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No Bullshit Advice & Mentorship
Mozilla Labs - Open Innovation in the News
Over the last few days two very well written articles about Mozilla Labs in general and the Concept Series in particular were published by BusinessWeek and ZDNet.
BusinessWeek took a broad view of design and innovation in Open Source and published their article “Mozilla Labs Explores Open Source Design” as part of an online special. Dana Blankenhorn from ZDNet wrote a very passionate piece about Labs and our work together with the wider community: “Mozilla Labs where the future is being made today”.
Both articles are testament of the amazing Mozilla Labs community, the creativity and passion of each and every participant in our Design Challenges and what we accomplished together.
Currently we are working hard on building better tools, better programs, more outreach and create more opportunities to participate — I can’t wait to see what 2010 has in store for us!
To end with, I couldn’t have said it any better myself — in Dana’s words: “Try things out. Play - Play is where great ideas come from.”
Lessons from Mozilla - Open Innovation & Crowd Sourcing
We recently were invited to present Mozilla Labs at a workshop on open innovation and crowdsourcing organized by Eric von Hippel (MIT) and Karim Lakhani (HBS). The workshop brought academics and practitioners from organizations such as General Mills (food), Ford (automobile), Pitney Bowes (services) and the World Bank (finance) together, and had each present the specific implementation of crowdsourcing at their respective organization.
Below you’ll find my deck on Mozilla Labs’ approach, experiments, results and challenges in the wider area of crowdsourcing - aptly named “Lessons from Mozilla - How we are learning to foster and grow participation”.
Flipping through this deck, I realize that this also acts as a good update on what Mozilla Labs worked on in the last 12 months in relation to the Concept Series and Design Challenge.
Social Currency…
Recently the whole world seems to go nuts over “Facebook fans”, “Twitter followers” and all the other signs of wondrous consumer love. The common notion is that consumers aren’t merely users of your product or service anymore but that they have to become fans, lovers and/or evangelists of your brand (which is not your brand anymore anyway - but that’s another story).
Which makes me wonder: What does it actually mean when you have a “fan” on Facebook? How does this fan translate into real business (or whatever other meaningful metric your business has)? I bet - little.
Fast Company (not my favorite business magazine as they seem to rather mindlessly jump on all the latest trends) recently published an interesting article: “Five Steps for Consumer Brands to Earn Social Currency” — arguing that the sole notion of buzz, fans and followers is rather meaningless on it’s own. They go on and state “Not every brand should be social” and “Social tools are a means, not an end”.
So far so good. But - in the same magazine they run a story about Mekanism, a buzz marketing/social media agency, hailing their business and how they help brands build followers and fans. The article goes on to point out achievements such as “[…] hired Mekanism to double Del Taco’s 20,000 Facebook fans” - 20,000 Facebook fans to what end???
Especially disturbing is the example of Toyota’s Matrix campaign, which basically encouraged people to unleash a stalker attack on their friends. The campaign resulted in “[…] a woman had filed a lawsuit against Toyota and Saatchi stating she’d feared for her life and had resorted to sleeping with a machete under her pillow.” The article goes on to hail the fact that the campaign drew 4 million visits (again: to what end?). 4 Million visits and at least one person suffering severe mental trouble (I guess that’s what you call collateral damage).
Maybe I just don’t get it…
Update: Patricia Clausnitzer translated my blog post into Belorussian - read it here.
Using Etherpad for AWESOME Collaboration in a Public Talk
In my session on an Open Web App Marketplace during this year’s Mozilla Summit 2010 I wanted to split my time into 15 minutes of me talking & presenting and use the remaining 30 minutes for a discussion with the attendees.
My main observation with open forum-style discussions is that you usually only get a fraction of people to speak (people are shy, the discussion moves on and your original point might not be appropriate anymore, people sometimes get into a bit of bikeshedding, etc). To overcome this problem, we originally planned to break the group into smaller sub-groups of 5-8 people and let them run through a structured brain storming exercise.
As we expected to have more than 100 people in the session, this became somewhat complex. On a hunch I decided to try an experiment: What if we would allow the audience to discuss in person (one person speaking at a time with me moderating) and use an Etherpad as a back-channel for the participants to jot down their thoughts and notes. At the same time one of my colleagues kindly offered to take notes from the live discussion and add them to the Etherpad.
It turned out to not only work - but blow my expectations out of the water. The group not only had a very fruitful live discussion but people were hacking away on the Etherpad. The interesting thing which happened, was that people started to have conversations on the Etherpad itself - people agreed, disagreed, argued and sharpened their arguments. We ended up with about 10 pages full of extremely valuable comments, thoughts and ideas. The Etherpad software itself handled the onslaught of more than 50 people hacking on the same document at the same time with grace and created a fascinating visual artifact as participants could see how thoughts were developed in real time (which we also projected on the main screen).
I highly recommend giving Etherpad as a backchannel a try for your next public talk. You can download the Open Source software here.
An Open Web App Marketplace
During the Mozilla Summit 2010 just a few days ago I led a session (and later in the week a lightning talk) on app stores; why both consumers and developers love apps (and the stores which make them available on platforms such as the iPhone/Android/Facebook/etc) and why the Open Web is in need of a marketplace for its continued success as a premier platform (both for users and developers). In a lot of ways this is a continuation of our thoughts about the characteristics of an Open Web App Marketplace, published by Jay Sullivan on the Mozilla blog.
In my session we used an Etherpad to capture feedback from the more than 150 attendees - you can read the transcript here. Main areas of discussion centered around the question which role Mozilla could and/or should play in such a construct, how this would change the web at large, how to handle the fact that the Open Web allows the user to do view source on code and which role the browser could play.
As this is a continued discussion with lots of variables, opportunities and risks, we would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and comments. Head over to the Mozilla Labs discussion group, leave a comment here, send me an email, blog about your thoughts (and let me know about it, so I can link to your post) and find me on IRC (http://irc.mozilla.org/ - #labs) and in real life.
The slides from my talk are here:
[Reactions]
- Mike Kristoffersen on “An open, open web app store”
- Followup by Mike on “Is it wrong to make a profit on the work of others?”
- TechReview on “Can Mozilla Deliver an Open App Store?”
Mozilla presents Prototype of an Open Web App Ecosystem
Today, we (meaning the Mozilla Labs team) are releasing technical documentation of the proposed system and a developer preview prototype that allows you to install, manage and launch Web apps in any modern desktop or mobile browser (Firefox 3.6 and later, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Opera 10 and WebKit mobile). This prototype provides a simple mechanism to support paid apps and authentication features to allow apps to log users in upon launch.
Head over to the Mozilla Blog for all the details and check out the technical documentation and developer previews.
I will post more on this soon - so stay tuned. :)
Mozilla’s Open Web App Platform is not a Store
Yesterday we published a tech preview of Mozilla’s Open Web App Platform - both from a developer as well as an end-user perspective.
We received a lot of great feedback from the wider community, the developer community as well as the press (e.g. TechCrunch, WIRED or GigaOM among many others). The interpretation of our platform is mostly spot on - but sometimes way off when Mozilla’s proposed platform is compared directly to app stores such as Apple’s iTunes store or the Android store.
It is important to note that what we are proposing and building is significantly different from single, vertically integrated app stores. The platform at its core allows for web apps to be installed, managed and launched in any modern browser - and is agnostic to where these apps come from.
The manifest, which basically describes the app and is one of the central elements in our architecture, provides information about the source (the place from where you got the app - which can be the website from the developer herself, a directory or a store) as well as authorization and identity tokens. With this simple architecture in place, the platform allows for any number of self-published apps, directories and stores to co-exist. There is not a single, central repository of all apps - but a whole array of them.
What this means is - the Mozilla Open Web App Platform allows for an ecosystem which is similar to any other retail/ecommerce experience you know and essentially just like the Web: Anyone can publish any app without an obscure approval process on her own website. You can list these apps in directories or sell them through stores. Or you set up your own store if you wish. Apps become a good just like any other digital good - freed from a vertically controlled ecosystem.
If you want to learn more about our platform, watch this video from my colleague Lloyd Hilaiel, who together with Mike Hanson is the main developer and thinker behind this.
Double Rainbow (or: Kevin Fox to join Mozilla Labs)
It is with great joy that I can announce Mozilla Labs’ latest hire - today Kevin Fox announced that he will join our team of mad scientists as our Principal UX Designer.
Kevin, after having worked at some of Silicon Valley’s powerhouses such as Yahoo!, Google, FriendFeed and Facebook and bringing the world such beautifully crafted experiences such as Gmail and Gcal, originally planned on working on his own for a bit. Thankfully we managed to convince Kevin that Mozilla Labs is just the right place for him to… well… change the world! And do so in a completely open and participatory way.
Kevin will officially join us in early November - in the meantime make sure you follow him on Twitter and read his blog (you will find his thoughts and musings both thoughtful and highly entertaining).
Double rainbows and unicorns indeed. :)
Why App Stores are broken - and how to fix them
Today I gave a talk at the >play conference (Berkeley Digital Media Conference) on app stores, why the current model is inherently broken and how to fix them (hint: check out Mozilla’s work on an Open Web App Ecosystem).
Here’s the synopsis of my talk:
“Today, apps are extremely popular - they’re easy to use, easy to find and attractive. However, this new world of apps is extremely flawed - and the growth and potential innovation of the current app system is held back by closed development models, vertically integrated experiences without competition and obscure approval procedures for developers . There is a better future - it’s called the Web, it won before and it will win again.”
And the slides (note that most of the important bits are lost on you if you don’t have the audio track):
You can also see the slides directly on Scribd
Why App Stores are broken - and how to fix them (the video)
A few days ago I spoke at Berkeleys >play conference on app stores, why and how they are broken and how HTML 5 and the Open Web app platform Mozilla is currently building will fix them (hint: The Web has won before and will win again).
You find a short summary and the slides from my talk here. Realizing that the slides pretty much only work if you also have the audio track, I decided to record a video version of my talk. Please note that this is a recording which was done after the fact - so my voice might sound a bit less dynamic and enthusiastic than in the original auditorium (turns out that the built-in microphone in my Mac is really bad at picking up a loud, dynamic voice).
If you prefer to watch the video directly on Vimeo, click here.
