We hear that the Mozilla Foundation is buying hiring three of the principle folks from Humanized, a small software user-interface shop in Chicago founded by Aza Raskin, the son of famous Apple interface designer Jef Raskin. Humanized has been working on improving the UI of both desktop and Web-based software, with projects like Enso and music search engine Songza. While we don’t know the amount that Mozilla is paying for Humanized, we understand the acquisition is more of a talent buy.
Songza, which is a Crunchies nominee in the best design category, was spun off as a separate company in December and is not part of the deal. Neither executives from Humanized nor Songza would comment on the deal.
Expect to see the Humanized team, which is about a half-dozen folks, not all of whom will be going to Mozilla, put their UI chops to work on Firefox or other yet-to-be-announced software projects. Perhaps new desktop apps that work both online and offline and are separate from the browser? Whatever it is, we can’t wait to see what they come up with.
Update: Mozilla CEO John Lilly confirms his interest in Humanized, but says it is being done as a straight employment agreement, not an acquisition. In a note to me, he says:
Mozilla has hired 3 of the principals from Humanized. They will be joining the Mozilla Labs team on January 16, 2008. We expect a lot of innovation work from them, some Firefox-related, some broader, just like everything else in Mozilla Labs. This was not an acquisition. No premium was paid and no intellectual property was acquired by Mozilla.
The work done by the Humanized principals speaks for itself — there are lots of great, web-relevant ideas in their work and we’re excited to have them join Mozilla.
The four main people at Humanized are Raskin, John DiCarlo, Atul Varma, and Andrew Wilson. Raskin will be joining with two of the others.
Update 2: Aza Raskin speaks. He now tells me:
I am not at liberty to say which founders will be coming with me to Mozilla. However, I will say that the person who is not coming has decided to follow their dream of pursuing ground-to-orbit transfer vehicles and jet-propulsion research. Although I am deeply sad to no longer be working with him directly, if anybody can make space travel a reality, it’s him. He’s one of the top 3 smartest people I know.
The goal of Enso, Humanized’s flagship product, is to make computers more usable for everyone. You shouldn’t need to care about which application or web service has the functionality you want — you should just be able to use that functionality anywhere. You should be able to spellcheck your file names, add maps to your emails, and translate your IMs by simply telling your computer what you want.
There is clearly a lot in common with that goal and Mozilla’s goals. Although I don’t know what the final form will be, there is a huge opportunity to make both the web and the desktop fundamentally more humane.
How is this breaking?
Mozilla is buying? I thought open source cos doesn’t buy.
Unconventional but good move.
Don’t see non-profits make acquisitions but with all that Google money waiting to be spent, this is a great buy on mozilla’s part.
You guys are not Digg (don’t go that way please!), we do not need “BREAKING” in front of stories on the front page.
Mozilla is the Leader of Open Source User Friendly Technology.
Congratulations to Aza for this wonderful news. I’m glad to hear that Mozilla is increasing their focus on user experience, and look forward to seeing how they integrate humanized/enso into their interface.
The Songza site is awesome. That is what web based UIs should be.
Interesting – they seem to have some good ideas, but Humanized’s actual products never did it for me.
So who’s the odd man out, the IT guy/CTO?
I believe Jono Dicarlo is one of them thats going per his blog post about rent. If I had to guess the other one is gonna be Atul Varma since he’s listed as lead programmer on the Humanized site.
What is interesting here is that they have a lot of good ideas around browsers. Some of them are a little far out, which is what we need. We have been stuck in the same browser since the beginning. A chrome with Home Back Forward Reload etc. Tabs were a great addition but it is time to think out of the box and these guys can do that.
I want to see their zoomable ui, and vertical tabs.
Humanized team realized that running a business is hard and that they should be fiddling around in a lab somewhere instead.
Its a great service – Songza. Requires a pretty good bandwidth though. So with the team moving over to Mozilla I would look forward to browser plugins that perform real time decompression of the relayed songs.
The Mozilla foundation has done a great work at making open source products more acceptable to the general user. The interface has a very important role to play in this and the news of Jef Raskin’s move is music to the ears
I meant Aza Raskin ofcourse
Sorry for the error.
I’m sure Aza will do a lot/something for Mozilla. A fully customizable browser would be really nice.
Random tidbit: Aza has Mozilla stickers all over his stuff now ;P
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