Last week was very busy, as we have leveraged the Interop trade show (10 to 15,000 visitors in 3 days in Paris, France) to launch Firefox 1.0.
While usally free software non-profit organizations tend to have very small booth, we managed to negociate a huge 540 sq.ft. booth right in the middle of the hall. But having a huge booth (among the biggest there) was not enough. We wanted everybody to come and see Firefox, so we have set up a "rolling thunder" of Firefox / Thunderbird / NVU / OpenOffice.org demos, spiced by a few Web standards talks. (We scheduled 79 of these 20-minutes talks in 3 days!)
The big screen, the theater, the constant animation made our booth the most-visited of the whole trade show. After the 20-minutes demos, the attendees could experience Firefox and Thunderbird on various IBM, Apple and Linux-Mandrake machines, with volunteers helping them in using the newest features such as tabbed-browsing, pop-up blocking, anti-spam (for Thunderbird).
All around us, other people in very expensive booths were amazed by the positive energy you could feel on the Mozilla-Europe / Firefox booth. Many of them came to congratulate us for drawing so many visitors. I can say they had a kind of envious feeling to see the crowd trying to learn more about Firefox and get one of our gorgeous Firefox colour stickers...
Because it was a professional trade show, we made great contacts with very large organizations who want to deploy Firefox and Thunderbird on a very large scale (dozens of thousands seats per organization!).
I would like to thanks the companies and dozens of volunteers who have helped us in making this an amazing event. Thank you very much for helping all of us in taking back the web!
(pictures to be uploaded soon')
