As CEO and chairman of Mozilla, respectively, John Lilly and Mitchell Baker have overseen the huge growth of Firefox, the popular open-source browser.
The pair talk about this and more in an interview with Walt Mossberg at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.
Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.
We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”
Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.
Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.
Back in the heyday, Peter Currie was the money man to see in Silicon Valley.
As CFO of Netscape Communications, he led the famed browser start-up into history, as the first great Internet rocket ship, when it went public on Aug. 9, 1995.
Rising to insane levels, the stock was ground zero of the Internet gold rush, despite the fact that it had no profits to speak of. But it did have a 23-year-old co-founder and tech wunderkind in Marc Andreessen and a growth trajectory that was astounding.
If you think it sounds somewhat similar to Facebook today–where Currie will now help out as temporary financial adviser after the social-networking site parted ways with its CFO, Gideon Yu, yesterday–you are correct.
While at the TED conference last week, I asked a variety of people in attendance at the elite gathering which presentation had blown their head off–figuratively, of course!
TED, which feels like a four-year college in four days, had an eclectic range of speakers, many focusing on the awful state of the earth. But there were also less-dire presentations, such as one on how Brad Pitt’s head and range of facial expressions are now stored in a Sony database for all eternity.
That’s a cold comfort amid all the global melting down, but BoomTown will not refuse it.
Here’s some more TED reaction from the digerati.
In its ongoing renovation of its offerings–last month it began rolling out a new homepage–Yahoo is unveiling a new online calendar, with a passel of new bells and whistles, to a small group of users worldwide.
Overall, it is a good-looking, simple and clean design–which will eventually be extended to all of Yahoo’s 8.1 million calendar users worldwide.
And, incredibly, although Yahoo’s is the top online calendar in the world, it has been 10 years since the Internet giant updated it.
Finally, Google Co-Founder Larry Page takes the microphone and thanks the Chrome browser team and compliments them for their efforts.
This is, as anyone on the receiving end of Page’s sometimes pointed manner knows (and BoomTown has been), a big deal.
Page also starts to talk about how browser choice and innovation could make the planet a better place.
Of course! World peace through better browsing!
As was reported earlier today by BoomTown, Google confirmed on its blog that it will launch its new Chrome browser tomorrow.
Google said it would be launching Chrome in 100 countries, but but will only be available in beta in Windows (Google said Mac and Linux versions were coming soon).
The move by the search giant, although the blog does not say so, is clearly a direct shot over the bow of Microsoft, which dominates the browser market with 74 percent share.
Here is the full blog post by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management at Google, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director.
In its most frontal and aggressive attack on Microsoft yet, sources with knowledge of the project said Google is preparing to unveil a new browser–ready for download to users as early as tomorrow–to try to loosen Microsoft’s iron grip on the most important piece of software to navigate the Internet.
In addition, Google Blogoscoped has published a comic book that Google is apparently using to explain the technical aspects of its open-source browser, which is called Chrome.
I met John Lilly last October on a decidedly odd techie scavenger hunt in Hawaii– trapped in a van all day while searching for tikis and such, as if we were a geek Brady Bunch (yes, BoomTown works that hard for you)–and found him to be just the kind of quietly intelligent, thoughtful and self- effacing digital exec that Silicon Valley could use a lot more of in these often frivolous, look-at-me Web 2.0 days.
Soon after, in January, Lilly was named CEO of Mozilla Corporation, after serving its its COO, taking over for Mitchell Baker, who remains its chairman. Mozilla just launched its Firefox 3 browser to much success.
Here’s my video interview with him about where Mozilla is going next.
Before John Lilly got the CEO job at Mozilla, I had visited the HQ of the the open-source software nonprofit foundation (and, at the same time, a for-profit startup)–famous for its increasingly popular Firefox browser and red dragon logo–on Landings Drive in Mountain View.
I toured the place and took video note of a freakishly large sculpture made of soda cans and the biggest couch I have ever seen. In other words, just another typical Silicon Valley company.
Here’s the most recent GigaOm show without Om! But, in the latest episode of the GigaOm Show on Revision3, Liz Gannes and Joyce Kim do a good job interviewing John Lilly, the new CEO of Mozilla.
I spent some time with Lilly at a conference in Hawaii last year (I know, boondoggle!) on a scavenger [...]
I like this piece on Gigaom.com by Kevin Kelleher, mostly because he uses the phrase “bat-shit insanity” to describe the $6 billion Microsoft is paying to acquire aQuantive (which I wrote about here) and compares the software giant to an aging movie star in this tasty way:
So aQuantive as an investment is kind of like [...]
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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