Keynote on Firefox OS at Campus Party Recife!

NOTE:  I put this up on my blog almost 6 months ago - and never realized it didn't get published at the time!

Chris Heilmann and I just finished our keynote at Campus Party Recife in this lovely Brazillian coastal town.  It's amazing to see the enthusiasm and momentum around Firefox OS in the community.

The boy in the picture is hearing for the first time.

Led by Chris (with some added points on the APIs themselves from me), the presentation started with a short bit about Mozilla's history and (open) values and traced the (very fast) evolution of our Web APIs toward a hardware-accessible web.
 
In the same spirit as we did with the Browser Wars before, we (Mozilla) are taking on the Mobile OS lockout being faced currently in developing countries like Brazil.

Simply put, if you can't afford it, you can't have it!  And an Android phone is alot more expensive (relatively speaking) for a consumer in a developing country like Brazil than it is for us North Americans or Europeans.

By enabling mobile application and content development in longtime-proven technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, Mozilla aims for critical mass in developer space (meaning there are much lower barriers to entry where any webpage can be an app!)  It's "write once run anywhere" for real, and it's already been around a while.

Already, with Telefonica on board (with their open web device initiative) and talks happening with several more phone and service providers, it's no wonder our audience more than doubled expected capacity!

Typical questions centered around"How will this shake up the existing hegemony?" and "Will this run on my device?"  While we're currently limited by the practical and proprietary limitations of porting hardware abstraction layers, we hope that, for starters, by driving a critical mass of developers toward Open Web Apps and Firefox OS, that we can affect the current of change in this space.

As with all things Mozilla, this followed up with an appeal for community.  Yes, we need YOU, to help us test, to help us develop, to help us translate, and to evangelize in your language.

To this end, there was an appeal to the Evangelism Reps program (which yours truly is test driving at the moment!)

Slides for our presentation are available here with notes  and without notes.  More information and links can be found in the presentations themselves.