Boot to Gecko: Brazil will be the first market for open source mobile

Brazil will be the first country to have phones running the open source platform Boot To Gecko, based on HTML 5, in the world. The announcement was made ​​today in Sao Paulo by the Mozilla Digital and Telefonica, and the first devices will be launched between the end of this year and early 2013.

The two companies announced today a partnership to develop applications that HTML 5 will run natively on the phone, resuming the conversation that began in February during the Mobile World Congress. The idea, according to Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, "is making the web available to all users in their pockets."

Boot to Gecko, the Mozilla project codenamed, will be the basis for the platform used in phones (called Open Web Devices) HTML5 applications that will run natively. In practice, it is a lightweight and fast operating system based on the web that gives basic appliances (featurephones) smartphone features - mantra repeated by Kovacs (below) several times.

"It's an open platform to allow complete control of applications, much like a browser, and applications are installed the way you expect. The difference is that they are created with web standards, and we will have links and clicks between apps, something that already happens on the web today, but not in the applications closed platforms, "says Kovacs.

The video shows a demo of Boot to Gecko running on a prototype :

With Brazil being the first market, both Telefonica Digital (business division of Telefónica) and Mozilla still does not say which manufacturers will launch products with the platform.

Asked whether the initiative would be a form of the operators (in the case, Vivo and its 90 million customers) regain control of the apparatus of the hands of manufacturers, Kovacs was blunt: "Well, operators are very large companies, no?".

Pablo Larrieux, chief innovation officer of Telefonica Vivo, said that "expects the first devices with Boot Gecko to be sold by price featurephones today" and that, being an open platform, "to be sold unlocked, because of Brazilian laws ". Vivo said that the partnership is a way for the operator to anticipate customer demand for appliances "open innovation", as with other platforms.

Seeing the demo video and listening to the project concept, I remembered the late WebOS, Palm - which had the same idea to run web apps. In Vivo / Telefonica, is good business: it supports the development of an open platform and escapes the constraints of market smartphone manufacturers (hi, Apple!). If the project get to the real world later this year or early 2013, Vivo will surely offer very low prices to increase the use of mobile internet (remember that it is an internet company now).

Nagano comments: This project also reminds me of the Chromebook - indeed, even surprising to me that this notion that " the computer is the network "- (copyright 1996 ~ 2000 Larry Ellison / Oracle) has not been further explored by the market, Himself as Google demonstrated its feasibility with products like GMail, Google Maps, Google docs, etc.. Otherwise, this platform offers a great business model for operators, since they can charge on the data traffic, which sounds like music to your ears.

What will they really need is a Killer App that will convince people to abandon the current model of mobile computing mezza-online/mezza-offline and go to an entirely online.

Still time:

In the documentary " Triumph of the Nerds "there is a stretch where Larry Elisson confesses all his hatred of the PCs at the same time defending their idea of what we now call cloud computing (and that there in 1996!)

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