Mere hours after the debut of the first commercial Firefox OS phones, the shop selling them is out of stock.

Released as developer preview units, the Geeksphone models are called Keon, priced at $119; and Peak, which was selling for $194. Here’s what they look like:

Now, I took a macroeconomics course more than a decade ago, so I can tell you that one of two things is happening:

1) There are way, way too many damn nerds on this planet, making it no longer a suitable environment for anyone else.

2) Geeksphone didn’t anticipate quite so many people wanting Firefox OS phones and only made a couple hundred models.

Personally, I think the truth is somewhere in between.

“Initial previsions were largely surpassed!” the Madrid-based company posted a few hours into the shop-opening. “All the orders have been recorded and will be shipped soon.”

On its website, Geeksphone said that while Keon and Peak are currently out of stock, it expects to continue online sales (preorders, perhaps) soon.

Both devices are developer previews as opposed to true consumer-ready smartphones. They’re best suited to developers wanting to make applications for Firefox OS.

Firefox OS itself is a Linux-based, non-iOS, non-Android mobile operating system from Mozilla. Currently, the company is trying to drum up support from third-party developers, without whose apps the entire OS will be rather boring for consumers.

Here’s a look at Firefox OS:

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs will be leaving his position in a matter of months, but he’s still willing to show up at events and give his take on his company and the competition.

Kovacs spoke today at the D: Dive into Mobile event in New York City and talked on a number of topics, including the upcoming Firefox OS, the potential for Firefox on iOS, and why he is leaving the company.

One of the most interesting things he spoke about today was why Firefox has not been released on iOS while Google has offered its Chrome browser on iOS for some time. He confirmed earlier reports that Apple was blocking its submission due to Mozilla wanting to use a different web engine.

“iOS has a policy, generally speaking, where you have to use their web engine,” Kovacs said. “Our web engine is different. … I would love to see far more energy behind iOS. We refuse to make the policy switch.”

On the topic of Firefox OS, the upcoming operating system from Mozilla, Kovacs said the first phones running it would be released in five countries this June. The first five countries will be Venezuela, Poland, Brazil, Portugal, and Spain. But the U.S. will not see any action until 2014.

“This is a version one product,” Kovacs said. “Short term, it will be a brand appeal. But the innovation will explode later.”

A Mozilla spokesperson reached out to us a few hours after Kovacs spoke, saying that Kovacs “mispoke” about the release timing and provided this carefully worded statement:

“As Mozilla announced on February 24th, the initial countries where Firefox OS devices will be available to consumers are Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. Exact launch timing is decided by and dependent on our partners.”

On stage, Kovacs confirmed that Sprint will be a U.S. launch partner for a Firefox OS phone.

When asked why he is leaving the company later this year, Kovacs said he had done what he came to do in terms of helping Mozilla grow and move into mobile.

“I learned in college that you don’t want to stay at a party too long,” Kovacs said. “I was hired to be an agent of change. We’ve grown, we’ve made inroads in mobile. … It’s time for me to move on to other things.”

The reason Kovacs announced the decision much earlier than a normal depature is because it jibes with Mozilla’s dedication to openness.

“We’ve been having this discussion for a long time,” Kovacs said. “It felt disingenuous to keep this private.”

Gary Kovas photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

When Mozilla rolls out Firefox OS, current CEO Gary Kovacs likely won’t be around to help it along.

Kovacs, who took the helm in 2010, will step down as CEO later this year, but he will remain on Mozilla’s board of directors.

“With this solid foundation and a strong team in place, this is the right time for me to announce the transition plan and a vote of confidence in the abilities of the leadership team,” Kovacs said in a statement.

Firefox is going mobile — only without its current CEO.

Kovacs’s departure comes at an interesting time for Mozilla, which has made some good strides with Firefox OS, its HTML 5-based mobile operating system. Reception to the effort has been largely positive, and Mozilla has already gotten support from major carriers like Deutsche Telekom, Japan’s KDDI, and Telefonica.

How Kovacs’s decision will affect Mozilla’s mobile ambitions is still unknown, but it’s certain that whoever replaces him will have to know the mobile space pretty well. (Kovacs himself cofounded Zi Corporation, a mobile text messaging company, and was vice president of mobile and devices at Adobe.)

Alongside Kovacs’s departure, Mozilla also announced a few other exec changes:

• Former Mozilla Corp. CEO Mitchell Baker will chair the Mozilla executive board.
• Jay Sullivan, formerly Mozilla’s products VP, is stepping up as chief operating officer.
• Mozilla in-house counsel Harvey Anderson will become Mozilla’s legal and business vice president.
• Asian operations president Li Gong is rising to become Mozilla’s new mobile devices senior vice president.

Mozilla says the leadership changes are all about gearing up for its next chapter — which is already shaping up to be pretty interesting.

Photo VentureBeat/Sean Ludwig

A few days ago, Internet-technology company Mozilla introduced Firefox OS. This is the company’s new free mobile operating system for smartphones and tablets based on its Firefox browser.

The OS is moving into a crowded market dominated by Apple and Google — not to mention Blackberry and Microsoft.

One of the things that can help propel a new product like this is video games. We contacted Mozilla to ask how Firefox OS handles games.

A Mozilla spokesperson provided the following statement:

Firefox OS will support all HTML5 apps – including HTML5-based games. Mozilla is unlocking the Web as the platform to build apps powered by open Web standards like HTML5, CSS, and Javascript, along with new Web APIs.

Firefox OS offers many benefits to developers. Developing apps targeting a single platform is not a viable option. Developers who opt to develop apps for Firefox OS benefit from simplicity and freedom.

Developers will no longer need to learn and develop against platform-specific native APIs. Instead, they can develop on a single technology stack (HTML5/CSS/JavaScript/ new WebAPIs) and deliver across all devices running the mobile version of Firefox.

You’re not locked in to a vendor-controlled ecosystem. You can distribute your app through the Firefox Marketplace, your own website, or any other store based on Mozilla’s open app store technology.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Last week we suggested a few things to keep an eye out for at Mobile World Congress, and last night we had our first sighting.

Mozilla announced a greatly expanded line-up for its Firefox OS. Firefox OS, or FOS, is interesting because it is entirely ‘web-based,’ meaning the average HTML-literate web developer can write an app for the system. Many developers (and carriers) see this as somewhat of a holy grail, the ultimate end game of all the mobile operating system platform wars.

Creating great mobile experiences in a world of OS fragmentation is one of the major themes of VentureBeat’s invitation-only Mobile Summit, which is only six weeks away (April 1-2 in Sausalito, Calif.). Read more about the Mobile Summit themes.

Firefox will not bring an end to the platform wars, but it is a step in that direction. In our post last week, we told you to keep an eye out for new hardware partners and new carriers. And at its press event yesterday, Mozilla delivered both. They now have three hardware partners including TCL (aka Alcatel), LG Electronics, and ZTE. That’s a good start, with devices shipping ‘this summer.’

Mozilla also announced 17 carrier partners, and this is probably far more important. Telefonica was already on board, having been the first to announce Firefox OS support last year. Added to this were America Movil, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Smart, SIngTel, Sprint, Vimplecom, and a few more.

You may not recognize some of the names on this list, and that’s because Firefox OS is targeting carriers in emerging markets. But Mozilla ha now lined up something like 17 of the top 30 carriers globally. This is a pretty serious list.

So far so good. There is still a lot we don’t know about Firefox OS, and it is still largely untested in the marketplace. But last night annoucement shows the company has made considerable progress.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Say what you will about its chances, but Mozilla’s smartphone efforts are off to a pretty good start.

At Mobile World Congress, the company fleshed out its vision for Firefox OS, which is heavily targeting emerging markets.

Early support for the effort looks particularly strong on both the hardware and carrier ends. Mozilla says that it’s partnering with ZTE, Alcatel, Huawei, and LG for the first round of phones, some of which will arrive by the second quarter of this year.

Firefox OS will be pretty well-represented on the carrier end, too. Big names like Deutsche Telekom, Japan’s KDDI, and Telefonica are all committed to pushing out Firefox phones. Mozilla says that 18 network operators are on board, which is a pretty significant feat for new OS with a nonexistent track record.

For the first push, Mozilla is targeting developing markets like Brazil, Colombia, and Poland, all of which are full of people who are looking for powerful, but inexpensive phones. That’s Firefox OS’s sweet spot.

Unsurprisingly, the U.S. won’t be a part of that first push. Mozilla doesn’t expect the first Firefox phones to hit the States until next year, which means it’s going to be a while before we see how the Mozilla fares in the cutthroat smartphone market here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With most smartphone makers endlessly obsessed with high-end devices sporting bigger and better specs, Mozilla’s focus on low-end devices with Firefox OS is simply refreshing.

Today, the browser maker unveiled two developer preview phones for Firefox OS that it is offering in partnership with Spanish startup Geeksphone, which is building the phones, and Telefonica.

True to its low-end focus, Mozilla is placing the spotlight mostly on the less-powerful Keon (above). It features a small 3.5-inch screen, a 1GHz processor, 4GB of storage, and 512MB of RAM. With those specs, the Keon would barely even cut it as a cheap Android phone in the U.S. today. But in Brazil, where Mozilla is debuting Firefox OS phones later this year, it’s representative of devices that many consumers can actually afford.

On the slightly more powerful end, Geeksphone is also working on a developer preview phone called Peak (right). It sports a 4.3-inch screen, 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, and a much better camera than the Keon.

These aren’t phones meant to take on the iPhone — instead, they’re aiming to get developers comfortable with Firefox OS and its complete reliance on open web standards, which is Mozilla’s big selling point for the platform. Apps for Firefox OS are built entirely in HTML5 but will have the same sort of functionality as native apps on iOS and Android. That means the apps will be easy to build, even for amateur developers.

“Developer preview phones will help make the mobile web more accessible to more people,” said Stormy Peters, the director of developer engagement at Mozilla, in a blog post today. “Developers are critical to the web and to Mozilla’s mission to make the web accessible to everyone. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide use Firefox to discover, experience, and connect to the Web — a web based on open standards and open technologies. We couldn’t have done this without web developers.”

I’m watching JavaScript creator Brendan Eich play a video game, and we’re talking about the future of the mobile web.

While the native-versus-mobile-web debate has become stale — “boring” in Eich’s words — the technologies interweaving our devices and our data are evolving at ever more rapid rates. Firefox OS, the mobile operating system Eich has been working on at Mozilla, is showing off some of that evolution today.

The game Eich is playing is Banana Bread, a JavaScript game, natch, rendering at an impressive 60-plus frames per second. Eich tells me mobile web apps are inching closer to that kind of performance.

“We will close this gap with the native stack,” he says. Although Facebook famously turned its own massive back on the mobile web for its iOS app, Eich says, “You’ll still see a lot of web and hybrid apps.” Largely because, as I point out and he agrees, most app developers don’t face the technological demands of a Facebook and can’t afford to build two or three fully native apps.

What does all this mobile web talk have to do with Firefox OS? Everything, because the mobile web will be powering Firefox OS’s applications.

The Firefox OS on it own is, as we’ve already seen, a pretty interface on par with what we’re seeing from Apple and Android. Eich tells me it’s built on the same basic Linux kernel Android uses.

Here’s an updated look at today’s version of Mozilla’s operating system:

But like Windows Phone — another pretty interface — it faces the uphill battle of luring in consumers and developers while very few apps exist on its platform.

For now, at least, Mozilla is fighting that problem with its perennial weapon of choice: the web.

“We do expect that with a little bit of effort, the web can continue to evolve into what we call the third ecosystem — after Apple and Android — for mobile,” Eich says. Today, Mozilla is filling its ecosystem with web apps that work well on mobile devices. “We’re curating; we’re not trying to be exclusive. We’re just trying to pioneer a category and show what can be done,” says Eich.

Mozilla’s fascination and faith in the mobile web has been well documented in the recent past, especially with the launch of Firefox for Android. But Firefox OS means Mozilla has to really put its money where its mouth is.

Firefox OS has, Eich says, “a thinner stack than the dominant mobile OSes. … This has enabled a lot of developers to get on board and has allowed us to populate the ecosystem from the web.”

What about performance issues, the kind that caused Facebook to shy away from its previously optimistic view of web and hybrid apps?

“We realize that the web stack is never perfect,” Eichs admits, “but it always catches up, and it has the broadest reach. So we started working on the standards.”

Mobile web standards have been getting a lot of airplay lately. Facebook started drumming up a lot of support for drastic improvements for mobile web standards through Ringmark, its mobile web benchmark suite, and the CoreMob W3C group it leads.

“We like the intention there,” says Eichs, noting that Mozilla was a founding member of the group. But he also points out that previous groups had also come up with a lot of great specs that no vendors or manufacturers ever implemented.

“But it can be really informative,” he says. “These standards bodies … beyond CoreMob, there’s really a healthy standards process that’s filling in the gaps for smartphones.

“This could have been something that Apple and Android participated in years ago. For them, it’s overhead. For us, it’s core to our business.”

In other words, Google and Android haven’t been able to get the mobile web into fighting condition; leave it to Mozilla to take that gargantuan task upon itself in earnest with Firefox OS.

“It’s as disruptive as when we developed our first browser,” says Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs.

In the moments before the Eich-Banana Bread episode, Kovacs, Eich, and a few other Mozilla executives and partners are talking about how Firefox OS was coming along. Again and again, the conversation comes back to the web as a core piece of how Firefox OS is intended to work.

“There is only one way,” Kovacs says. “Over time, the web is what we, Mozilla, are here for. Wherever the web goes and wherever the user is, that where we’re going to go.”

Wherever the user is — that phrase conjures up all the billions of people who live outside Silicon Valley’s bubble of privilege, outside the “iPhone zone” of the developed world. Eich, Kovacs, and Carlos Domingo, the product development director at Telefónica, all point to the developing world as an area rife with opportunity but largely overlooked by investors, developers, and manufacturers.

Telefónica, one of the more prominent mobile carriers in Latin America, has been pushing hard for more mobile development and technology in those geographical areas in particular. Eich says we all should be looking outside our own spheres of familiarity to see the future of technology: “The opportunity exists to serve people in various parts of the world who shouldn’t have to buy an iPhone.”

Kovacs says the next couple billion web users are going to come to the web from mobile devices — and he’s not talking about iPhones. And Mozilla plans to be present and usable for those people.

For Firefox OS, Kovacs says, “A lot of the underlying technology … can be brought from what we learned from developing on the desktop.” And from desktop to mobile wasn’t such an intellectual leap. “I can’t imagine a world where we didn’t go into mobile,” he says, “and in 10 years, there will be another approach.”

Who knows, he asks, what strange and wonderful devices our kids and grandkids will be using. But the web will still be there. “For us,” he says, “it needs to evolve.”

Top image courtesy of igor1308, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

We’ve been itching to know more about Firefox OS ever since Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs started talking real talk about it to us at SXSW.

And today, we got screenshots. Hooray!

UPDATE, 2:55 p.m. Pacific: A Mozilla rep emailed us back to share the following: “Those screenshots are of Firefox OS, but are outdated. We’ll share new images soon. As an open source company developing products in the open, you can expect to see in-progress mock ups and screenshots of all of our projects as they evolve. These are not any indication of the final product. We’ll keep you posted as we have more to share.”

What we see so far is a relatively simple, touchable interface; pretty typography and big, glossy images; notification pull-downs and roundy-roundy app icons. In a word, it’s about what we’d expect from a company that wants to keep pace with Microsoft, Apple, and Google in terms of what it offers consumers — and, more importantly, in terms of how those offerings affect the state of the industry.

Here’s a sneak peek:

We’re waiting to get more details directly from Mozilla; since they’re generally rather open, being an open-source operation and all, we expect to hear back from them momentarily and will update this post if any new information is revealed.

hat tip: TechWeekEurope, top image courtesy of SewinMachine

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Because “Boot to Gecko” doesn’t have much of a ring to it, Mozilla announced today that its upcoming phone OS will now be called “Firefox OS.” The new platform also has the backing of major worldwide carriers, including Sprint and Telefonica, and a couple of device manufacturers.

With Firefox OS, Mozilla aims to provide a fully open source and free mobile platform that’s completely powered by HTML5. The first Firefox OS devices will hit Brazil in early 2013 through Telefonica’s Vivo brand — a decent market to start with, since Mozilla is targeting entry-level devices with the platform.

Of course, Google’s Android OS is also free and runs fine on low-end hardware, so it’s unclear exactly how Mozilla will compete with its more established competition. Its big innovation is its focus on HTML5: Since the OS is entirely powered by the web standard, app developers can create HTML5 apps that can tap into phone capabilities typically only available to native apps on iOS and Android. While that’s a novel feature for developers, Mozilla’s going to need more than that to sell consumers on Firefox OS.

Other carriers partnering with Mozilla include Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, Telenor, Etisalat, and Smart. Firefox OS devices will be built by TCL and ZTE and will sport Qualcomm Snapdragon processors.

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