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 content to keep users engaged.
WebFWD’s first month’s curriculum and coaching made us take a good, hard look at our project. We realized we felt like we were spinning our wheels, because we lacked a core vision. There was no way to take Craftyy further, because there was no direction in which to go “further”. However, while brainstorming new ideas for Craftyy, we thought up of something we felt had world-changing potential.
We made a couple test prototypes, and tested them, separate from Craftyy. Our first test reached its goal of $50 in one day to release a few special effects. The second test reached its goal of $1000 in four days, to release a bundle of art & music from nine game developers. This success was far beyond our expectations! People loved the vision, the idea, and we helped nine creators earn a little money for freeing their works.
We’ve even been in touch with a few people from Creative Commons to seek their advice and are reaching out to other founders of open business models!
We are confident going forward in this brave new direction. Commonly.cc will be a platform for anyone to host their own public domain crowdfunders. And together, we will pave the way to a thriving public domain.”
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!
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 empowering anyone to try out open source web apps with one click.
We started Appsembler with the mission to help open source software developers turn their web applications into SaaS products, and build sustainable businesses so they can work on what they love. We focused initially on the hosting and billing aspect since those are thorny problems to solve, but critical to make it easy for end-users to try and buy the software.
What we’ve discovered is that these problems are trivial when compared to the bigger problem of app discovery. Marketing, promoting and selling the software is infinitely more complex, especially for developers who are typically clueless about how to do this effectively. Appsembler will provide an end-to-end solution for developers to “SaaS-ify” their software and go to market quickly.
We’re excited to be a part of the WebFWD program because Mozilla’s mission is very much in line with our mission of being a catalyst for open source innovation. Mozilla is tackling some of the same problems with Marketplace and Persona and we hope to learn and leverage these technologies in our own offering.”
— Nate Aune, Founder, Appsembler
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 networks and developed them into reusable design patterns called the nodes-graphs-stories architecture. Anahita has been in development for the past 4 years and it is currently available as a stable release for public to download.
The Anahita co-founders have years of experience in developing custom iPhone, iPad and Android apps as well as social networking technologies.
Rastin and Ash are looking forward to get to know the innovators and experienced people in the Mozilla family and gain the necessary knowledge to position Anahita as a primary technology for sharing knowledge, online learning and communication amongst people and organizations around the world.
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 that constantly evolves goes from being a mere time-waster, to being the core of a community.
After our successful Kickstarter campaign we started looking for support and mentorship. Given the “remixable” nature of Craftyy, we joined WebFWD knowing they can best address the unique challenges of that intersection between open innovation and business.
We look forward to WebFWD!
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 insects who rule the world and struggle for resources in the mysterious Land of Harendar.
A year into development, we’d already created the prototype for Gameleon: it was the game editor we used to create and publish content for BugTopia. That’s when we realized we had an awesome product, so we focused all our efforts into polishing and refining the editor into something that can be used by anyone in the world to create their very own MMORPG’s for the web. We really wanted to democratize game-making - and here we are today!
We won the IXIA Innovation prize at How To Web and have received seed funding from Eleven Accelerator. The next logical step was applying to Mozilla’s WebFWD program, not only because it would have been an honor to participate, but because it would have been an acknowledgement that our idea had great potential. Together with Mozilla, we know we can bring about a big change in the web gaming world!
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 our cloud servers but none seemed up to the task so we built mist.io. As the project grew, two new members were added to the team: Stephane, an expert in front end development and mobile applications; and Yiannis, a talented designer, UI/UX specialist and creative coder.
Cloud computing makes our lives easier, but also makes it easy to forget where our data really lives and who has ultimate control. With mist.io we want to empower the cloud user instead of the provider. We’re terrified to witness cloud providers abusing their control over their clients’ infrastructure for political ends (e.g. Amazon vs Wikileaks). Interoperability, open standards and open source software are essential to the information society, so we are working with Mozilla and WebFWD to contribute towards a more open Internet.
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 Nick met on AngelList and founded Mobozi in Septermber 2012. Before that, Nick worked for a consulting firm in Japan and an interactive agency in Dallas. Raj spent the last 10 years leading application development for several federal agencies and large enterprises.
Nick and Raj are both fascinated by the proliferation of personal media creation that mobile devices have enabled, but prefer developing on the web rather than proprietary mobile frameworks. It was their love of the Open Web that led them to found Mobozi and eventually join Mozilla’s WebFWD.
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 Duke University and have spent the last five years as a software engineer. I am currently a cofounder, CEO, and developer for Nudge.
Ben: I am from Seattle. I split time in college between Amherst and Georgetown. I moved to San Francisco in 2008 to work for Google. I am currently a cofounder, designer, and front-end developer for Nudge.
We are excited to be joining Mozilla WebFWD. We admire Mozilla’s commitment to open source and hope to join Mozilla’s efforts in creating a more open and democratic web. The WebFWD program offers us access to an amazing developer community and a team of experts that can help us tackle the technical challenges of building a web-based platform.
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 automating over 500 development tasks, Vizme makes it much easier for web developers to create remarkable HTML5 apps and sites.
Our team members include:
We were attracted to WebFWD and Mozilla because their mission to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web aligns well with our goal of making HTML5 web app development easier.
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 First Look at these amazing teams, representing Athens, Boston, Bucharest, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Eugene, Oregon!
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.
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:
The feedback was intense, which was the point. Our teams recovered at La Mar before heading home to watch themselves (and the feedback) on video before the Big Day.
How would you feel if this group was staring like this at YOU while you pitched?
Then Wednesday happened. They practiced. They shared with Mozillians. And then they presented to the world! About 80 people turned out at our Mountain View HQ + others tuned into the live stream, tweeted and then mixed with the teams afterwards.
In addition to the pitches, attendees at graduation learned that one of our teams raised a round of funding and another one was acquired.
Overall a super successful event (we haven’t even mentioned the food and booze ;). You can check out some of our photos here.
Our success, of course, owes largely to everyone else who supports us! Here’s how you can help:
Stay tuned for more news from our alums and our new batch of teams, to be announced in the next few weeks!
Warm regards,
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 Greece and Sweden will be In the House. Since we’re in the U.S., we’re not sure if that constitutes a “half” — you tell us.
(4) Eats and Booze. We’ll have plenty of good stuff for you to nibble on and slurp when the pitching’s done and you start schmoozing with our teams and the other great investors, service providers, entrepreneurs, engineers and other cool people who will be there.
(3) Pitch pitch pitch. They’ve been pitching to one another, to us, and to some super cool mentors, and will continue doing so right up until next Wednesday.
(2) Our teams are simply awesome. They’ve won industry awards, acquired customers, done deals, gotten 2M+ YouTube views (yes, just one team) and more; you can read the details here.
…and the kicker:
(1) Special announcements will be made *at* graduation! In addition to all the great work they’ve done in our program, our teams will be sharing some special news at the event that your ears will hear first.
We hope to see you there!
— The WebFWD Team
p.s. we are also still accepting applications for our February class through January 31 > http://webfwd.org/apply
Not expected to attend, but certainly welcome.
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. Each team has done some super cool things during their time in WebFWD. Below is our chance to brag about them. If you want to hear from them directly, please be sure to check them out next Wednesday, January 23rd as they graduate (RSVP here — live stream available). There will be a few more announcements then ;)
— The WebFWD Team
During the WebFWD II Program, our teams have accomplished a lot! Some highlights:
codebender