Fourth cycle approaches for Mozilla's WebFWD open accelerator

Mozilla's WebFWD programme is seeking applications for its fourth cycle of classes which are designed to teach new innovators to build healthy businesses by embracing the best of open source and startup principles. By getting entrepreneurs to create businesses what make the Web better and more open, Mozilla hopes to ensure that future businesses on the internet are more effective in enabling an open web.

Participants in the programme, which involves a three month course in the product lab with nine weeks of interactive learning tutorials and access to specialists in subjects such as pitches, strategy, branding, user research, experience and acquisition, community marketing, selling, financials, legal issues and culminating in a final pitch practice. This is accompanied with ongoing coaching with Mozilla experts and an opportunity for follow on funding from Mozilla. The H has previously talked to a graduate of WebFWD in the form of CASH Music's Maggie Vail who said "WebFWD has been invaluable to us. They've given us guidance, advice, helped us solidify our mission and our messaging, and just in general showed us an example of how open source and non-profit can revolutionise things."

Mozilla are looking for projects which are already at the stage of builiding products and are open source, or at least use open source as a component, or are using the power of HTML5 in their development. The projects have to have a minimum of a working prototype. The teams can be located anywhere as the participation is designed to be remote, though there will be Orientation events in July and a Graduation meeting in November. The deadline to apply is 5 June. The deadline is the same day as the Graduation and Demo day for the current third cycle of inductees in the WebFWD programme which includes Anahita social networking, the Appsembler marketplace, Commonly Hub CC asset bank, Gameleon cloud gaming platform, Mist.io virtual machine monitoring, Mobozi mobile web platform, Nudgepad web site builder and Vizme HTML 5 app development.

(djwm)