Explained by Tristan Nitot

The numbers are huge:

• 230M+ Mozilla users (Firefox, Thunderbird etc)
• 1000+ code contributers

Now both numbers are huge, but there could be even more innovation happening with even more contributors. Most often these are just people “scratching their itch”. These are not only coders – for example an artist who couldn’t bear looking at the crappy logo designed an elegant new logo.

So what does the Mozilla foundation do to help this happen?

• provide improved frameworks for development (under a OSS license)
• organize events, Mozilla Labs nights and café (Paris & London)
• concept series (online) and contests.

Technology

• Ubiquity (command driven UI)
• Personas (profiles beyond skins, more lightweight and easy to use, based on just a PNG image)
• Weave (sync profiles between Firefox and Fennec instances)
• Bespin (online collaborative source / text editing).

So what does the innovation cycle look like?

We start out with a smart idea, make a prototype which is in fact a bad product, see if it can live up to its expectations and either improve it to turn into a real product, or abandon it and work on something else.

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