Mozilla, Zappos talk at DevCon keynote

June 18, 2008

This post was written in June 2008; specific information contained within it may be out of date.

The keynote at the end of day two of DevCon had three industry leaders providing very different, if parallel, visions of the future. Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s chief evangelist, talked about love: how the web loves us, and we love it right back, illustrated with photographs of his exceptionally cute baby daughter. Mozilla’s own practice of setting the information free, and making it easy for users to change platforms, leave you and come back to you, is something that all developers should hear: the days of locking people into one platform forever are gone.

Tony Hsieh from shoe company Zappos talked about creating a culture where customer service is not what the company does, but what it is. Defining your culture from day one and hiring people who have not only the expertise, but the personalities to fit, should make for a happier workforce. And companies should be transparent: “be real, you have nothing to fear”. I hope eBay’s upper management were listening.

Finally, a very short speech from eBay CEO John Donahoe made three key points:

  • “You are very important to our success”: developers have in the past increased user engagement and improved the user experience, and that will remain the case going forward.
  • “We’re excited about Echo.” It should drive innovation.
  • “We’ve only just begun.” eBay want developers’ thoughts, ideas and feedback: “it’s a kinder, gentler form of feedback than that eBay community can be sometimes”.

There may be trouble ahead…

It’s available on listen again if you want to hear it all for yourself.

Written by Sue Bailey · Filed Under Events | 5 Comments 

Firefox 3.0 released

June 18, 2008

This post was written in June 2008; specific information contained within it may be out of date.
Download Day

Firefox 3.0 has been officially released by Mozilla and is available for download today. Mike Shaver, Director of Ecosystem Development at Mozilla was at eBay DevCon today and in his keynote speech announced that the download had become available just 3 hours previously.

Mike explained how Mozilla are passionate about Firefox as a web standards based product. He explained how when IE6 was released there was no real competition and developers produced software which worked with Microsoft technology exclusively. With Firefox now having 20% of the browser share developers can once again write code for web standards.

You can download Firefox 3.0 today, on what’s been designated as “Download Day” and be part of a world record attempt. Firefox are hoping to set a Guiness world record for the most downloads of a program in 24 hours. At the time of writing they’ve had over 2.6million downloads already.

The one complaint I have so far is Firefox 3.0 is incompatible with most of my add-ons including the Skype extension for Firefox, hopefully the developers will catch up soon.

Written by Chris Dawson · Filed Under News | 17 Comments