow of WebFWD applications reflects what we already know: the Mozilla brand resonates worldwide.

Today we’re thrilled to announce a partnership with Rockstart, an accelerator based in Amsterdam. Founded by entrepreneurs who are deeply involved in the Dutch startup scene, participants in Startup Weekend Amsterdam and Startup Weekend Eindhoven, the guys at Rockstart understand the power of building bridges across regions.

We’ve been impressed by their resourcefulness, tenacity and flexibility. Like us, they understand the power of connection and collaboration. We believe that by working together, we’ll discover great teams and identify some powerful opportunities. A tagline on their website reads, “From the basement to Woodstock…”

Expect some epic rock and roll!

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Photo credit: All aboard! by Robert Gaal.

Creative Commons: Allowing Content Creators to Thrive

Jan 25, 2012

  • LearnFWD
  • creativecommons
  • licensing
  • Eric Steuer

Since the advent of the Web, content ownership has been contentious. Innovators have been challenged with how to proliferate and extend their creative work in a world where content is tied to restrictve frameworks such as copyright.

Enter Creative Commons, which was created in 2001 to establish and expand licensing options for content creators in a networked world, allowing the creators to indicate how content can be used and shared, commercially or non-commercially, and whether it can be “copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon.” Today, over 50 jurisdictions (nations) have ported Creative Commons licenses, spanning sectors such as technology, science, government, journalism and entertainment. Some high profile users of Creative Commons include Google, Flickr, Al Jazeera, Wikipedia, Nine Inch Nails and even The White House.

On The Power of Open website, created by WebFWD Fellow and CASH Music founder Jesse von Doom (@jessevondoom), you can read many more stories of how CC licenses are being used. Not surprising then that today’s presenter, Creative Commons advisor Eric Steuer, also sits on the board of CASH Music.

WebFWD Scout Sightings

Jan 24, 2012

  • Scouts

Like the rest of the Mozilla project, WebFWD is deeply committed to building a global presence and cultivating a global community, while doing the most we can with a small team and a lean approach.

That’s what inspired us to recruit a network of Scouts, to serve as eyes and ears on the ground, identifying skilled developers and entrepreneurial open source projects around the world. Our Scouts are based in Indonesia, Singapore, India, Kenya, Greece, France, Germany, the UK, the US, Canada and beyond. They’re active participants in the WebFWD community and in their local tech communities - introducing WebFWD at conferences and events in their locales and in their online lives. We thought it’d be fun to share some of their activities as well resources and links they’ve curated.

Here’s our first roundup of Scout sightings:

Prolific tweeter Fauzan Alfi (@fauzanalfi) reports on a great event about to happen in Bandung, Java, Indonesia: In March 2012, Yohan Totting (@tyohan) and FOWAB (@fowab) will hold Geekfest 2012, a homegrown event similar to SXSW. It’s an opportunity for us to talk and share about WebFWD to all geeks there.

From Paris, Thomas Bassetto (@tbassetto) recommends: Obvious to you. Amazing to others. From the always amazing Derek Sivers: “Do not be afraid to share something obvious to you, because everyone has to learn some time. And anything which helps people realise something true is worth repeating from time to time.”

Finally, here’s a short list of interesting links from Brian King (@brianking) an Irishman who lives in Slovenia:

  • Everything you need to know about startup accelerators in Eastern Europe
  • Start-ups in Estonia - Baltic green shoots
  • Building up the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Kosovo
  • StartupBus Europe
  • Upcoming Startup Events in Europe
  • Viidea - A company doing great things with video, with a very open model.

WebFWD scouts Brian King and Tristan Nitot, mentor Curt Smolar, and fellow Patrick Santana (of the OpenPhoto Project) will all be at FOSDEM in Brussels, Belgium, February 4-5. Look for Brian King’s WebFWD talk on Saturday afternoon in the Mozilla Devroom. And in Berlin, our newest Scout, Joseph Somogyi recently introduced WebFWD to the Chaos Computer Club, and will speak about WebFWD at various open source events in the coming months. Stay tuned for details.

Thanks everyone for your efforts and outreach. More sightings in the year ahead!

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Photo credit: Binoculars portrait by gerlos

What makes us different: Incubator overload vs open innovation

Jan 23, 2012

Another day, another incubator story. If you think we’re exaggerating just do a quick Twitter search on incubator. Not just in Silicon Valley, but from Portland (Oregon) to Philadelphia and across the pond, incubators have captured the attention of young entrepreneurs and the skeptical eye of seasoned journalists and those looking for a quick click story.

Imitation may be a sincere form of flattery, but an epidemic of incubators doesn’t necessarily promise awesome new products and services. And nothing deflates more quickly than a cycle of hype.

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At WebFWD, Mozilla’s program for innovation built on open source principles, we’ve got a mission. And Mozilla has a culture that’s endured and is resilient enough to change and evolve. In the open, along with the Web that shaped us. When you participate in WebFWD, you participate in that evolution.

Mozilla and the collaborative, geographically-distributed open source culture we’ve helped create has something unique to offer entrepreneurs and is a powerful value proposition that transcends time zones and old-boy networks. That’s why we launched WebFWD this past summer. We think you should know what makes us different and if it moves you, apply to work with us on extending the open Web.

    Here are some powerful differentiators:
  • Mozilla is a non-profit organization dedicated to openness, innovation and opportunity on the Internet. We weren’t born yesterday. We’ve been building the Firefox browser, one of the Web’s greatest open source adventures, for more than a decade!
  • We have a network of mentors, partners, and scouts with deep technical and business expertise and a world-spanning breadth of experience we can share with our teams.
  • WebFWD is focused not only on open source (with all its subtle nuances and benefits), but more broadly, on Open Innovation. We’re continually defining what it means to innovate in the open.
  • Like the rest of the Mozilla organization, the WebFWD program is global. Our Fellows can live and work anywhere in the world and focus on building sustainable projects in line with their own lives, of value to their local communities.
  • Our admissions process is ongoing. We review and accept applications throughout the year. You can apply anytime.
  • WebFWD Fellows work with us for a 6-month period. A longer-term engagement of six months helps ensure we meet teams’ needs as they progress into sustainable, viable and compelling technologies.

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WebFWD is still in its early days and no doubt the best lies ahead. We’re moving forward now with a great group of Fellows doing wonderful work. We believe in the model we’re developing for fueling and funding rapid development of open and innovative products and services.

Got questions? Let’s start talking. Got an itch to scratch and open source outlook? Join us.

Photo credits: Incubator-9128 by graibeard and Incubator by Tomorrow Never Knows

Creativity, Sharing & Innovation - Through Licensing!

Jan 18, 2012

  • LearnFWD
  • licensing
  • CreativeCommons

Each week we offer our teams thought leadership and best practices for pushing their projects to the next level.

These are so good that we’re opening up the live web-based events to a limited number of external attendees (=you). Next Monday, we’ll hear from Eric Steuer - musician, German citizen, contributor to Wired Magazine and senior advisor at Creative Commons.

While we already heard about software licensing in an earlier LearnFWD, this week, Eric (one of the first non-lawyers to join Creative Commons) will explain not only what creative licensing is, but share why it’s an important tool (particularly these days) for many early-stage web companies. Be one of the few to join us this Monday by signing up here.

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Photo Credit: lukas_y2k (flickr)

Open and Out There: Upcoming Events

Jan 13, 2012

  • events

We’re not only open, we’re also available: getting out there and meeting lots of different people in the entrepreneurial community. Here’s some highlights on where we’ll be in the next few weeks:

Tuesday, January 17th we’ll be opening up our first LearnFWD to a limited number of public attendees. While it’s true, we post these on our blog after the fact, we think it’ll be cool for others to tune in live and get the Q&A too! This week we’ll hear from Pivotal Labs on their awesome tool, Pivotal Tracker - a lifesaver for project management. (WebFWD teams get free accounts thanks to our Pivotal partners.) Be sure to RSVP here for the login info.

Tuesday, January 24th we’ll be hosting the monthly meetup for our friends at MongoDB, at Mozilla’s San Francisco space. Our teams get free use of the MongoDB database…and we just think they’re really cool anyway. We’re going to hear Harmonic share how they migrated from MSSQL to MongoDB. And have some pizza.

Tuesday, Jan 31st we’ll be back at the SF MozSpace, co-hosting a Black Founders Meetup. We’ve had a great conversation with the Black Founders team and look forward to meeting again at the end of the month.

Thursday, February 2nd Pascal Finette will keynote at the Technology Convergence Conference on “Innovating in the Open.” WebFWD is passionate about the benefits of open innovation, and we are keen to tell this story far and wide.

Stay tuned for more events and goodies and hope to meet you soon if we haven’t yet!

The WebFWD Team

Join LearnFWD in Real Time Next Tuesday: First Up, Pivotal Tracker

Jan 11, 2012

  • LearnFWD
  • agile

If you’ve been at this space for a bit, you know that every week we offer our teams thought leadership and best practices for pushing their projects to the next level via our web-based LearnFWD series.

These have been so good, we just can’t contain them: this month, we’re opening these live web-based events up to a limited number of external attendees. If you are one of the first 30 people to sign up, you can hear the scoop in real-time along with our teams!

This week we’ll get the skinny on Pivotal Tracker, an industry-leading project management tool, straight from the source: Parker Thompson of Pivotal Labs will walk us through this and take questions live (BTW, our WebFWD teams get Pivotal Tracker for free, FTW).

Again, we’re capping outside attendance to 30. If you make it, we’ll send you a follow up message the day prior with login URL & password details. Be sure to RSVP here.

Hope to see you on the Internets next week!

Term Sheets: Too Important To Not Understand

Jan 10, 2012

  • LearnFWD
  • investment
  • legal
  • termsheets

As a founder, the energy you put into your vision, product, customers, team (are we missing anything?) is all-consuming. It’s no wonder, then, that even the brightest entrepreneurs wind up neglecting to plan and prepare for things that don’t seem burning or urgent… but are certainly important.

Take, for example, decisions around corporate structure and governance. Who is CEO, who is CTO, who is a “co-founder”? Who gets founders’ stock?

In the throes of getting your product to market, these issues may sound remote, administrative, dry or even self-serving. But not thinking through these decisions can lead to dramatic impacts on the future of not only your project, but your financial well-being.

Enter Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP’s Startup Toolkit. As a law firm seasoned in its work with early stage companies, Orrick has created some online tools to save founders from headache, helping them to think through important decisions earlier and by doing so, avoid troubles later.

This week our teams had the privilege of hearing Orrick Partner (and founding member of its Emerging Companies Group) Lowell Ness walk through both the Founders and Bridge Financing Term Sheets. While both are available in the online toolkit, Lowell’s commentary on the implications of some of these innocuous-seeming fields was invaluable.

Tune in for this first of a 3-part series from Orrick to our teams (thanks to Orrick’s Total Access program), and get the latest trends in vesting, accelerating options upon change of control, and more!

Unburying the Nuggets

Jan 6, 2012

  • LearnFWD

A key part of WebFWD is access to the best thinking - and thinkers - in innovation. Software engineering, marketing, design, investment, branding….a long list of things every startup needs to know is part of the buffet that our teams partake of on an ongoing basis.

We’ve been (and will keep) posting this stuff on our blog, but we realized it’s just too good not to call out on its own! So please check out our new Webinar page which includes all of our weekly LearnFWD webinars that our teams get each Monday, plus some other presentations at the bottom that we think are interesting.

Enjoy!

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Test-Driven Development: The New Black

Jan 4, 2012

  • LearnFWD
  • Testing
  • TDD

It’s a new year, a time when good habits are formed. Test-driven software development is no exception!

At our Summit last month, Mozillian Mike Hanson shared some benefits of testing (including coding discipline and ways to integrate broader groups of code contributors). Today, we got to see one of our Fellows, CASH Music, doing this in action. Duke Leto shared how CASH is using tools like SimpleTest and Jitterbug to better collaborate and streamline its testing and release processes.

Interestingly, we learned that starting the test habit was tough, but once CASH got into the groove, it’s become an addiction virtually as powerful as coffee for the team. In fact, CASH is so into this that they’ve moved on to employ Continuous Integration as part of their software development cycle (in the spirit of open source, you can even see it here). This employs alerts that help developers bypass mistakes that come from mere forgetfulness, and helps them identify which commits lead to breaks on the functionality, among other benefits.

You can actually watch how these tools work in Duke’s fantabulous presentation. We’ll look forward to hearing how your TDD (test-driven development) goes!

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New Year’s Resolutions

Jan 3, 2012

  • goals

It’s been a rich and eventful half year since we launched, and we’re already contriving some great plans for 2012.

Open Innovation is a core part of our Mozilla DNA. At WebFWD, we believe our success depends on and is magnified by our community. So as we share our goals with you below, we’ll follow up with specific ways you can participate in our efforts to keep the Web open, innovative and at the service of users.

First, our goals:

  • Grow our Fellows program. We aim to identify and align with visionary projects to move the Web forward all over the world. To do this, we’ll create neat partnerships and we’ll support our fantastic Scouts as they scour their own regional communities for WebFWD teams.
  • Increase awareness and recognition of WebFWD as a key resource and thought leader in Open Innovation. We’ve already generated a boatload of expertise initially created to support our teams; we want to extend our audience and make more people aware of these great resources.
  • Deepen the value of our core program. Adding precision and continuing to evolve and improve processes - this is not sexy stuff, but key to ensuring a productive experience for all of our teams. We want WebFWD participants to engage as deeply and quickly as possible with all aspects of the program, including mentors, resources and each other.

Where you come in:

  • Help us identify qualified Fellows and Partners in various regions.
  • Share your expertise. Present at one of our weekly LearnFWD sessions or contribute a relevant guest post on our blog
  • Become a Scout. We have a limited number of openings to join this corps of well-connected, technology-savvy individuals who share our vision and can help inspire and identify qualified teams for the Fellows program. Scouts can also contribute by serving as WebFWD spokespeople at events, meetups and within other organizations or innovation programs in their communities.

We’d love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts, suggestions and questions. Send a tweet to @MozWebFWD. Or, if you prefer, we still use email too.

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Wishing you an open, innovative and forward-facing 2012!

Photo credit: Only Time will tell by gilderic
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