100,000,000 Downloads

100,000,000 downloads. That’s almost 1/3 of the US population. Here’s another cool stat:

Countries Ranked by Population: 2005
--------------------------------------------------------
Rank Country                                  Population
--------------------------------------------------------
   1 China                                 1,306,313,812
   2 India                                 1,080,264,388
   3 United States                           295,734,134
   4 Indonesia                               241,973,879
   5 Brazil                                  186,112,794
   6 Pakistan                                162,419,946
   7 Bangladesh                              144,319,628
   8 Russia                                  143,420,309
   9 Nigeria                                 128,765,768
  10 Japan                                   127,417,244
  11 Mexico                                  106,202,903

Source:census.gov

That’s right. Only 11 countries in the entire world have a population higher than the download count. And were not to far from just 10 left.

In case anyone else wants to play with the number of the day (hint 100 Mil), leave a comment with a statistic to show how large the number really is. If you can, also cite your statistics. If a few people participate, perhaps I’ll make a little poll so people can vote on what the most impressive way to show 100 Mil is.

SpreadFireFox.com – Epic Saga

Well, it’s not really a secret that despite Spreadfirefox.com’s great success, it hasn’t been firing on all pistons. There seem to be two camps, either people amazed by the project and its success and are blind to any shortcomings, and those who are quite the opposite. I’d like to look at a few things from a business standpoint rather than a geek for a moment (since I am a Business Major). A lot of suggestions have been given, some completely baseless, some completely off the wall and impossible to accomplish, and a few that are ok.

Continue reading

50 Million

As noted by Blake and Asa:

50,000,000

Got that? Well now it’s actually a little higher, and still growing.

Amazing. Just a year ago, nobody outside the tech community knew what Firefox or Mozilla were. Now yesterday someone recognized my Firefox TShirt. What a difference just a few months can make. Those 50 million downloads are starting to show as people are now starting to recognize the brand. We aren’t an iPod (yet), but were getting there. Just look at big Apple’s QuickTime (work with digital video, and you know it well) and it’s adoption rate. That is a good benchmark to compare against.

Checkout some of the stuff people have done over at SpreadFirefox leading up to 50 Million. Makes me think I need to get a poster. Those look pretty cool.

IMHO Benjamin Smedberg should make the list for wearing a Firefox polo shirt in some of the first pics holding his new daughter (congrats btw). There’s dedication for spreading firefox.

Where’s Rob: I’ve been omitted

Everyone loves those Where’s Waldo books. Well, if your good at them: I NEED YOUR HELP.

That’s right. Apparently I’m either missing, or out of place in the Ad. There are reports of a few names not in alphabetical order, as well as a few inverted (Lastname Firstname).

Your odds are about 1 in 10,000.

So: Who here can find me? The PDF is here. You can use anything at your disposal to perform this task, eyes, supercomputer, etc. provided it’s legal ;-) .

Go!

The reviews come in…

CNET posted a review of Firefox 1.0, and of particular interest is this breakdown of their rating:

Setup and interface 8
Features 9
Service and support 7

[Source: CNET @ 11/10/2004 9:20 AM EST ]

I want to draw attention to “Service and Support”. That’s where open source still lacks.

Firefox destroyed in marketing thus far when people said open source doesn’t advertise. I think we need a community driven solution for support to. Something better than a forum, IRC or a newsgroup (the last two, most of our target end users never have used, nor want to learn). We need an easy way to provide quality free support for basic issues. That is going to be critical if Firefox wants to be viewed as a 10/10 product rather than an 8/10. 8/10 is good. 10/10 is Firefox Good. SpreadFirefox.com shows a community can replace an entire company division. Now we need to spin it to do tech support.

Perhaps feeding a form of tickets into a forum like solution, let various users post answers, and a moderator after a designated period (4hrs or 10 replies) selects the best answer. That gets sent to the end user. User gets fun points, just like spreadfirefox.com. A point for every valid submission. 10 points for every nominated submission.