interviews on SWiK

NATIVE INSTRUMENTS : Community : Tech Talk : Radiohead

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:09:08 -0700

Mack 0.7.0: A Significant Update to A Powerful Ruby Web App Framework for Distributed Apps

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:08:46 -0700

We first covered Mack in April, when I billed it as a "fast, best of the rest, Web app framework." Mack, a Ruby-based Web application framework, developed by a team led by Mark Bates, has continued to grow over the past several months and today announced a significant release, Mack 0.7.0.

Mack is a unique Ruby Web app framework due to its heavy focus on reusability across multiple applications. Mack supports distributed objects - yes, between multiple applications, distributed views and layouts, and even distributed routing (all of your Mack apps can be aware of each other's routing). Mack has a Google group for discussion purposes, and Mark has put together a great screencast demonstrating how to create a simple application with the framework.

I caught up with developer Mark Bates to ask a few questions about the framework:

Why would you recommend someone try Mack over the alternatives (Merb, Rails, Ramaze, Sinatra, etc.)?

Mark Bates: I would recommend that people try a lot of different frameworks before they decide which one to go with - that's what I did. I tried over a dozen frameworks back in January 2008 when we decided to move away from Rails. None of them were right for the problems we had to solve. If you're looking for a framework that is simple, fast, easy to use, and yet powerful, than Mack might be right for you.

Mack has a large focus on giving developers the tools to build SOA, distributed, and portal-like applications. Mack is easily extensible and easy to configure to suite your projects. The core of Mack is small and lightweight. The mack-more series of gems allows people to pull in the extras that absolutely need.

What are the new features in Mack 0.7.0?

The two biggest features in 0.7.0 would have to be Distributed Objects and Distributed Views/Layouts, which round out the three big distributed features, along with distributed routes. These features are what really set Mack aside from all the other frameworks out there right now. Using the power of Rinda we're able to have a bunch of Mack applications talking seamlessly together with almost zero configuration.

In addition to the new distributed features, we've added a ton of helpers, including a whole suite of form helpers, Transactional support for tests using Active Record, DataMapper was already supported. Great improvements to the mack-data_factory content generating system, including a ton of new content types. A whole slew of bug fixes, and general overall improvements. A bunch of new generators and enhancements to existing ones.

What have you learned / discovered in the process of developing Mack?

One of the biggest things that I've learned since I've started developing Mack is that I truly believe in the KISS philosophy, Keep It Simple Stupid, and that it is the only way to code. One of big frustrations I've had with other frameworks, and one in particular, has been that if you crack open the source code to try and track down a bug it's nearly impossible. There are just thousands of lines of code, and eight levels of redirection before you find the things you're looking for. When I talk to people who want to commit that's the first thing I tell them, keep it simple. I want people to be able to open the source and be able to very quickly follow it through. Keeping things simple also has other side effects, apart from readability. It helps keep things fast, and helps keeps the bugs to a minimum.

Is deploying Mack applications as easy as Rails or Merb apps?

Since Mack is a Rack application at heart, it deploys with Phusion Passenger with just a simple config.ru file that Passenger requires. If you're using Thin, there's a Mack adapter built in, so it's very easy to deploy with a Thin cluster. Mackwiki.com (a new Mack-based wiki) is hosted using a cluster of 3 Thin servers behind Nginx. Again, KISS, is evident here. I want Mack apps to be easy to deploy. I've fought through some tough deployments with other frameworks, and I don't want other people to have to go through that.

Matthias Wessendorf talks Ajax, Trinidad, and ADF Faces (JSF Central 2008-08)

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:55:56 -0700

Matthias Wessendorf talks Ajax, Trinidad, and ADF Faces by Kito Mann. 09 Aug 2008. This podcast is an interview between JSFCentral editor-in-chief Kito D. Mann and Matthias Wessendorf, a software engineer at Oracle. This was recorded in March of 2008 at AjaxWorld East in New York City. You can catch Matthias Wessendorf and other expert JSF speakers at JSFOne.

Mloovi: Translate Any RSS Feed Into 24 Languages

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:19:32 -0700

Mloovi is a new app that runs any RSS feed through Google Translate. This may not be perfect, but there's is a clear need for such a service so we're pretty excited about it.

Created by the makers of language learning service LearnLists, Mloovi is free with ads and offers premium accounts. The company credits TechCrunch UK's Mike Butcher with the inspiration, and Butcher's blog is where we discovered the service.

Limitations

Let's be up front about limitations of the service: it strips images and formatting, the translations don't read super well, there's no analytics ala Feedburner, etc.

All of that said, we can now see with relative ease what's on the front page of Spanish Digg-type site Méname, so we're happy! When we find something that looks interesting, we'll read the translation, then perhaps try to find English language coverage of the same subject or just be happy to have some information even if it's a little Google-funky.

Read RWW in Spanish, Chinese, Etc.

Are Google Translate/Mloovi translations good enough for you to subscribe to?
( surveys)
Want to read (or scan) ReadWriteWeb in Spanish?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Readwriteweb-inglsToEspaol

How about in Chinese?

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Readwriteweb-ChineseTranslation

We ran the Mloovi-created feeds through FeedBurner so that we could get some idea how much interest there is in reading our content in the languages above.

Are these translations of sufficient quality to be of interest to readers? Let us know what you think in the poll above. RSS readers can click here to visit this post and participate in the poll or see results.

Other Translation Tools

We love our international readers and anyone who takes the time to read RWW in a language other than their native one. As such we try to pay particular attention to tools that facilitate text translation. If these tools are of interest to you too, see also our coverage of Lingro - the on the fly Creative Commons translation dictionary - and DotSub, the collaborative video translation service that results in projects like the one below. Three cheers for the global change made possible by new tools on the web!

Interview with TechCrunch Ruby Developer, Mark McGranaghan

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 12:52:17 -0700

Until last week, Mark McGranaghan was a full-time Ruby developer for TechCrunch, the popular Web 2.0 news site. He worked extensively on CrunchBase, a wiki-style database of companies, people, and investors in the world of Web 2.0. His last assignment was the free-to-use CrunchBase API which went live last week.

I caught up with Mark to ask him about his time working at one of the world's most famous blogs with one of the world's most famous bloggers! You might be surprised to learn that head Cruncher Michael Arrington - who is never slow to point out Twitter's downtime - is pretty cool with Rails and what works well for his developers works for him.

Rails Inside: Hi Mark. Thanks for agreeing to this interview. First, how did you get started with Ruby and Rails?

Mark McGranaghan: I started with Ruby at the end of 2006 when I was a student at Bowdoin College. I stumbled on it randomly while I was exploring new programming languages and ended up using it a lot for writing programs for my discrete math class. At the time I also wanted to do some web programming but didn't like the web stacks offered by the other anguages that I knew - Java, Scheme, and Python - so I started looking into Rails. I got the AWDwR book, subscribed to a bunch of Rails blogs, and then just hacked my way from there.

How did you land the job with TechCrunch?

Henry [a co-developer] and I met Michael through a TechCrunch employee that we had known previously. When TechCrunch approached us about building out a structured wiki for the startup community, we were thrilled. I think that just communicating this excitement and showing that we understood why this was an important problem to solve went a long way in convincing Michael that we were right for the job. We also spoke to some seasoned developers that Michael knew; that conversation going well also gave Michael confidence in us. Michael was also very hands-off about our choice of Rails to implement the site - if it worked for us, it worked for him.

What was it like working at TechCrunch?

We had a lot of autonomy working on CrunchBase at TechCrunch. As the only full time developers, we had both the freedom of and responsibility to make all of the technical decisions. That put a lot of pressure on us, but it also allowed us to move quickly. We made a lot of good decisions, and when we didn't we had to quickly learn form our mistakes and recover.

CrunchBase existed for quite some time before you became involved with it, so what base did you have to work from?

CrunchBase previously existed as a PHP application. The site was very simple. There were only pages for companies, with no links to other entities, and search was implemented with MySQL LIKE queries. We scrapped the PHP code, but had to migrate the existing database. This was done with a 1000+LOC Ruby script that pulled everything out the old database, did a series of transformations in memory, and re-saved to a new database. It took us a long time to understand and normalize the data representations used by the old implementation, but it ended up OK. Being able to use ActiveRecord on both the new and the old tables helped a lot.

How is CrunchBase deployed? Does it scale well?

The CrunchBase Rails app is served by a single dedicated machine provided by MediaTemple. We have to contend with several scalability challenges. The first is the general traffic to CrunchBase.com; the site gets a lot of visitors because of its high Google rank and frequent TechCrunch links and the pages are expensive to generate. Fortunately, the site is very cacheable: most requests are served out of a view cache in a few milliseconds. We generally can't use page or action caching because different types of users see different version of each page - instead we use a custom caching mechanism that takes into account the authentication level of the user. Because of the interconnectedness of the CrunchBase data model, any individual piece of data may be cached in multiple webpages, widget objects, and API responses. When such a piece of data changes, all of the corresponding caches have to be expired.

Another major scalability concern is JavaScript and image requests from TechCrunch.com for the CrunchBase widget that we frequently embed on that site. We serve millions of these objects a day. Fortunately, we are able to serve almost all of them statically with lighttpd, which ends up being very cheap.

What was the motivation for the new CrunchBase API you just released?

We created the CrunchBase API because we believe it is in everyone's interest for this data to be free. It lets developers get convenient access to data [on Web 2.0 companies] and build interesting apps. It lets users find the data in new ways through these apps, and it gives us distribution and establishes us as the data hub. Also in the spirit of freedom, we've made the API as brain-dead-simple to use as possible; just visit an API url (example) and get a pretty-printed JSON output [Ed: This JSON pretty-printer has been open sourced by TechCrunch]. We have no registration, no API keys, no requests limits and no throttling.

Is TechCrunch a good place to work? Are other Rails apps in the works and are Ruby / Rails developers being hired?

TechCrunch is a very interesting place to work as a developer since its at the center of the startup/tech industry. A lot of news, ideas, and even people from the tech industry flow through our office, and you can't help but pick up a lot of energy from that. We now have an opportunity to leverage our position as a hub as well as the TechCrunch brand to create some really cool apps. One new Rails app that we just launched is TechCrunch Pitches, which is a site for users to submit and vote on 1-minute elevator pitch videos from startup founders. In order to support our existing properties and develop new ones we are currently hiring Ruby developers.

Now that you've left TechCrunch to return to school, will you continue to contribute to the Ruby community?

I've always liked doing independent work and research while I'm at school. This year I'm going to focus on open source: learning more from the existing projects and starting a few of my own. In particular I'd like to spend some time away from the Rails world - it's getting a little repetitive for me - and try some new things with Ruby and other languages. I've made a few steps in that direction by writing some components for a new Ruby web framework (github.com/mmcgrana). I'd like to bootstrap the framework by developing a few proof-of-concept open source apps against it. Other components of the Ruby/Rails stack that I'm growing frustrated with are RDoc, Rake, and Capistrano; I'll be looking closely at YARD, Thor, and Vlad over the next few months.

Thanks, Mark! Best of luck with your forthcoming ventures. Mark can be followed on Twitter, if you wish to do so. His username is mmcgrana.

Amazon.com: Olympus WS-110 WMA Digital Voice Recorder: Electronics

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:51:28 -0700

Listen&Type

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:51:28 -0700

Listen&Type

Linus Torvalds, Geek of the Week

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:50:23 -0700

Linus Torvalds, Geek of the Week

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:51:50 -0700

Shifting Perspectives: Epic Dolls and Phaelia on all things Druid

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:50:18 -0700

Filed under: Druid, Analysis / Opinion, Tips, Podcasting, Virtual selves, Guilds, Classes, Interviews, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives<sep/>

[from bushwald] bruce sterling - interview with the science fiction writer, futurist and design critic

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:52:43 -0700

Collecting & Obsessing: Game & Watch - DS Fanboy

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:51:02 -0700

[from bushwald] 'I Didn't Want To Make It That Complicated At First' | Girl Talk's Feed The Animals, Track By Track

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:03:56 -0700

"Gregg Gillis leads us through his sample-heavy (of course) new album."

[from bushwald] 'I Didn't Want To Make It That Complicated At First' | Video | Girl Talk's Feed The Animals, Track By Track | MTV

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 10:04:20 -0700

"Gregg Gillis leads us through his sample-heavy (of course) new album."

Blogarithms " Skype for Interviews - A How-To Video

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:00:40 -0700

Blogarithms " Skype for Interviews - A How-To Video

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 07:18:22 -0700

People in Tech: Brad Feld, Foundry Group

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:20:24 -0700

MIT Alumni, technologist, venture capitalist, marathon runner, Colorado dweller, thinker, blogger, and all around super human, Brad Feld (LinkedIn, Twitter) has made a huge impact on startups. With posts on his personal blog, Feld Thoughts, and on Ask The VC (a must read for anyone interested in venture funding) Feld has played a major roll in lifting the curtain on the traditionally mysterious venture process. We recently caught up with him for a quick interview.

Background

The venture investing process used to be largely a mystery. Young entrepreneurs were not sure how to value their companies, nor were they sure what to make of the term sheets offered to them - largely because the mechanics of venture math weren't open to them. But recently the rules of the game have changed. The venture process is now much more open, in no small part because of Brad Feld.

Feld is also responsible for building what is today a thriving tech community in Colorado. When he moved to Boulder 15 years ago with his wife Amy, there was little to no tech presence. Today Boulder is a boom town, buzzing with some of the sharpest brains in tech. Companies like Lijit, Me.dium, and Gnip, as well as a whole pack of TechStars (which Feld started with Dave Cohen) alumni headquartered in Boulder.

Besides making a huge impact as a VC, Feld is one of the most inspirational people I've met. It is my pleasure to connect our readers with him via this interview.

What is your background?

I grew up in Dallas. I got an Apple II computer for my bar mitzvah and quickly became a reasonably well adjusted teenage computer nerd way before it was cool. I went to MIT, got a few degrees from there, and started my first successful company (Feld Technologies) when I was a sophomore. With a partner, we grew Feld Technologies into a decent sized (20 person) software consulting firm before selling it in 1993 to a public company (AmeriData Technologies). I worked for a few years at AmeriData while making angel investments with some of the money that I made (companies like Net.Genesis, Thinkfish, Harmonix, and Critical Path).

My wife Amy and I randomly moved to Boulder, Colorado from Boston in 1995 (Boston wasn't home for us) and have never looked back. In 1995 I started working with the Softbank making investments with them and in 1996 teamed up with three of the other guys working there to start Softbank Venture Capital (which turned into Mobius Venture Capital). I've been actively investing as a VC since 1996 in a wide range of software and Internet companies around the US. Last year (2007) I started a new firm with four of my friends from Mobius and we launched our new fund (Foundry Group - www.foundrygroup.com) in the fall of 2007.

How did you get interested in the Venture Capital business?

While Feld Technologies never took in any investment (we only raised $10 to start the company) a number of our customers were Venture Capital firms. We wrote back office software for the VCs to help them manage their portfolio accounting and reporting which - prior to us coming along - was a nasty spreadsheet exercise. I got to know some VCs and after we sold Feld Technologies did some consulting work for a few of them as I was investing as an angel investor. My connection with Softbank was random but timely, as Softbank was making an aggressive push to invest in Internet companies in the US (which directly overlapped with my angel investing). I woke up one day and had co-founded what became Mobius Venture Capital.

What are the top 3 things that you look in a company before you invest? Is there any one thing that always kills the deal for you?

I am a thematic investor. I like to pick a few themes - either deep technological protocols or what I anticipate to be broad market changes in the adoption and use of technology - and invest in the themes over a 10+ year period. Historical themes including email and RSS; current themes include these along with the Implicit Web, Human Computer Interaction, Digital Life, and something we call Glue.

So - thing #1 is "does it fit a current theme?" If no, we pass unless it is an entrepreneur that we know or have worked with before (we aren't a slave to our themes, but the bar for looking at something outside a current theme is usually having an existing relationship.) The next thing we look at are the people. Are these people we want to work with? Do we think we'll have fun creating a company together? Do we trust each other and believe we can have an open conversation regardless of the circumstances? Will we be able to kick ass together? If we get past these two gates, then we go deep.

What was your best/worst investment ever?

Best: Based on combined financial metrics and realized absolute dollar returned, probably Service Metrics. Worst: In terms of heartbreak, probably Interliant. I co-founded it, it maxed out at a $2.5b public market valuation in 2000, and was bankrupt in 2002. I've had plenty of bad investments that didn't ever get off the ground; the toughest ones for me have been the ones that had huge value at some point and then got decimated when the Internet bubble burst.

What are the top technologies that you want to invest in over the next 3 years?

Implicit Web, Human Computer Interaction, Digital Life, and Glue.

How did you become a marathon runner?

I was a cross country runner in high school and always loved running. When I hit age 35 (around 2001) I was a blimp, way out of shape, and physically worn out because of how intense work had become. I decided I needed a big goal that would force me to spend time away from work that would benefit me. Marathon running was a logical one since I had always loved to run. I decided that I would run a marathon in every state in the US by the time I turned 50. I've knocked down 10 of them (the 11th is happening on June 21).

Which business leaders, past or present, do you admire the most and why?

Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie, George Soros, and my grandfather.

What is one insight, business or technical, that you want to share with our readers?

"Do, or do not. There is no try."

What is the meaning of life according to Brad Feld?

When it's over, they dig a hole in the ground, put you in it (or spread your ashes somewhere), print your picture in the newspaper and write some nice things about you, and then life goes on for everyone else but you. Live every minute that you have.

Skype for Interviews

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:16:51 -0700

Blogarithms " Skype for Interviews - A How-To Video

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:16:51 -0700

Skydeck: Will It Be The First Billion Dollar Social Graph Company?

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:22:32 -0700

"...someone is going to build a billion-dollar company around the implicit social graph. And I'm betting on Skydeck." Jason Devitt

Welcome to the second installment of our new People in Tech series. In this post we interview Jason Devitt, CEO/Co-Founder of Skydeck. It's a mobile web startup built on the premise that "you ought to be able to manage your cell phone records the same way that you manage your email." The second big idea of Skydeck is that your true social network is hidden in your communication records. Read on for more insights...

Do you remember Vindigo? Back in 1999, when the Palm Pilot was booming, two young guys quit their trading jobs at the hot NYC hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co., with a vision of the future that we are only starting to live today. Jason Devitt and his partner David Joerg dreamed of a mobile phone that was web aware, geo-location aware, and full of useful user generated content, reviews and games. Now Devitt is back with his second startup, also in the mobile space: Skydeck. We caught up with him for an interview.

Almost a decade ago, Devitt and Joerg recognized the power behind the idea of a hand held computer that users carried around with them wherever they went. The duo went on to build Vindigo city guide - one of the first successful consumer applications for mobile devices. The software automatically loaded local information onto Palm Pilots and allowed people to find reviews of local businesses and restaurants. It was downloaded by over 2 million users and won numerous awards.

Five years later, Vindigo was acquired by For-Side.com - one of the largest mobile media companies in the world. And Devitt is back with Skydeck, which brings the social dimension to your phone in a whole new way. Before reading this interview with someone we found to be a very insightful and visionary entrepreneur, we recommend that you get a feel for what sort of person Jason Devitt is by watching his testimony before the US Congress.

Note: Skydeck is still in private beta, but if you mention ReadWriteWeb during sign up, you will get an invite straight away.

What is your background?

I grew up in Ireland, studied electronic engineering and law (long story), and then spent four years working for an extremely successful hedge fund called D. E. Shaw, in London and New York. That was like getting paid to do an MBA, but more importantly the company moved me to New York in the middle of the dotcom boom and I finally discovered what I wanted to do with the rest of my life: start companies.

Tell us about your first startup - Vindigo.

Vindigo was one of the first companies in the US to sell content and applications for mobile devices. We published about twenty different titles for BREW, Java, Palm, and Windows devices. We powered apps for MapQuest, the New York Times, MadLibs, and Plaxo, we managed the mobile web portal for a tier 1 US carrier, but we also developed our own content and we were best known for our first app, the Vindigo city guide. We started that company in my apartment, built it up to $10 million in revenue, and sold it in 2004. Vindigo is still in business and still profitable as far as I know, but I left in 2005.

How did you come up with the idea for Skydeck?

My co-founder Mike Wells and I were working on a completely different business idea, and our research for that led us to take a close look at cell phone bills. We realized that there's a lot of useful information locked up in your bill in a useless format. For example, if you live in the US, there's a complete record of all your calls each month - both incoming and outgoing. We asked ourselves why is this data so hard to get at? Some carriers let you download a CSV file, some smartphones let you export a file, but the vast majority of carriers and phones don't offer either and there are no standards for the rest.

You may think it's a good idea that all this data disappears into the ether. But it doesn't. Your carrier uses it to market new services to you. Your employer can get at it if you have a business plan. The police can get it if they have a warrant, and the NSA can get it without a warrant. So why can't you? That was the starting point.

What is the main idea behind Skydeck?

There are actually two big ideas. The first is that you ought to be able to manage your cell phone records the same way that you manage your email.

Imagine if Outlook or Apple Mail or Thunderbird only showed you the last ten emails that you had sent or received. What would you do? You'd try to make notes about emails that were important. You'd send someone an IM instead of an email just to make sure you had a record of the message. You'd try to guess the last time you sent an email to a customer. But most of the time you'd just forget about a message as soon as something else grabbed your attention. You'd get by - you may remember life without email at all - but it would be broken. Yet that's how our cell phones work today. We plan to fix this. We start with the data in your phone bill, marry it to your address book, and turn the list of numbers into a history of all your conversations so that you can search and sort and filter it just like your email archives. We're working towards real-time data.

The second big idea is that your true social network is hidden in your communication records.

Your true network is not the list of people that you 'friend' on Facebook or LinkedIn; it's the people that you call and text and email and IM every day. Those friends are not created equal. The ones you speak to most often are important, and the guy that you exchanged one email with in 2001 is not, even if he tags you on every new social site online. Skydeck maps your true social network using your cell phone data. Straight away you can see who you call most often, who you need to call, and who never calls you back. If you make a lot of phone calls, this can change your behavior. Over time we'll help you use the data to manage and prioritize all your communications, including activity on other networks. And as of last week we let you share some of the data - with everyone opting in - so that Skydeck members can see not only which other Skydeck members have connected to you, but which of them really know you well.

What influenced your choice to build a browser extension?

We need you to trust us with some very sensitive information. We decided that one way to earn that trust was to avoid asking for the username and password to your cell phone account. So we wrote an extension that stores those in your browser, retrieves your bills on your behalf, and uploads them to Skydeck.

We've had mixed reactions to this approach. Some people see any download as a security risk in itself; others share a computer and don't want to store passwords in the browser. And some people would sooner give up their social security number, home address, and medical records than spend 30 seconds installing a toolbar. On the other hand, some people appreciate the effort we made and others love the toolbar because we included a gauge showing how many minutes and text messages you have left on your account each day. In the future, we'll offer people a choice.

What are the most complex technical challenges facing Skydeck?

Your true social graph is much richer than a list of connections, because each connection has some measure of strength associated it with. The challenge is that this graph is directed and asymmetric, unlike most networks you create online. This means, for example, that each person has a unique, personal view of the network.

We've just started giving users the ability to browse and explore this network. Adding better ways to navigate it, keeping it up-to-date as the data flows in, and scaling the whole thing are some of the technical challenges we're excited about.

What are your goals for 2008 and beyond?

We just talk about the next iteration. And the next iteration is data that updates every day, not just once a month.

How did the mobile landscape change between your first and second coming?

When we started Vindigo in 1999, a smartphone was the Neopoint 1000. In 2000 I bought the first phone in the world with a color screen, the Sony Ericsson T68. There was no mobile web, there was only WAP, and WAP was so awful that we built our first app for PDAs. Just a year ago people claimed that the iPhone would never be a mass market product because it was too expensive. Now it's $199. Five years from now, a phone with the feature set the iPhone had at launch will be free from Tracfone, without a contract.

But the biggest and most important change is the move towards open platforms. Mobile 1.0 companies like Vindigo couldn't do anything without the permission of carriers, and some of our best ideas died on the vine. That's why I was happy to testify to Congress and the FCC in support of the open access provisions for the 700 MHz auctions.

Today most phones have a credible web browser and more than 10% of new phones have an open OS. (Not open source, just open to installing a third-party application; the bar is low in mobile.) That means there are a lot more services that companies like Skydeck can take directly to the consumer. This is the only way the mobile market will ever realize its potential, unless the carriers get religion and embrace innovation. And thanks Alex, but my 'second coming' won't do that.

Which business leaders, past or present, do you admire the most and why?

In our culture we place too much emphasis on leaders and not enough on teams.

What is one insight, business or technical, that you want to share with our readers?

The implicit graph will be to social software what PageRank was to search.

The implicit social graph is the true social network that I mentioned previously, the network deduced from your communication history: automatic, dynamic, weighted, and not necessarily symmetric. Social software refers to any application where people interact, from Facebook to eBay to email.

A problem common to all social apps is that the more successful they get, the harder it gets to pluck the signal from the noise. Yogi Berra may as well have been talking about MySpace when he said "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

Starting out on eBay, my reputation should not be zero, it should be based on the reputation of the people who know me well. I should be able to give out a public email address, but block messages from everyone except my true 1st and 2nd degree. On Twitter I should be able to follow the 25 people who are most important to me at any given time. And I should be able to do all this without having to make and maintain a list of who those people are, and without having to fill out forms, check boxes, and assign people to groups every time I meet someone new.

I'm not claiming that we've got it all worked out and that Skydeck will be the next Google. I know of at least six startups exploring different aspects of this. There are also people working on it at Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, and readers should take a look at MIT's work on reality mining.

My 'insight' is that someone is going to build a billion-dollar company around the implicit social graph. And I'm betting on Skydeck.

Wrap Up

Please post any additional questions for Jason and also, let us know who else you'd like to see interviewed in our "People in Tech" series via the comments below.

If you enjoyed this post, please digg it by clicking here digg_url = 'http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/jason_devitt_interview_skydeck.php'; digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff'; digg_skin = 'compact';

Dave Gibbons interview - Den of Geek

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:03:08 -0700

The co-creator of Watchmen talks about the upcoming movie adaptation and looks back on his career...

Drinks with Tony - Interview and radio show with host Tony DuShane

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:57:20 -0700

[from bushwald] Open Source Systems Management: Zenoss expands platform support, an interview with Mark Hinkle | Commercial Open Source Software

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 03:55:31 -0700

How do I conduct a good telephone interview? | Ask Metafilter

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:43:48 -0700

Free Internet Radio, Podcasts for Marketing and SEO

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 04:06:55 -0700

Free Internet Radio, just load Webmaster Radio 24/7

People in Tech: Andraz Tori, CTO/Co-Founder of Zemanta

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:45:53 -0700

Zemanta is a an interesting European startup that is applying semantic technologies to blogging. Sarah Perez covered the company's launch in March. One can think of Zemanta as an auto-complete function for blogging. As you are typing up a new post, Zemanta's browser plugin fetches related content - images, articles, videos, links - and provides a simple and friendly UI for inserting the related content into your blog. We caught up with Andraz Tori, CTO and co-founder of Zemanta, at the SemTech conference at San Jose last week for an interview.

Just because Zemanta's product looks simple does not mean that it is not sophisticated. Beneath the product's UI there is a powerful semantic analysis engine that matches content to Zemanta's web index. The elements of their technology include clustering, natural language processing, dynamic ontologies - the full spectrum of semantic web tech that well-publicized companies like Powerset, Freebase, and Hakia are known for.

All of these algorithms are running on a scalable, distributed grid, powered by Amazon Web Services. After meeting with Tori, we instantly knew why Zemanta won a Red Herring 100 award this year in Europe - not only are Tori and his team doing some amazing work, there is a wonderful story and passion behind the company.

RWW: What is your background?

Andraz Tori: I started programming at age of 10 and have been successful at international programming competitions in high school. I went to study computer science, however always did some things in parallel. For example, I had a 5-year detour as TV host on Slovenian national television and established a successful computer center in Ljubljana. I always look for how to improve life with technology and decided to go entrepreneurial when seeing an interesting opportunity on how to do it on a large scale.

What is it like to be a tech startup in Europe?

It's fun. It's hard. But that is even more rewarding when you overcome the challenges. Seedcamp (a UK competition inspired by Y Combinator) was a great boost for European early stage ventures and for us too. It is fun trying to bring a startup culture to Slovenia, a country that is not really used to it.

How did Zemanta get started?

We've seen that local TV house was providing all their video production on the Internet. Naturally Google could not understand and index them. We discovered that TV house had subtitles for all the shows and wrote a program to automatically create web pages that are automatically indexed and then point people to the right videos. That was too easy so we added a bunch of natural language processing and automatically connected those pages to other stories on TV portal and to Wikipedia. Now full blown web pages were created automagically. We sold this solution for pocket change and then realized that it is actually a very unique product - like nothing else out there! Then we (with co-founder Bostjan Spetic) realized that this amazing technology works on the language that only two million people speak. So we decided to go international and applied to Seedcamp. There we got first seed funding and later proper seed round from UK investors.

What is the main idea behind Zemanta?

When dealing with secretary, do you instruct her how to do every single detail or do you tell her approximately what you want, wait for result and just correct it if there are any the mistakes? We use computers today in the first way, while at Zemanta we believe it should be more of the second. Zemanta applies that idea to content creation. When author writes initial text, the service analyzes it and suggests how it can be improved.

Right now it suggests images to add, related articles, tags and in-text links. All this unobtrusively and implemented via slick interface. The better the computer understands the text and its context, the more it can help you write it. That's the idea behind Zemanta. Right now we are applying it to bloggers (via plug-ins for Firefox and Internet Explorer so they work even on hosted platforms) and we also are planning to open up an API.

How does your product use semantic technologies?

When doing our analysis we need to connect pieces of text to their semantic meaning. When suggesting tags we need to know their semantic neighborhood. But all this stays in background, the user never sees the magical semantic hand which is hidden behind simple and slick user interface. Because we find out what parts of text are about, we are able to create correct semantic markup that helps pages to get better visibility in semantic search engines or applications such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey.

What is Zemanta's architecture and use of Amazon Web Services?

Deep processing of text is a processor intensive task. You need to make it scalable, AWS EC2 is the right answer. We created our own high-availability high-performance solution that makes sure service is kept alive and well. All existing solutions only map well to classical web server + SQL server combination. We also use S3 for backups and some SimpleDB. AWS (and similar services) make life easier for startups. However you need to design your systems to be 'cloudable' from the start.

What are your goals for the rest of 2008 and beyond?

Simple, be the best utility service for bloggers in 2008. Get bloggers on board so they tell us what they want from the 'smart' service. Then provide more functionality and benefits from using Zemanta and provide an API to early adopters that want to integrate it in their own CMS or other types of applications.

Beyond 2008, we envision suggestion service so helpful that the experience becomes ubiquitously expected. In a few years you will want it whenever you will create content - be it writing a blog post, or using word processor or even in your email client. Users are going to expect computers to understand their intentions better. And help with good, insightful, directly usable suggestions. Zemanta is going to provide that service to large many of them via different delivery methods.

What companies are competing with you in the space? What other Semantic Web companies do you find interesting?

You could create Zemanta experience if you pulled different companies' products together. But we are the only one having a rounded product, not just API and not just one or two types of suggestions. You could find parts of Zemanta experience in Sphere, Calais, BlogRovr, Watson, etc.

I am a big fan of Cyc and Metaweb and hope people will build wonders on the foundations those two companies are building. I am also interested in Powerset and Twine which both could become very important if/when they make it into the mainstream.

What is one insight, business or technical, that you want to share with our readers?

Developing diverse skills pays off. And doing things with your whole heart always means an interesting journey, even when you end up at different place than you initially expected.

Hibernate Configuration Files,Writing Hibernate Configuration Files,Hibernate Configuration

Sat, 31 May 2008 05:43:27 -0700

org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect

Support Firefox Day chats: Mike Beltzner

Fri, 23 May 2008 20:15:27 -0700

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This is the transcript of the chat with Mike Beltzner as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.

All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.

What frustrates you most about the Firefox 3 UI?

Heh, great question. There are a couple of things that are frustrating to me, both at the UI and underlying infrastructure level.

At the UI level, I’m frustrated that we’re not animating more, and not trying to offer more “emergent” interfaces that help users complete tasks based on what we can infer from the task the user is trying to complete.

So, specifically, I want the location bar to be even smarter, and things like saving pages and downloading files to be even smarter. And I want them to animate fluidly so that users can understand how one part of the UI associates with the next, or how one operation flows into the next.

At the underlying level, I’m excited about new platform enhancements like Compositor as it will let us float chrome over parts of the page more naturally, and of course better threading models will help us give users progress indication.

Hello, what do you consider as the most influential UI Firefox 3 advantages over competing browsers and why?

Another good question! The biggest advantage that a Firefox 3 user has over anyone else is that their browser learns based on how they use it.

The Smart Location Bar and Download Manager, for instance, help users search through the places they’ve been and the things they’ve downloaded, which makes the browser smarter and more personal. So instead of having to remember the name of that place where you saw a funny video about monkeys, you can just type in “funny monkey” and get where you’re going. Or instead of having to remember where you downloaded that interesting research paper, you can search through your downloads and go back to that site.

It really changes the way that you browse, and I think people are going to really love it.

It’s all about searching, basically?

It’s certainly about recognizing that people tend to revisit sites a lot, and until now, it was hard to do that. Adding search over local resources was a natural way to solve that problem. But really, that, coupled with the performance improvements (yes, that’s part of usability and design!) and security improvements (yes, important for usability and design!) make Firefox 3 an incredible product.

(David Tenser: Incidentally, the Firefox Support website is also based on the idea of searching for your problems (support.mozilla.com)… yes, a plug for support :p)

In Firefox 3, which UI feature is the one you’re the most proud of?

Hmm. (beltzner ponders)

I’m personally proud of being able to select all entries in the download manager, but that’s only because it was one of my first real patches ;)
But that’s not really a hugely important feature. I think I’m most proud of the Smart Location Bar (also known as the Awesomebar). I think it will be as important a shift in web browsers as tabbed browsing was.

Besides the obvious UI changes, what else about the download manager changed in Firefox 3?

Well, the biggest thing was the addition of support for pausing and resuming downloads. This is done either explicitly through pressing the pause and resume buttons, or automatically when you close Firefox in the middle of a download or turn off your computer. The next time Firefox starts, we resume the download.

Do you think the location bar and search bar will be merged, and if so, when?

You can also now search your downloads by file or download host name. And if you’re on Windows, we scan downloads with your virus scanner before letting you open them.
Do I think they’ll merge? Perhaps eventually, yes. Mozilla has actually tried that before, back in Mozilla Suite days. It didn’t work that well, and users found it hard to differentiate. That’s why they went with the broken out search bar in Firefox 1.0. I think you’ll be seeing some experiments from Labs in the near future about merging the two UI spaces again, and making it more task based.

(David Tenser: What does task based mean?)

We want to enable things like mapping, sharing, emailing, as well as searching and navigating. Right now each bar has it’s own task: The Location bar is for navigating. The search bar is for searching. We’re starting to see overlap in Firefox 3: the Location Bar is for searching locally, the Search bar for searching the web.
Eventually we want to add other tasks: mapping, sharing, creating, etc. Of course, we have to balance all of this against efficiency.

You say you *think* people are going to love it, what testing has been done (aside from power users and Slashdot) on the browser’s UI?”

The 1.6 million people using our beta and release candidate builds are more than just power users, and we’ve gathered feedback from a bunch of audiences. Some of this I’m very comfortable just asserting from watching people of various levels of expertese interact with the bar, too.

Classic lab based user testing is costly in terms of time and investment, and a good way to determine if your feature is discoverable, but not a great way to design. Design takes insight, observation and inference. We had the insight that a user’s history was a great predictor of where they wanted to go through observation, and inferred that search was a good metaphor to expose it.

Does user support issues sometimes help you figure out the right approach in design decisions?
Yes, of course. Here’s an example: “I lost my bookmarks, help!” was one of the most common support questions. That led to us totally rebuilding the infrastructure on which bookmarks were based, and adding in an automatic backup function, as well as a restore tool.

What do you think about IE8 implementing the domain highlighting that was tried a lot for FF3 but finally backed out?

I think they can expect to see some of the same resistance that we saw from within our community. And IE has run into this problem before. The move to IE7’s UI disoriented a *lot* of IE users. This is a careful balance a designer has to maintain: how can we introduce new thigns without disorienting our users.

I believe the domain highlighting is something we’ll revisit in the future, but we need to make sure that we do it in a way that is: not a negative impact on performance, and not disorienting to users.

One of the really exciting areas of Firefox 3 is easier integration with sites. Add-ons and Support are two obvious examples. Can you talk some about that?

Sure thing! In addition to integrating with addons.mozilla.org and support.mozilla.org, we’ve added support for webmail and web calendaring applications to register themselves as handlers for those protocols.
So, for example, Yahoo! Mail or 30 Boxes can open the mailto: and webcal: links you run into. We want to do more there, but need to work with web developer communities to build the right standards and specs.

(David Tenser: actually support.mozilla.com :) )

(use a redirect!) So, that’s one thing that frustrates me. The .org/.com split in our websites is confusing to everyone. We should just redirect them all so that everything works. Or show pages like http://ytmnd.org :)

(David Tenser: I agree. )

What application UIs inspire you?

(Hint to applicants: that’s a question I ask all people who interview!)

(David Tenser: Note that everyone!)

(beltzner ponders for a second)
I really like a lot of aspects of a bunch of UIs. One thing that really impressed me was when Flickr added support for video. They just fit it in right into their existing UI without doing much else. It was simple, and it worked well.

The iPhone UI is cool, but more for the gestural support than anything else, and perhaps the physics model.
Making things bounce and animate is very important in UI. It makes the elements feel more “human” and real, which makes them more pleasant to interact with.

(David Tenser: Here comes a long question.)

I am sure I’m not the only one who noticed a change in the approach for the UI design for FF3. Decisions like using different colors for the location bar menu, based on cognitive studies. I don’t remember reading or hearing about that previously on Firefox development. What has changed? More reading? Classes? People?

What has changed is Alex Faaborg and Madhava Enros. :) My team has grown. Madhava and Alex have been bringing their considerable skills to bear on design questions, which has increased our ability to respond and discuss these issues that come up.

For Firefox 2, it was me and Mike Connor and the Firefox development team. For Firefox 3, it was me, Mike Connor, Alex Faaborg and the Firefox development team. We’ve also started to shift the way we talk about design.

That’s not just been through adding people to my team, but a shift in the entire organization. Everyone now looks at UI with the frame of how users will experience it, and how those experiences can be improved. And with more of us on the team blogging about it, everyone’s learning better ways to improve the experiences.

So there’ve been a lot of changes, really, and all for the better.

What is your favorite Opera feature?

Uhm. Hm. The uninstall? I’m a little stumped, to be honest.

I’m not that mean. They have some good ideas, but I often find that they expose them in ways which aren’t very subtle. Speed dial is a little neat, but it’s also visually very noisy. I would rather they have taken up less space on the page.

Do you use many web applications, and how do you think web applications in Firefox will progress in future?

I use Zimbra, Gmail, GReader, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Friendfeed, MoveableType, Zoho Office, Springnote, and others. Oh, Mibbit, when I’m travelling.

So yeah, I use a lot. I can’t actually think of a single thing I can’t do in a web app.

What I love about Firefox and Mozilla is that we’re interested in increasing the capabilities of the web.
I’m really excited to see what things get done with our new offline support, as well as the new SVG and Canvas features. In the future, 3D canvas and <video> and <audio> tags will basically round out the stack.

In terms of Firefox, I think we will eventually integrate Prism or Prism like functionality. And make it even easier for web apps to interact as real desktop applications.

(David Tenser: So it seems Firefox is expanding into other projects like Prism, Mobile, etc)

You can see us moving along those lines with our web application support.

Will you be leading the Firefox Mobile UI efforts as well?

Right now Madhava Enros is leading the UI efforts on the Fennec project, but he’s not the only one contributing ideas. Aza Raskin, Jennifer Boriss (our newest team member!) and I are all working on design ideas together, along with people like Jonathan Nightingale, Gavin Sharp, Stuart Parmenter and others. And of course, all in the public.

My role will be oversight and advisory, but I’m already pretty excited by the ideas I’m seeing on mobile.

What do you think about fulltext page search in adress bar?

Fulltext page search in the address bar ends up being very, very noisy. If we can get it to work right, we will, but early experiments showed that it picked up a lot of irrelevant content from the page and made it harder, not easier, to find pages.
We might want to include full page search in a deeper, more advanced search UI sometime in the future. But as the default search, it didn’t work well.

Do you have ideas for web startups, such as new sites or new business models made possible by the new features in modern web browsers?

Well, if you think about it, web browsers now offer you a way to deploy an application, have it work online or offline, have it show rich and interactive UIs, and have it benefit from the network effect and the “works-anywhere” model of computing.

This has been a long time dream of application vendors, and the rationale behind things like Java and other application models: the promise of “write-once, run anywhere”. As we move on to mobile devices, this same rich technology stack will come along with us. So you’ll be able to write an online app, or a Firefox Add-On, and have it work as an app on a mobile device. Connected or not.

Sounds like there’s a lot of potential in that, for me. One thing that’s always amazed me is the web application and add-on developer communities ability to be more creative than anyone can imagine!

(David Tenser: Thank you very much Mike for taking the time to do this. Hopefully everyone in the channel learned something new.)

Support Firefox Day chats: Asa Dotzler

Fri, 23 May 2008 21:14:38 -0700

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This is the transcript of the chat with Asa Dotzler, as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.

All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.

(David Tenser: Tell us a little about yourself and what you do at Mozilla!)

I’ve had many roles at Mozilla over the last decade or so. I started as a volunteer trying to figure out how to get involved as a non-coder (not even a very technical person). After banging my head against the wall for a while, I found a couple of people that were hosting developer builds on their FTP servers (back then, Mozilla didn’t make binaries), so I started testing and reporting bugs.

I learned a lot from the developers about what they needed from bug reporters before they got overwhelmed by so many testers, so I became sort of a buffer -a teacher for newbies to help them adjust to bugzilla before interfacing with the developers directly that led to my role as Mozilla Community QA guy and a job with Netscape(/AOL) in 2000.

Then I moved into project management with Drivers@Mozilla and from there into Firefox project management. Then the Mozilla Foundation, and now I’m doing evangelism.

What do you think are the key things to keeping community members motivated? I know that’s a hard question, given that motivations vary.

Absolutely, motivations vary. That’s why it’s important to develop personal relationships. As you get to know people, you learn what drives them and you can help them find the right spot in Mozilla to have the most impact in an area that matters to them the most. For some that’s solving technical problems; for others, it’s helping users; for me, it was building communities, and I was fortunate enough to have a few wonderful people encouraging me on that: Mitchell Baker, Seth Spitzer, and a couple of others were really important early personal relationships.

Do you use Firefox 3 for your day to day browsing? And, what do you like most about it? Is there anything you dislike?

I’ve been using the latest nightly build since Mozilla first started making nightly builds back in 1999. :)
I love Firefox 3. It’s just so easy to get around the web with great features like the Awesomebar and the new bookmarking system. I do dislike a few things but they’re always getting better. We can always be faster and lighter and more streamlined in UI, so I’m never satisfied, but I sure do love Firefox 3.

(David Tenser: Really, Firefox is the kind of browser that is so good you stop thinking about it. Just my added opinion.)

You seem to have been around the project as long as anyone else at Mozilla. How has it changed? For better or for worse.

Yeah. mitchell, brendan, dmose, shaver, a couple others, we’re the old timers. It’s definitely grown in many ways. We’ve grown in full-time contributors so much that I don’t even know the names of everyone working full time any more. We’ve grown the community so large that I can’t list all the teams and efforts any more. It’s huge and that feels a bit strange to me — to not know everyone and have personal contact with everyone.

But our impact is so much greater than it ever was beforeand so I’m happy giving up some of the personal connections to make sure the world has a better Web experience.

Do you get many direct support requests from users? If so, how many, and what do you do with them?

I still get a number of support requests in my inbox every week. Occasionally I get the cellphone call too. I’ve even had people show up at the door here at the Mountain View office asking for support. I try to answer them directly in email with the answer to their problem and then tell them “next time, please see support.mozilla.com”

When they call my cell (less often these days) I ask them to visit the website. (I used to have my cell number public so people could call me for release emergencies, etc. I don’t any more)

How has the user support needs changed for Firefox since 2004?”

At the beginning of 2004, we had Firefox 0.8 and probably about a million users. Most of those million users were pretty web savvy, and so they were comfortable with forums and IRC or just figuring it out themselves. Today we have over 170 million users and most of them are not “geeks” and “early adopters”. So we have two big challenges there: 1) support more people, and 2) support less technical people.

I think SUMO’s doing some awesome work to address those challenges and David, who was there in the early days of Phoenix helping our users back in the day, is doing an awesome job scaling and leveraging to be able to do something that’s never been done before. I mean that. It’s really amazing to watch…

(David Tenser: Thank you!! :))

There’s no other consumer product in the world with 170 million users and a serious support sytem run by volunteers.

What day in past 10 years do you like the most and why? Launch Firefox 1.0? What surprise you most last time?

There have been too many to narrow it down to just one. The day I got invited out to the first Mozilla developer day in 2000 and a month later when I got offered a full-time job were pretty amazing. Mozilla 1.0 shipped on my birthday. That was awesome.

Phoenix 0.1, 0.5 and Firefox 1.0 were all days I’ll never forget. But there are so many more.

(David Tenser: For your previous question, I just want to insert that I blame SUMO’s success on the SUMO team and the amazing community. This could not be possible without all the folks in the community.)

Absolutely right and I blame you for inciting them to such efforts ;-)

Many people love Firefox and would love to get involved with the Mozilla project. What is Mozilla doing to reach out to these people, and what is the best way for people to get involved?”

This is a great question and one I’ve asked myself often going all the way back to the beginning of the Mozilla project. The answer I keep coming back to is that every time we lower the barriers to participation, we strengthen the project. So, finding those hurdles to getting involved with existing areas (code, qa, marketing, support, l10n, etc. etc.) and removing or weakening them, those kinds of structural changes…. along with a very positive attitude and a big smile has been my approach :-)

What do you think is the best way to spread Firefox amongst people that always used Internet Explorer and don’t know how Firefox could be better?

I think there are a lot of ways and that no one way is best for everyone. I like to ask people what’s painful about going online and then figure out how Firefox can help that pain point. Most people find the Web really uncomfortable. They’re not like a lot of us who love it and can deal with its problems. The web is a series of flaming hoops they have to jump through to get something done. So I try to show them how Firefox removes those flaming hoops so they can just go online, get done what they want to get done, and get back to the rest of their lives.

Is your role as Mozilla community liaison limited to Firefox now (as a Mozilla Corporation employee) or extends to Mozilla Messaging? What work is being done for community building for Thunderbird?

My role has never been restricted because of my employer so it’s what I want it to be and what the community needs it to be. For the first few years, I was focused on SeaMonkey. Then I moved my focus to Firefox and a bit to Thunderbird. Lately, it’s been mostly focused on Firefox and the Open Web, but I offer help to anyone who needs it and I’ve certainly been involved with Moz Messaging, Mobile, Labs, SeaMonkey, etc. I go where I’m useful :-)

(David Tenser: So you’re everywhere!)

Heh. Trying not to be too scattered.

(David Tenser: Really interesting session. Thanks so much for taking the time to do this!)

Yeah. It was a blast! Thanks for making this happen David!

(David Tenser: Thanks for joining! It’s been lots of fun :))

Support Firefox Day chats: John Lilly

Fri, 23 May 2008 20:15:26 -0700

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This is the transcript of the chat with John Lilly, Mozilla Corporation CEO, as part of Support Firefox Day, formatted for better reading.

All sessions happened on IRC with questions from the public moderated by David Tenser, Mozilla Support lead.

I didn’t make it on time so I missed some of the first questions. The transcript starts with a partial answer by John Thanks to David, here’s the full transcript:

Firefox 3 is being released much later than was expected (similarly to most previous versions). How can you promise time-driven release of 3.1 later this year?

Well, we can’t. Time estimates are a best guess, but generally we do the best we can do to interesting releases in as timely a way as we can. We know that there’s something next after 3 that’s before the Mozilla 2 workand Firefox 4 and so 3.1 (or 3.next as we call it sometimes) is that, and our best guess is that we can do it sometime this year.

With so many people moving toward mobile devices in place of their PC, do you foresee the mobile project taking over as the primary vehicle for Firefox?

That’s a super-interesting question. Myself, I find that I use the mobile internet more and more with my iPhone & the Safari browser. Wwhen I travel, especially in Asia - Japan and China -, it feels like sometimes the predominant way of interacting with the web. Having said that, I think that PCs are very unlikely to go away or even decline. So I think of it as an addition of a major form factor, not a replacement. But there’s no question that it’s extremely important for us.

Hi John, Firefox has grown so tremendously in the past 2 years. How do you think about scaling product services like Support or to phrase it another way, how does a resource constrained (relative to competitors) project like Mozilla try to serve 150+ million users with features like support/troubleshooting?

Well, we think about how to scale and how to leverage with every single thing we do. I think the work we’re doing here is a start — a major start-, and I think that ultimately we can only look to the same ways we’ve done things to date — or, rather, the same types of things.

What we’re doing with SUMO is trying to empower lots of people to contribute and really to help each other. It’s similar to what we’re doing with localizations and in the code itself. We have a pretty small playbook, honestly - one basic play- but it’s a very good play, as it’s inclusive of the whole world. So figuring out how to help people help each other is the key.

Do you think Mozilla’s outlook has become too Firefox-centric? Are there any plans to branch out and put (more) resources into other projects (e.g. Thunderbird) or new endeavors?

OK, this is going to take me a bit of time to answer. *stretches typing fingers*

2 years ago, we had about 10 or 11 per cent of the world’s internet users using Firefox and about 40 people working for Mozilla and a volunteer contributor base who was contributing 40% or so of the code for the products (Thunderbird & Firefox, although Firefox community has been more active).

What was clear there is that Firefox mattered in real ways to *lots* of people and that they were building things on top of it that nobody expected, like the 5,000 extensions, for example. And it was also clear that there was going to be renewed competition and innovation in browsers, and, eventually, on mobile, and so we just weren’t staffed appropriately for the new environment –. It was all we could do to keep things running, so focus on the most leveraged thing — Firefox — was necessary.

Now we’re getting to a place that’s better — Firefox 3 is a very good product, I think — best browser that I’ve ever used– and we have a team that can engage in web standards work, evangelism, etc. So life is a lot better there, but even 6 months ago, it was hard for us to really spend a lot of time on Thunderbird. That’s why we created Mozilla Messaging, and seeded it with $3M. That’s the same amount of money that MoFo was started with, incidentally. And now I think we’re seeing the beginnings of the results of that — we have a coherent, engaged, excited team working on reinventing mail and they’ve just released an alpha. So I think there’s going to be a ton of great stuff there.

At the same time, we’ve been building a mobile team and I’d expect to see a lot there plus are doing work on Mozilla 2, not to mention embedding APIs so that Gecko can be more useful for everyone *and* have been building out a more global set of folks — bringing in more people in Europe, more in China, building a lab of folks in New Zealand. So from my perspective we’re already been doing a lot more than just Firefox and will do more — I think we’re at a better size now and more able to do more projects without compromising on Firefox, which to be very honest, is where the majority of our leverage and ability to matter in the industry comes from.

So no, I don’t think we were over-focused on it — that was necessary, but yes, there are other things we’re interested in.

Mozilla has celebrated 10 years of Mozilla, where do you think will Mozilla and Firefox be when we celebrate 25 years of Mozilla? :)

Well, I’d mostly like to get to the Firefox 3 release first.

But after that, I think the goal is to be here for 50 or 100 years because the web is the central innovation of our times. It changes everything, and will for a long time to come. So Mozilla, in my view, has a role to keep the web as robust and open and participatory as possible in ways that can’t come from purely commercial companies (many of which are contributing well).

What’s the toughest thing about being CEO of a leading open source, free software project like Mozilla? Rallying the troops? Sustaining the company? Edging out competitors?

I’ve been thinking about that a fair bit lately, as you might imagine. The funniest thing about it is that every morning when I wake up, as soon as my eyes open, and sometimes before, I ask myself “What’s the most important thing for Mozilla to get done today?”. It always changes.

Depends a lot on what’s happening but I think the toughest thing right now is that we’re not like a traditional organization in any way we do things differently, we communicate differently, we care about different outcomes, so as a result, we’re not particularly well understood.

I’d like to be able to communicate the messiness -the wonderful messiness of the organization- in a way that’s easier for others to understand but I’ll tell you truthfully that I feel very lucky to be in a position like this where I can help figure out a ton of other very smart people figure out how to make a difference in the world.

Not sure if that answers the question, but next.

(David Tenser: if it didn’t I’m sure there will be a follow-up :))

Can you please specify when we can expect Firefox 3 to be released?

Nope, that’s an engineering decision not a CEO decision (that’s one of the ways we’re different). But right now the RC1 is in the world and we’re watching bug reports very closely. I think we’ll make calls on whether an RC2 is needed or not next week and that will have an effect on when we ship what we’ll call final.

Sorry not to be more specific than that, but that’s how we roll here: we’ll ship when it’s good, not before.
(But hopefully soon!)

(David Tenser: Makes sense to most here I think)

Your favorite Firefox add-on?

Lately I like PicLens an awful lot. It’s just a killer UI for looking at Flickr pictures, especially of my family.

Do you write code for Mozilla? if so, how much, and where?

No, I don’t, and all Firefox users everywhere should be thankful for that. I’ve got a computer science background but my master’s is in Human Computer Interaction, so I really care more about user interfaces and how software is used. So I do argue with beltzner and alex and mconnor and johnath a bunch about UI
but don’t code. :-)

Going forward, what do you see as the biggest threat to the open web?

There are a bunch, of course. A couple that come to mind:

- Flash and Silverlight. They’re great, useful, tools, but not really the open web. I’ll end up installing Silverlight on my own system so that I can watch the Olympics this summer, but it’s not really what I want.
I think that with canvas, SVG, etc, we should be able to do just as well or better
- Video and codecs. We’re trying to figure out exactly what to do with <video>, and codec ownership is the trickiest problem to solve, so hopefully we can make progress this year on it.
- Mobile web (bonus 3rd threat!). The mobile web is at risk now because it’s largely controlled by carriers, and, to some extent, manufacturers. But nobody wants the mobile web. What everyone wants is the web, but in your pocket and wireless. The “real” web is special because it’s open at every level and so we need to make sure that mobile is like that, too.

Mozilla seems to be more successful in Europe than in the US in terms of market share. Why do you think that is?

Lots of reasons, really, not least of which is awesome efforts by dtenser, tristan, pascal, peterv, gandalf, etc. But more structurally:
1) We align well with European values around openness, shared decision making, etc.
2) We’re not Microsoft, and don’t have as American-centric a view as many companies (I hope).
3) I have a feeling that Netscape did quite well historically in places like Germany, and think that’s helped us, too but i suspect there are many more reasons.

How do you see Labs developing over the next few years?

I have great hopes for labs. For a few years I worked in Apple Labs which was a traditional model: lots of folks in a big building drawing crazy stuff on whiteboards and getting something into a product every 4 or 5 years (see: QuickTime).

That’s very traditional, and not very effective. In Mozilla Labs, the hope is to take that model and mash it up with open source, with user generated content, with add-ons and try to *enable* lots of people who aren’t at Mozilla to do lots of crazy and great things. Weave is an example of a project where we’re doing infrastructure to let others build great stuff. So I hope we can start lots of little infrastructure projects that let others do great and amazing stuff. That would be success.

(David Tenser: Thank you very much for the session john! I appreciate the time you set aside for sharing your thoughts and visions.)

Totally! this was great. Going to give my fingers a rest.