Firefox OS Apps Day event held on 23rd March 2013 courtesy of Mozilla
Finally It certainly was long overdue. The Firefox Apps Event Mombasa was held on 23rd March 2013. With their successful event in Nairobi a month ago, Mombasa Techies were clearly excited to bring the renowned, exhilarating and educational Firefox event home.
First ever Mozcafe held on 12th April 2013 courtesy of Mozilla
On 12th April 2013, the Mozilla Mombasa Community had their first MozCafe meet up at the splendid Cafe Aroma. The scrumptious coffee and yummy cookies was just more than enough to get us started.Guess what? 15 people from different universities who are the leads of different IT clubs in Mombasa attended the meet-up.
We mainly discussed about the past and future events of the Mozilla Mombasa community specifically highlighting the HTML5 Hackathon and Firefox Flicks event. The meeting started off with the attendants giving brief introductions about themselves, what they do and their views about the Mozilla Mombasa Community. We also discussed about the various challenges facing most students when it comes to tech related events and projects and yes this was really interesting...so, the conclusion was, many think Mozilla is just the browser and coding is difficult, it's only for the professional programmers And that is why we were there to discuss on ways to motivate people and encourage them to actively participate on development and also further establish the growth of the community.Mozilla Boot to Gecko (B2G) Tour courtesy of Mozilla
So picking up a week later fresh from the Kampala B2G Tour we first headed to Mombasa to hold a booth and talk about Firefox OS, the Firefox Marketplace and how to deploy apps there. As usual, our booth generated tonnes of traffic with some guys already aware of B2Gs developement while others heard of ti for the first time. I gave a talk as well about Mozilla communities in Africa and plans for 2013...more on a different blog post on that.
So, moving on to Mombasa. This was the final desitination for our Community B2G Tour. We were here back in March where we met with the Mombasa Tech Community lead by Alifiyah Ganijee, Saeed Faud and Ahmed Maawy who took up the responsibility of organizing Mozilla activities in the region. Since then, they have held a Mozilla Summer Code Party and now did all the ground preparations for the Mozilla Tour.
A HTML5 Hackathon held on 22nd June 2013 courtesy of Mozilla
We are very pleased to inform you that Mozilla Mombasa hosted the HTML5 Hackathon at the Jomo Kenyatta Univeristy of Agriculture and Technology Mombasa Campus.
Out of the 30 people who had registered for the event, we had 26 people who were present for the event, most of them were quite early and very eager for the event to get started.Unboxing of the first ever GeeksPhone Keon in Mombasa courtesy of Mozilla
We are so excited to share this with you all, we received our first GeeksPhone Keon running on Firefox OS on 30th May 2013 from Mozilla. And guess what? All customs were paid for by Mozilla and it took around 2-3 working days for the phone to get cleared at customs.
Trust me, the packaging in itself was enough to make us get excited, the icons on the box actually represent some of the things that the Phone can do, what an interesting way of putting it!
Firefox Flicks 2013 Mombasa held on 17th June 2013 courtesy of Mozilla
The Firefox Flicks event, a global video contest, kicked off 3.00 pm at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture & Technology, out of the 20 people expected who registered for the event, 17 were present in time and very eager to know more about the event.
The event began with an introduction session by Alifiyah Ganijee, who talked about the GeeksPhone Keon and passed it on to the participants to have a look at it, she then started of the event with an overview on Firefox Flicks 2013 highlighting what the Flicks is all about, the deadlines, judges this year, how to submit a flick and the prizes to be won.
The Firefox Flicks Global Video Contest (2013) was here again. This years theme was Get Mobilized; where entrants are supposed to make a video to demonstrate what having the Web in our hands can do for us and how it affects those around us. This is so as to inspire people to Get Mobilized for individual and collective progress.
After I found out that last years competition only had one entry from Kenya, I decided that this year had to be my debut into the contest. By Sunday 16th June, the eve of the Firefox Flicks 2013 event by Mozilla Mombasa, no advancements had been made in creating a flick and with the 3rd and final early entry award deadline set on the 3rd of July, time was running out. I decided that tonight had to be the night so as to have a demo for the Flicks event as well as be eligible for an early entry award. I started tinkering with ideas, all of which had to be simple enough to be completed in one night and by evening I had come up with some form of unfinished idea.
