May 2013
3 posts
2 tags
Our teams kick some serious...
Just two weeks until our WebFWD III Cohort teams graduate on June 5!. Below are just a few highlights of how they kicked some bootie during our program; we hope you can meet them at graduation, and/or at our San Francisco mixer the day before, June 4 (note the floor change)!.
— The WebFWD Team
Anahita
All Anahita apps now available for free download.
Free “Tribe” support...
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Our Scouts Charge On
As we approach our June 5 deadline to apply for our next class (aka WebFWD IV), our Scouts are getting the word out around the world! We’ve even welcomed some new ones to the Cause! Below is a brief profile on our newest Scouts as well as recaps of some of our team’s recent activities. We are so grateful for them!
Put your virtual hands together for our newest Scouts representing...
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MMoM = May Mensch of Month
Today we are celebrating not only May Day but the fact that we have so many menschen involved with WebFWD! We’re super happy to say that this month’s distinction goes to Telemachus Luu.
We were introduced to Telemachus last year by the amazing team at Hackers and Founders. Telemachus is a big supporter of H/F and their accelerator, Co-op. He’s also a founder of Nephoscale, an...
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There's No Substitute for the Testimonial
This note is from one of our newest Scouts, Saverio Romeo. Saverio is based out of the UK, is an analyst with Frost & Sullivan by day and a steadfast, passionate supporter of Mozilla and open innovation 24X7. Enjoy!
Talking about WebFWD – Real Cases Are the Key for Raising Interest
“On the 19th of April at Birkbeck College, University of London, Mozilla WebFWD alumnus and Synbiota...
April 2013
9 posts
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Open Source as Sales Strategy
This week our teams had the privilege to ask our alumni, Fred Dixon, questions about selling. Fred, after all, is the brains behind our sales module (knowledge and skills honed after years of blood, sweat, tears and progress!). He is also one of our esteemed menschen. So it’s no surprise he was on the call.
That said, some rather interesting (and dare we say surprising) points came of our...
WebFWD: Join The Movement
As a community-powered program, WebFWD has lots of ways or you to engage with our exciting teams who are building the future of the web. First of all, you can meet them! Our 3rd class of teams are graduating on June 5! Be sure to RSVP to attend live or via the livestream here.
In addition,there are many ways for you to help us build the future of the web with us! First and foremost, we’d...
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Your Community: One Of Your Greatest Assets
Spring break is over and our teams are back at it. This week Mary Colvig, who heads up contributor engagement at Mozilla, took them through some tasty recipes for building a vibrant, engaged community among your users and customers.
During our debrief, our teams had the privilege to share ideas and ask questions of Digital Strategist Michaela Thayer, a recent and very valuable addition to...
Spring break is ending...graduation is coming!
Happy Spring! Our third WebFWD class is currently winding down its “spring break” — basically, taking a one-week breather after 5 weeks of intense strategy, positioning, user research, design and marketing work. They’ve also been refining their pitches and working with our stellar mentors. Which means we’re already setting our sights on graduation.
This means it’s time to mark your...
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Our Scouts: A Growing Force!
If you haven’t heard about our Scouts, this will change. It’s because our Scouts are getting more resourceful, aggressive and engaged by the week!
First a brief recap. We launched our Scouts program in 2011 because our program is global. We want to support innovators wherever they are because Mozilla supports a universal, accessible web. This means we want entrepreneurs building the...
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Designing for New Users
How do you design your website and product in a way that ensures your visitors become customers? To do so, you need to answer three key questions:
What do you want a user to do?
Where do you want a user to go?
How do you want a user to feel?
Sound easy? Read on. Chrissie Brodigan, user experience designer and researcher at GitHub and popular teacher at General Assembly, has helped many of our...
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New Team Introduction: Commonly.cc
This introduction is from our current team craftyy, who will be continuing their participation in WebFWD as Commonly.cc. Enjoy the ride!
—The WebFWD Team
“We entered WebFWD with lots of ambition for our initial project, Craftyy, to become a platform of choice for game enthusiasts and hobbyists. We had a few successes, but had very little retention, and we had to constantly churn...
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A Huge Praise for this Month's Mensch: Allen...
Running WebFWD is hugely rewarding for so many reasons…but the primary one is working with fantastic entrepreneurs, partners and mentors. It’s the latter that compels us to honor this month’s Mensch of the Month award to our star mentor, Allen Wirfs-Brock!
A little history: Allen’s grasp and experience with software covers both the business and technology sides. Currently...
March 2013
10 posts
2 tags
Making a Game Map Editor: Gameleon
This week is a big week for games! Game devs around the world are converging at GDC, Mozilla partnered with Epic to advance 3D gaming on the web, and our team at Gameleon provided Mozilla’s Developers with a closer look at the technology they built to create its game map editor. Have a peek yourself and test it out! If you really like what you see, you can also support them on Kickstarter.
...
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The Making of an API
Yesterday our Mobozi team shared with the wide Mozilla developer community on MozHacks some of the steps they took to create their new API that allows for simple photo upload and serving across HTML5 apps. We encourage you to check out the post here to see how they planned, developed, designed, documented and marketed their new API. And test it out yourself!
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New Team Intro: Appsembler
Below is the final submission from our new teams from Appsembler. And be sure to check out their blog - we particularly loved their piece on “10 Things Every Open Source Project Should Have.” :) Enjoy!
“The barriers to adopting open source software are falling, but today it’s still too hard to find, try and buy open source. Appsembler knocks down these walls by...
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Nice code...will anyone use it?
This week our teams are immersing themselves in designing for users! We’ve got videos on user research with Diane Loviglio, responsive design from Matt Kelly and Jonathan Smiley of ZURB Design, and designing for conversion and new customers from Brian Dils and Chrissie Brodigan.
Even better: we have Chrissie and other UX pros giving our teams hands-on, individual advice. Today Carl Nelson...
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What Does "Open" Mean for Businesses?
Last year we had the privilege of hosting a few events with Black Founders, a fantastic organization doing great things for tech entrepreneurs. At one of the events we had the pleasure of meeting Chad Whitacre, chief promulgator of Gittip, a radically open organization seeking to change how value is exchanged. Gittip brought along their partner Balanced, a payments processing, escrow and payouts...
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What I Learned Preparing My Talk on WebFWD -- from...
In February, our steadfast Scout Joseph Somogyi had the opportunity to share a talk about WebFWD at one of our Firefox OS App Days. He shared some of his lessons with us, which we think are useful to those of you preparing your own talks on any subject. Enjoy!
“To start preparing, I used the slides Diane posted on Slideshare….but I still practiced 2 days!
My practice taught me...
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Our Experts: Jane Finette
As you may know, our teams participate in WebFWD from all corners of the globe. So when we come together on our team calls every Tuesday & Thursday, we get down to business on their businesses. They share their victories, their questions and their struggles. And often we are joined by many industry veterans who can bring their own experiences into play to coach and guide our teams.
Today was...
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New Team Intro: Anahita
The Anahita team believes many future web and mobile services will be built on social foundations where social interactions amongst the users will be inherent part of the services. Anahita provides such a foundation that is a powerful framework and platform specialized for developing social web and mobile services.
The Anahita team has identified the recurring patterns that exist in all social...
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New Team Intro: craftyy
Nick Liow & Jason Church are a game-developer duo. Games have a wide reach, and encompass skills from art to design to code. We realized this meant games would be the best way to turn consumers into makers.
Craftyy is our project which aims to add a Remix button to every game. With it, we can enable players to customize, build upon, and share their work for future players to enjoy. A game...
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New Team Intro: Gameleon
Our team of geeks got together two years ago with the mission of making a cutting-edge HTML5 game that rivaled the complexity of Triple-A games for desktop PCs. We had a mixed background, from business-to-business software solutions to architecture and concept art, but what we shared was our passion for gaming. We developed BugTopia, the game of tiny adventures on an epic scale, the tale clever...
February 2013
8 posts
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Our February Mensch....
This month’s MoM has a special place in our heart. He became familiar with Mozilla well before WebFWD was a twinkle in its eye, as his wife was a marketing exec for Firefox back in 2009-10. As a long-time institutional investor, Didem and Pascal recruited him to be a mentor at the program’s kickoff and was off and running.
He mentored our teams (so much that he joined one of their...
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New Team Intro: mist.io
mist.io is an open source freemium service that helps you manage and monitor your virtual machines on multiple public and private clouds using your mobile phone, tablet or laptop.
mist.io was founded by Dimitris, Mike, Markos and Chris.
We’ve been working together for several years and in 2009 we co-founded unweb.me, a software consultancy. We were researching existing tools to help us manage...
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New Team Intro: Mobozi
Next up in our new team announcements is….
Mobile devices have become huge media creation tools, however very little of this sharing is done through the mobile web. Mobozi is building a mobile web platform for creating, collecting, and managing user generated media. We are utilizing HTML5 to make dealing with media over the web just as easy and enjoyable as through a native app.
Raj and...
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New Team Intro: Nudge
Next up in our new team intros…
Nudge is a better way to build websites. Our web-based platform lets individuals and teams design, develop, and manage projects in one place, on a single stack.
We are a two-person team, Breck and Ben. We started working together in 2009, and that same summer we participated in Y Combinator.
A bit more on us:
Breck: I am from Brockton, MA. I attended...
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New Team Intro: Vizme
This is the first of a series of close-ups we’re doing on our new cohort of WebFWD teams. Enjoy!
Vizme is an HTML5 app development platform that simplifies and accelerates the creation, storage, testing, and hosting of fully cross-platform (desktop and mobile) web and hybrid apps and sites. By integrating over 1,300 open-source and public libraries into one coherent platform and...
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Introducing our New WebFWD III Cohort
We’re back at it again! After a successful graduation of our last cohort, we’ve already recruited our next class! They’ll be assembling at Mozilla’s HQ and San Francisco offices next week for a series of pitching and meetings with our community.
We’ll do individual blog posts with more details on each team here in the next few weeks; until then, here’s the...
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Want to improve your developer velocity?
Our alums at wercker are releasing their public beta this quarter. As you may recall, wercker was among our January graduates and finished our cohort with an announcement of funding by Greylock, Shamrock Ventures and Vitulum Ventures.
A brief video overview is below and you can read more about the team’s vision in today’s MozHacks!
Wercker Overview from Lindsey Bateman on Vimeo.
The Latest from our Scouts!
Fairly early on in our development of WebFWD program we launched our Scouts program. As our eyes and ears (and mouths) on the ground in various centers of tech activity, our Scouts have proved to be a critical element in our success. They’ve driven awareness by appearing at many meetups and industry events, spreading the word about the resources we have to offer innovative web startups. We...
January 2013
5 posts
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A New Year, a New Mensch
Last month we unveiled our Mensch of the Month Award (aka “MoM”). In short, it’s for people who go above and beyond the expected. Who serve others without hope of getting something back. The people who go out of their way to help others with no hope of payback. They pay it forward.
Often this involves behind the scenes stuff. Doing things that aren’t recognized. When our...
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And we have graduated WebFWD II!
We did it! We graduated our 2nd batch of _amazing_ WebFWD teams this week!
We started with a pre-graduation pitch panel, putting our teams in front of some of the sharpest minds in investment, pitching and public speaking there are. On Tuesday, our teams got grilled by:
David Ascher, who heads up various innovation initiatives at Mozilla and has led messaging organizations in the past.
Dia...
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Top 5 Reasons to Attend our WebFWD II Graduation
Tomorrow — Wednesday, Jan 23rd — our 2nd WebFWD cohort will graduate and we want YOU there - in person or via live stream. Details and RSVP at this link > http://webfwd2graduation.eventbrite.com
Why should you go? In the spirit of David Letterman, here are the Top 5 reasons, in ascending order of importance:
(5) Half of our teams use the metric system. Amsterdam, Canada, France...
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Our Grads (aka Brag Alert II)
Over the past 3.5 months, our teams have poured hours of work into their strategies, user research, marketing and positioning tactics and more. They’ve spent lots of time on BigBlueButton coaching one another and sharing best practices, victories and challenges. They’ve met with our mentors, acquired customers, and pitched pitched pitched.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list....
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Apply to our next class here...or on AngelList!
As we prepare for our upcoming graduation in a few weeks (which will be live-streamed — RSVP here!), we’re also actively recruiting our next class. And today we’re pleased to announce that startups around the world cannot only apply on our site, but also right on AngelList.
If you’re not already on AngelList - and have any remote interest in startups - it’s time to...
December 2012
6 posts
It's Been a Good Year
At the end of the year, many people think about what’s ahead and make resolutions. We’re certainly doing that at WebFWD. At the same time, we also think it’s fruitful to look back on the previous year and acknowledge some awesome milestones.
In 2012, we:
Hosted our 2nd Summit
Added 14 more videos to our LearnFWD topic-driven arsenal
Rolled out our current 3-month structured...
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Introducing...The Mensch of the Month (MoM) Award!
We love to share “The Art of the Start” with our teams. It’s a classic manual written by Silicon Valley maven, marketer, communicator & investor extraordinaire (oh, and also one of our mentors ;), Guy Kawasaki,. It is chock full of principles and tactics for getting your startup off the ground.
Guy’s final chapter in the book is titled “The Art of Being a...
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Jumpstart Your OS App with Launcher.io
The cloud is here, and web apps are powering it! But developers who build these web apps (and even Wordpress Themes or Drupal-based sites) who want other developers and users to try out their applications face a high barrier to entry from requirements to set up a local server, database, configurations, etc.
Fear not: Launcher.io is an open and free marketplace for one-click web applications!...
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Crowdfunding Tips from our WebFWD Teams
It’s likely you’ve heard of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, two increasingly popular services used by artists and businesses to raise funds for projects. Though fairly new, the trend received a nice boost earlier this year when the U.S. government passed the JOBS Act in April, which among other things, expanded the amount of funding companies could get through these types of sources to $1M...
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The New Way to Watch Movies
Our current cohorts includes the first-ever team led by a film director! Simon Klose got the vision to incorporate web technology into his craft of filmmaking while building his documentary on Pirate Bay. He realized that filmmakers benefit greatly from creating direct connections to fans beyond simply making the film itself. Hence Linklib was born!
Today Mozilla’s developer-centric blog...
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Selling: The Skill Everyone Needs
This module is on how to sell…or, “earning revenue so that your co-founders can eat” to quote Fred Dixon of our WebFWD alumni team, BigBlueButton.
Fred is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded three software companies. Most recently he is lead developer of BigBlueButton, an open source web conferencing platform, and the CEO of Blindside Networks, the company that started the...
November 2012
7 posts
2 tags
Setting Yourself and Your Founders Up For Success
When you come up with that amazing idea to solve that painful problem, one of the furthest things from your mind is future financial and management conflicts and liabilities. But they happen. Enough that a body of approaches and agreements have evolved to protect you from these issues before they happen.
Do you need a Founders Agreement? How can you keep control of your company once you get...
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codebender: Using the Web to Program Physical...
A few months ago we introduced you to our Greek team, codebender. Since then, they’ve been busy coding, evangelizing and supporting other webmakers at Mozilla’s MozFest event in London earlier this month.
Between this, our program, and the team’s studies, we didn’t think they were quite busy enough. So we asked lead developer Vasilis Georgitzikis (aka Tzikis) to share a...
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Vilnius, Lithuania: Final Baltic Round
This past few days we had the chance to complete our first Eastern Europe tour by participating in Silicon Valley Comes to the Baltics. Part of a general series that started in the UK and expanded to other spots such as Portugal, the event’s purpose is to assemble representatives from the Valley to share lessons and best practices to ultimately inspire entrepreneurs in the region to go out...
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Estonia: The E-State
Most people know Estonia as the first country in the world to use an e-voting system. The innovation goes beyond that, though: the government runs its cabinet meetings without paper and solely using web-based document systems; citizens can use their mobile phones as identity devices for banking, taxes, public transportation and paying for parking; and students can learn there final exam scores via...
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They Know How To Web in Romania
It was a privilege to participate in the third How To Web conference in Bucharest this week. Conference organizer Bogdan Iordache masterfully assembled hundreds of entrepreneurs and investors both from the region as well as abroad.
Some of the keynotes included inspiring talks from Evernote CEO Phil Libin, who encouraged entrepreneurs that there is no better time to start up something; as well...
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Improving Your UX and Conversions: Tips +...
Now that our teams have built a strategy and talked to users, it’s time to build an experience that suits them. So this week we had some of our UX experts audit their sites and brought in expert WebFWD mentor Chrissie Brodigan and WebFWD alum Simon Tennant of buddycloud to share some thoughts on how to make their experiences better.
Our call yielded lots of great nuggets to keep users...
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The Vibrant Web Community in Cluj-Napoca
The first leg of our November journeys brought us to Cluj-Napoca, Romania, home of a very vibrant Mozilla community and native IT talent. Diane was joined by Scout Brian King as part of Open Web, Open Business, an event produced by the local Mozilla Rep team.
Brian kicked things off with an overview of Mozilla’s current open web initiatives, focusing on HTML5 and Firefox OS. Drawing off of...
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Wherever You Go, There We Are
Well, this is a paraphrase of the infamous Buckaroo Bonzai character, but the point is similar: Mozilla and WebFWD want to be wherever you - the greatest innovators for the open web - are. To that end, our program is open to everyone and we don’t ask you to relocate.
We are doing some traveling this month to not only spread the word, but grow our Scouts and mentor networks as well. Do you...
October 2012
11 posts
1 tag
Talking to Your Users
As in, really talking to them! This week our teams embarked on User Research — which you can do even if you don’t have users yet! As a startup, you need to find out problem you are solving. This isn’t always obvious. You usually have an idea that gets you going, but once you speak with others, you realize there are nuances and motivations that come into play that have a huge...
