Mozilla’s Innovation Accelerator WebFWD Targets Southeast Asia

WebFWD is an innovation accelerator program by Mozilla, catered to help developers and entrepreneurs to build better applications for the web. It is a six-month long accelerator program that provides entrepreneurs with mentors, coaching, access to infrastructure resources like hosting and database services and ongoing learning sessions.

Below are two examples of WebFWD’s products from Diane Bisgeier, program manager of Mozilla WebFWD, to give you an idea of what they are looking for:

• CASH Music offers artists open source tools to promote, distribute, and sell their music, providing them with much more economic advantage than the current label system does, thanks to the web.

• OpenPhoto is developing a platform allowing consumers to maintain ownership of their memories (photographs) by giving them tools to host, tag, and retain ownership of them regardless of what third-party service they may upload them to (e.g. if Picasa or Shutterfly were to close down, OpenPhoto will prevent any loss of personal data).

“These projects exemplify our core values of data ownership and user control over how they experience the web – and how the web experiences them,” Diane remarked.

WebFWD is entering Asia with a bang through Mozilla Asia Camp 2011, an invitation-only event with active contributors in the Mozilla Asia community. It will be held November 19-20 in Kuala Lumpur. It is also the first time that a Mozilla Camp will be held in Asia.

From what I understand, there aren’t any Asian teams included into the WebFWD program yet, at least not from Singapore. But the WebFWD team is looking forward to receiving applications from Asia. There isn’t any official date for when WebFWD is to start in Asia. But Diane explained:

Our admissions are rolling – as soon as we receive applications from qualified Singapore projects, we will have Singapore teams! Our program is designed to scale globally. Our mentors are listed on our mentors page and we’re continually expanding this valuable resource for our teams.

The program looks exciting for Asian developers and entrepreneurs and the Mozilla team is going around Southeast Asia to promote WebFWD. Here’s Mozilla’s promo tour lineup:

• Jakarta: November 13 – 16,
• Singapore: November 16 – 18
• Kuala Lumpur: November 18 – 21

For Singapore, there will be a welcome event on November 17, at 7.00pm at Blk71. We will update the time and venues for Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur as soon as we hear back from Mozilla. Stay tuned.