Photo: Blake Ross

STORYBOOK BEGINNING: Ross’s mom, Abby, knew early on that her son was a programmer at heart. Not this early, though.

Naturally, Firefox is the model in Ross’s mind of how he and Hewitt—who was one of the original Firefox engineers—ought to develop Parakey. “If it were up to us, we’d open source all of it,” he says, “but it depends on how the investors want to do this.”

This statement expresses the differences between the Firefox and Parakey business models. Firefox began life as an open-source, not-for-profit experiment and recently has begun morphing into a moneymaking enterprise under the Mountain View, Calif.–based Mozilla Corp. Formed in 2005, Mozilla makes money through sources such as Google ads included on the Firefox search results page. Parakey, on the other hand, is launching with profit in mind. While many of the details remain under wraps, the idea is to roll out initially with a single application, such as the photo system, which will demonstrate how the platform can be exploited. Once all the infrastructure is in place and scalable, they’ll make a more concerted play to involve outside developers, probably around January. Ross says that advertising revenues will come in differently from the way they do in Google or other ad-dependent businesses. He can’t say more about it for now. Although market analysts have yet to probe it, some are already unsure how well Ross’s new project might do. “I’m skeptical,” says Joe Laszlo, a research director at Jupiter Research, a technology-research firm based in New York City. “The vast majority of people who want to publish content at all prefer a best-of-breed shop and don’t want to do it all in one place.”

As Ross shuts down his laptop and digs into dinner, his mind turns to other matters—like Time magazine’s big event, scheduled for the following night. With Parakey development taking up his time, he hasn’t had much left over for parties or even his Stanford education. He’s taking time off from everything until he gets this project done. But, as always, he still makes room for his original muse—his mom. When she calls him up complaining about some new technology that’s confusing her, he knows there’s more work to do—and a new opportunity on the horizon.