Jul
23
Stormtrooper spreads Firefox
Do you know who Danny Choo is? If you don’t, you’ve missed one of Tokyo’s current cultural institutions.
Anyway, the Stormtrooper lended a helping hand to the Mozilla Foundation when they were spreading Firefox in Akihabara the other day. Numerous young lasses dressed up as maids (what else?) was spreading a good cause among the otakus roaming Akihabara. Not that there is anything wrong with being either an otaku or walking around in Akihabara for that matter! But these marketers sure know their target group!
Anyway, having Danny dressed up in his Stormtrooper gear made the whole event look even more surreal! Here he is trying to convince the Marketing Director of Dell Japan to install Firefox in all new PCs.
That looks pretty cool, wish I could have been there! So do you think Firefox will catch on in Japan? It seems that a lot of people are either content with IE or use something like BugBrowser or whatever.
According to this article:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/05/business/ptend06.php
Firefox share in Japan is around 5% (low compared with Europe & US). It is extremely hard to say if FF will pick up a bigger share in the future. A campaign like this will probably gather some interest, but only marginally I think.
there is nothing wrong being otaku! lol. infact most ppl in Japan that uses computer seems like only otaku. everyone with internet is all done on phone.but if you count the gamers and the anime lovers… those arnt otaku. everyone likes anime and video games in japan!
Yeah you got something of point actually. I would say the Internet usage rate in Japan is really really high, but for everyday use the cell phone is still the most commonly used “browser”.
People don’t really use a pc at home as much as in the western world, it seems.
Nice post! I was just doing an article about Firefox marketing in Japan when I came across this on Technorati.
Hey Johan,
Thanks for the post
Was wondering if you are up for meets? Always meeting folks in the industry – maybe we could share some ideas.
Danny
Hi Danny,
Yeah, why not? That would be cool.
As long as you don’t want me to dress up as Princess Leia though!
Help me please…
I just installed Firefox 2.0, and all of a sudden, my username/password isn't being inserted in the signon window (it always was before). I tried the usual suspects–I did not mistakenly tell FF not to remember the password for this site; and I also tried the remember password bookmarklet, but all to no avail–FF will not ask me to remember this password. What do I need to do to get around this?
Darius… Sorry mate, can’t help you… You’re in the completely wrong place for a question like that!