Chris Heilmann and I just finished our keynote at Campus Party Recife in this lovely Brazilian coastal town. It is amazing to see the enthusiasm and momentum around Firefox OS in the local community.

By partnering with Telefonica and their Open Web Device initiative the reception was that much that the organisers had to double the amount of seats for the keynote and seeing that Brazil was facing Belarus in the olympic football challenge at the same time that is saying quite a lot!

A screencast of the talk is available and there is also a live video of the whole presentation available on YouTube:

Led by Chris with some added points on the APIs themselves from me, the presentation started with a short bit about Mozilla’s history and open values and traced the very fast evolution of our Web APIs toward a hardware-accessible web.

In the same spirit with which we handled the browser wars before, Mozilla are taking on the Mobile OS lockout developing countries like Brazil are facing right now.

Simply put, if you can’t afford it, you can’t have it! And an Android phone is alot more expensive for a consumer in a developing country like Brazil than it is for North Americans or Europeans.

By enabling mobile application and content development using technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, Mozilla aims for critical mass in the developer space – as there are much lower barriers to entry: any webpage can be an app! It’s “write once run anywhere” for real, and it’s already been around a while.

The slide deck of our talk is available on Slideshare with notes and a version without notes.

During the Question and Answer session typical questions centered around “How will this shake up the existing market?” and “Will this run on my device?”  While we’re currently limited by the practical and proprietary limitations of porting hardware abstraction layers, we hope that, for starters, by driving a critical mass of developers toward Open Web Apps and Firefox OS, that we can affect the current of change in this space.

As with all things Mozilla, this followed up with an appeal for community. Yes, we need YOU, to help us test, to help us develop, to help us translate, and to evangelize in your language.

To this end we finished with an appeal to join the Evangelism Reps program (which yours truly is test driving at the moment!)