Last weekend, my colleague Julie and I were in Cannes, France, to represent Mozilla at "Break the Floor", one of France's top break dance competitions. Nebil, the organizer, and a hardcore Firefox/Thunderbird aficionado, has been an active Mozilla community marketeer for some time and saw in this event a great opportunity for us to reach out to a very different crowd. He approached us late last year and floated the idea of us printing a large Firefox logo to cover the show's dance floor. We happily obliged and produced a 5 meter wide logo onto which 32 B-Boys from across Europe showed their moves for more than 4 hours.

I've never been to a show quite like this one. The energy in the air was palpable, tight beats and wicked 80s samples filled a packed auditorium (the same one used for the Cannes Film Festival, no less) where B-Boys defied the laws of gravity in front of an audience of more than 1,200.

This was a first time Mozilla participated in an event of this nature and our huge logo there, coupled with the cool Mozilla booth we manned, certainly raised a few eyebrows. It definitely wasn't the tech-savvy crowd we're used to but that made it all the more interesting. We got to chat and hang with so many people keen to know who we were and what we were doing there, most of them in their late teens, early twenties. The feedback we got was really interesting.

For starters, nearly everyone we spoke to seemed familiar with the name "Firefox" but quite astonishingly, very few actually knew that Firefox was a web browser. Most thought we were a search engine, and a large number thought we were actually anti-virus software (!!!). When i mentionned the Mozilla Foundation, it's safe to say no one had heard of it, let alone knew that the Mozilla project was led by a non-pofit organization. It was a sobering reminder that we still have a long way to go in educating the public about Mozilla, about Firefox, about what we do and what we stand for. More than anything, "Break the Floor" was a healthy reality-check. Really look forward to attending more events like these.

To Nebil and his crew, thanks again for inviting us and you guys definitely rocked the house saturday !

For more photos, check out these, these and these and a great video that has just surfaced