Meet them here now, and then live at the Firefox Summit next week.

• Dave Bottoms. Dave brings extensive software and web marketing experience with him to Mozilla, and just blogged his first post to Planet.
• Nicole Loux. Nicole joins Melissa Shapiro on our PR team after working for several years on the agency side.
• Laura Mesa. Laura is our first new grad marketing team member, joining us after finishing college this past June.
• William Quiviger. William was previously introduced on Planet Mozilla by Jane Finette and will work on community marketing out of the Mozilla Europe offices in Paris. William’s blog is at somethin-else.org.
• Tara Shahian. Tara’s been with us for several months, working closely with John Slater on numerous design projects, including the Firefox 3 T-Shirt Contest. Her blog: MusingT.

We’ve also benefited from the contributions of four rock star summer marketing interns, who’ve been working on market research, metrics, events and affiliate programs: Juliana Chea, Natnaree Chummanon, Blake Cutler, and Ulili Onovakpuri.

Welcome aboard the Mozilla project to each one of you! It’s terrific to have you here.

It’s been an awesome morning and afternoon here at Mozilla headquarters. We launched Firefox 3 this morning and immediately felt the love from millions of people all over the world joining us to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in 24 hours.

Our systems were quite busy earlier this morning so individual requests may not have gotten through - but they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads. We’re currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability.

To put some more color behind what’s been happening on this historic day:

• We exceeded the first day download mark for Firefox 2 of 1.6 million after just five hours of availability for Firefox 3.
• Net Applications is already reporting a 300% positive change in Firefox 3 market share worldwide just today.
• Over 500 articles about the launch were linked to from Google News
• The Firefox 3 launch made the front pages of BBC.co.uk, NYTimes.com, Liberation.fr, laRepubblica.it, Digg, Slashdot, Techcrunch, and Yahoo! News
• The completely redesigned Mozilla.com launched in over 25 language versions
• New community activity on SpreadFirefox.com has skyrocketed with dozens of new groups and hundreds of new postings
• Over 700 community launch parties have been registered on mozillaparty.com

Download Day has already been an amazing demonstration of the power of the Mozilla community. Thank you to each and every one of you who’s contributed to a terrific launch of Firefox 3.

Onwards to a new World Record, together!

Here’s an excerpt from the case, which features Firefox as a jumping off point for thinking about names and branding (The full case is online too, if you’re interested):

Karan Kashyap’s mind was buzzing with the debates over naming the new shampoo at G&TW India where he was the product manager. The marketing manager Sudhir Dhuni had mooted the idea that they launch a shampoo under the deo[dorant]’s brand name, Mali.
…
Karan sat half-lying on his chair, listening to the music streaming out of his computer. And then his eyes slowly took in what he had been unwittingly staring at, the flaming orange icon of his browser, startling him unusually. Firefox, said his mind; Mozilla, came the echo. Mozilla Firefox, muttered Karan. Why on earth is it called Firefox? For a web browser? What kind of name is that for a product? How do consumers relate to it? And why Mozilla Firefox? Why two names, or is that one name?

And here’s an excerpt from my response (Read the full analysis at Businessworld.in):

Traditional brand building strategies have been disrupted. Industrial era techniques — repetition, saturation and need generation — rely on two aspects of the media landscape that no longer hold sway: concentration of attention; and one-way message push. Pre-internet media relied on scarcity and control over content and channels of communication to aggregate consumer audiences. We were passive recipients of a set of mass market messages. The rise of the internet has introduced choice and nearly unlimited personalisation into the mix of how a consumer chooses to allocate the attention he or she has to give to media. Add contribution of nascent consumer expectations to have an ongoing dialogue with their peers and the world, and what you have is a changed landscape for brands.

It was great to do this, as it helped me get down in writing concepts around attention and brand co-creation that have heavily influenced the marketing we’ve done at Mozilla this past few years. I’m grateful to Meera for the opportunity to share my perspective with Businessworld’s readers in India and beyond.

P.S. Working with a great editor absolves the late night writer of many sins - thanks again Meera!

“… and I’ll move the Earth.”
- Archimedes

You’ll get your wish next Tuesday, Mozillians. Start your levers! :-)

Props are due to Melissa and the rest of our kickass PR team, and to John, Schrep and Mitchell for telling the story of Firefox 3 to the Times.

In this experience, as with all the other work we are doing to get the word out about Firefox 3 in advance of the launch, we view our role as helping to advance the broader cause of the Mozilla manifesto. And we know we wouldn’t have any story to tell without the amazing work, dedication and contributions of everyone in the Mozilla community this past three years on Firefox 3.

Onward to launch!

P.S. If you spy Schrep and Tristan in Munich and elsewhere in Europe this week, make sure to say hi. :-)

I’ll be attending the 2008 NetSquared conference in San Jose, California next week — I’ll be there for day one on May 27. I went to the inaugural conference in 2006 with Frank Hecker from the Mozilla Foundation and I’m excited to see how the event has evolved.

This year’s theme is “Mashup Challenge“:

This year’s NetSquared Conference will bring together a unique mix of people from the public and private sectors to develop and release Mashups designed to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe.

Those “people” are you — members of the NetSquared universe working on behalf of communities everywhere and the technical experts who care about these issues.

If we’re successful, we’ll learn something about cross-sector collaboration, meet new and interesting people, and build a unique gallery of Mashups that citizens, schools, and community-based groups everywhere can learn from, replicate, and build upon.

There will be several Mozillians and friends of ours from Miro there, so if you’re going, see you in person!