What a Great Open Web Day at Naga!

Another awesome day was completed today!

We have just finished the first day of the Bicol MozTour--two grueling days of events across two different major cities in two different provices in the picturesque region of Bicol. We travelled to the Heart of Bicol in the dead of the night, some 389 km south of Quezon City.

The first day was held at the Fr. James O'Brien Library of the Ateneo de Naga University in Naga City, Camarines Sur (also known as CamSur). More than fifty attendees flocked to the computer research center of the library to participate in the Open Web Day, jointly organized by the Philippine communities of Mozilla and Wikimedia. As ever, Mozilla Philippines was lead by its ever-vibrant Community Manager Jun Barrun, and the Wikimedia team was lead by Jojit Ballesteros.

Most of the attendees were Library and Information Science students as well as Librarians from the local librarians organization.

The usual format for Open Web Day was followed, with Wikimedia PHL introducing how Wikipedia works, and how to contribute as well as an online workshop where the participants submitted new content to Wikipedia.

After the Wikipedia workshop, Mozilla PHL had its turn to tell the story of Mozilla, our advocacies and our products and projects. Unusual for Jun, he finished his long keynote in half the time he usually takes. Nice!

Next up, Jean Austin Rodriguez introduced the Boot to Gecko project (aka Firefox Mobile OS) along with the demo phone.

Lastly, I was asked to speak on localization. After my talk, I asked the participants to contribute 220 more strings to complete the strings translation. And they finished the translation in less time than I did to finish my talk! Great work, Naga City! :) Now it's up to the reviewers and approvers of the Tagalog translation to finish the job. :)

We capped off the day by traveling another 119 km to Legazpi City for the second leg of the Bicol MozTour.

Massive Firefox for Android Now Available!

Mozilla has just released a massive update to Firefox for Android, reflecting enormous contributions from all across the organization. Firefox for Android is for everyone who loves Firefox on their desktop, but now in their pocket. It is faster than the stock browser that ships with phones and has all the capabilities that our users love about Firefox and is available across lots of flavors of Android.

Firefox for Android continues the tradition of Mozilla to cater to the open web, and is responsive to the needs, choice, and privacy of Internet users.

If you have an Android-powered phone or tablet, get Firefox for Android now. And if you love it, rate it 5 stars on Google Play.

MozCoffee held at the Stock Exchange

I hosted a small Moz"Coffee" for the Sunwest IT staff on May 31, 2012 at the Country Spice, Philippine Stock Exchange Center in Ortigas, Pasig City.

I've worked with these guys since 2003, and these are hard-core open source advocates, as well as Firefox users. These guys are users of GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS X, and normally also use these technologies for their application deployments.

Among the topics that we discussed were the Firefox for Enterprise users, as well as auto-update functionality. Newer versions of Firefox use silent updates that were normally blocked by corporate firewall. Also among the topics were marketing opportunities.