It’s an interesting video from Ross Ching taking Matt Logue’s still photography concept and applying it to a time lapse video. By taking lots of still photographs you are basically able to edit out all cars on the road. Quite meticulous work this!

I love the video because it reminds me of many of the places I loved, lived and worked in: Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and everything in between, Downtown LA etc.

http://games.qq.com/a/20100715/000110.htm

Update:
And here is thirty-four more websites that featured it:
http://wangyou.pcgames.com.cn/xwkx/gnww/1007/1951824.html
http://ceo.131.com/news/changshang/10/0715/872391_1.html
http://games.enet.com.cn/article/A1120100715020.html
http://www.1t1t.com/html/indexnews_204/trade_207/2010-07/1279174736.html
http://newgame.yezizhu.com/china/news/201007/166646.shtml
http://vnet.99you.com/html/ywtj/2010/0715/3795.html
http://www.8dgs.com/news/20100715/20848.html
http://www.r2xy.com/news/yxzx/2010/0715/2712.html
http://icoou.com/News/Details/20100715/65111.html
http://www.popqiu.com/html/news/act/201007/1279168536.html
http://www.1314ty.com/news/yxzx/2010/0715/4055.html
http://news.boxuu.com/news/2010-7-15/78032.html
http://www.gameow.com/game-news/news-commend/11793/
http://www.yyugame.com/2010/0715/4MMDAwMDAzOTc4MQ.html
http://www.51haogame.com/news/yxzx/2010/0715/11135.html
http://www.k7u8.com/news/20100715/9379.shtml
http://www.175y.com/news/hot/2010/715/107151317105690BK47267D2HDD20E.html
http://www.50503.com/Article/News-55695.htm
http://news.com92.com/gnzx/2010/0715/21223.html
http://news.173eg.com/fj/2010/0715/48148.html
http://news.15game.com.cn/html/81/78/78619/1.htm
http://www.ezz.cc/news/hotnews/201007/15-65199.html

http://www.573dy.com/news/china/2010/0715/6978.html
http://newgame.cngba.com/news/dl/20100715126911.shtml
http://www.guoguoka.com/news/yjxw/2010/0715/4812.html
http://www.ewoka.com/html/xinyouzixun/201007/15-36223.html
http://www.ccjoy.com/qqfc/2/17250_20100715.shtml
http://www.dorewan.com/news/20100715/10244.html
http://www.mm001.com/game/85/n-12585.html
http://newgame.cngba.com/news/dl/20100715126911.shtml
http://www.yx30.com/thread-27088-1-1.html
http://www.webju.com/news/wydt/2010/0715/3627.html
http://news.gamech.com.cn/?Info/2010/07/73881.htm

http://news.1773.cn/wyzx/2010/07/755.html

Update 2: New article on QQ and 30+ other blogs. This time on WCG Asia. Features a photo of me playing Go Kart / QQ Speed: http://games.qq.com/a/20100719/000142_1.htm

Former MySpace Director Ulf Waschbusch Becomes Chief Product Officer at Gaming Startup ‘Garena’
Submitted by Tim Schulz on February 24, 2010

Ulf Waschbursch, a former Director of Product at MySpace Mobile will be joining Singapore-based gaming startup Garena as Chief Product Officer in March. Prior to joining Myspace, Ulf was a Product Marketing Manager in Google’s mobile-product division after graduating from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB).

Garena Software is a gaming-platform company that was founded by another Standford GSB graduate and has grown to over 25-million registered users across 200 countries — making Garena one of the largest international-gaming communities in the world. The company has a strong foothold in cybercafes across Asia, Europe and South America, and they’re beginning to move up the value chain by partnering with companies like MTV to build rich entertainment experiences for users. As Chief Product Officer, Ulf will be based in Singapore and will be responsible for extending the product into new feature areas and countries.

Based on what we see from the company’s worldwide user distribution map, it looks like he’ll be earning quite a few frequent-flier miles. Best of luck to you Ulf!

More about the company here.

Update: More recent mentions:
- Techcrunch – MySpace Lost Faith For All Things Mobile
- e27 – Former Director of MySpace Mobile Joining Garena as Chief Product Officer

This is a great success for the team who rebuilt the whole site (back- and front-end) over the last year. Congrats!

Considering this test line is supposed to be only 1MBit/sec and that I’m not supposed to be in the reception range (I guess being on the 10th floor helps) ,this is quite impressive.
Sadly there is no Snow Leopard driver yet, so for now I’m running the USB modem in Windows 7 only.

Update: Looks like this is as fast as it can get. Downtown Palo Alto with full reception (10 out of 10 bars) on a pretty empty WiMax 4G network:

7mbit down over the air

Update2: It is disappointing though in the bigger picture when you compare the US wireless situation with other countries. This for example is Singapore’s SingTel on a standard 3G HSDPA 7.2 mBit network (via tethered iPhone 3GS):

More pictures can be seen on my Photo Albums page – including slideshows. Larger version here.

But it seems people have noticed my absence.

To reminiscence a little: I really had an awesome time with all of you there!
In the last year we had a phenomenal turn-out of new products, gaining and satisfying literally tens of millions of new and existing users and changing the mobile landscape together with our tremendous set of partners from Microsoft to RIM, from AT&T to T-Mobile, from Google to Shazam. I’m proud to have been able to work with a tremendously dedicated and passionate group of people, which I am happy to call friends now.

With our nimble mobile team, we were able to achieve a great set of product launches, including among many others:
- Mobile WebNext, one of the world’s most advance mobile websites for WebKit browsers
- a whole new m.myspace.com, with enhanced graphical abilities and new feature sets and tremendous performance and uptime improvements leading to tremendous usage growth.
- a unified new look and user interface to make users feel home on multiple platforms
- a revamped SMS status product
- photo uploads via eMail, MMS, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Sidekick and more. Today a very large percentage of photo uploads to MySpace come from mobile.
- the first social networking application on Android, gaining the number two download spot on the Android Market
- the fastest downloaded application on RIM BlackBerry devices
- numerous new releases and feature updates for the Apple iPhone app, Sidekick, Nokia devices and more.

One thing we should not forget is the tremendous scale at which the team worked. Every little piece of code literally has an impact on millions of people. This I think should humble us all. Farewell friends and best of luck!

Last year we had a terrible season of fires here. In fact, one day I was coming out of a dinner in Beverly Hills – when all I could see was… the air! A very strong yellow-orange tint could be seen all the way to ground level, combined with an odor of BBQ. Really weird.

As one can imagine, the rush to get one was crazy. At first I tried to get my well-known and long-lasting standard username ‘ulfw’, which I tend to use as much as I can. My car’s number plate says it, my yahoo and aol accounts are ulf and even my URL as you all know is ulfw.com
Sadely Facebook permits 5+ character names only (like Google). So instead of going with something like ‘ulfmw’ or ‘uwaschbusch’ I opted to go with something different this time and made my profession the user name.

You can now find me on http://facebook.com/productmanager

Here are a few other funny ones:

• Tom Anderson
• Swine flu
• Sexy Girl
• Sweet Lover
• Super Slut
• default.aspx
• Tech Support

In unrelated news. I am scared. We just had a 5.0 earthquake literally less than a handful of miles of my apartment. Everything and everyone’s alright, but I got pretty shaken.

PS: Several aftershocks after the quake. Today we had a 4.0 while I was at work. This one felt more like a fighter jet going supersonic rather than an earthquake. I am getting worried about the amount of them lately. I had nothing like that in San Francisco.

Might still have to work a little on your results though, no?

When browsing around today, we ended up looking up basic human anatomy. Hilarity ensued when we got this result back for the query ‘average woman‘:

Ouch…

Filmed with my new Canon SD780 in 720p HD.

Los Angeles is a strange town. Having lived more than five years in the Bay Area and only about 10 months in LA, I might still have a jaded view of NorCal vs. SoCal. But one thing is clear: Los Angeles is not a city. It’s a conglomerate of small communities that pretty much only function on their own.
If you live in Santa Monica, best to have your friends, shop, go out to eat and do business in Santa Monica. If you live in Beverly Hills, best to have friends around there. God forbid you live outside of central LA, say in Pasadena or down south in the OC.

Here is a prime example of what I’m talking about. A random shot of Google Maps on my iPhone, taken at the same time. Left is the peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area (where I used to live) and on the right is West LA (with the blue dot marking my current location).

Now in San Fran, my options to get from place to place are almost endless. If I live in SF and want to go south to see friends in the valley – let’s hit 280 and I covered the 50 miles in 45 mins. And vice versa.
In LA, the story changes. When you check the map, you’ll notice I really only have one option: go west on the 10 to Santa Monica, i.e. go home. That’s all. If I want to go to the valley (the San Fernando one), I’d be stuck in south-north traffic. If I’d want to hit downtown to see a show, I’d be stuck in bad west-east traffic. If I’d want to visit friends in Orange County, god forbid I’d be stuck forever in north-south traffic.
The map only shows part of the story. When you zoom out you’ll see lots of more red and even black (stand still) traffic.
Now I don’t want to use this post for random ranting. It’s actually not even about what is better or worse. There actually is an interesting social difference I have noticed between those two places. In the Bay Area, it was never really an issue where people lived. You can pretty safely guesstimate how long it would take each other to meet and just plan accordingly. In LA, it’s more like – OMG you live 20 miles away? Er… I think I’m busy or… Maybe let’s meet later in the evening (i.e. when the roads are free). This seems to lead to smaller communities who are much more focused on themselves than the interconnected communities in the Bay Area seem to be.
Interesting stuff…

Update: Here’s some statistical data to back up my case. Study: Los Angeles has worst, most costly traffic jams and the mobility data report for Los Angeles. The Los Angeles area topped a study looking at urban traffic congestion, saying that area motorists spent 485 million hours idling in traffic delays in 2007, which was the most in the nation. The delays also caused area motorists to use up 367 million more gallons of fuel in 2007 than they would have if it were not for traffic delays. Overall, traffic congestion in the area cost an estimated $10.3 billion in 2007, again, ranking number one amongst all areas.

It took me a while to become a real fan of twitter. I tried it real early when it came out, played with it again when I was working at Google and doing the communication piece for Google’s acquisition of Jaiku. Surprisingly they didn’t build the service out and now made the Jaiku platform open source.

Now that I am using twitter again, I’ve grown a bit frustrated with the reliability of the service. Now, a fast growing service does have scalability pains. I realize that. But these outages and problems have been there for years. How come that can’t be under control?

Well – I hope they will make the service more stable going forward. I for one can’t see any of my friends’ tweets for over a week now. twitter.com/public_timeline works, but twitter.com/home doesn’t, nor do any third party clients. I can update tweets, but just not follow any friends. At least they know about the problem (and are hopefully!) working on a fix.

Oh and while you’re at it – follow me on twitter.

Update: Seems like I’m not the only one with that (and other) problems on twitter right now.
Update2: Over a week later, Twitter is finally aknowledging the problem and working on a fix. Woohoo.
Update3: Problem got fixed. Woohoo. Took a while and I hope it’ll stay up for a while

MySpace users can also update their status. Setup your account once at http://www.myspace.com/mobilesettings and then send a text message to MYSPC (that is: 69772). The text message content will be your status on MySpace. Right now we set your mood to (empty), but we’re working on allowing you to set your mood too. Go try it out!

The new site has been optimized for newer devices with screen sizes that are 176 pixels wide or larger in mind. Our MySpace Mobile website is one of the highest trafficked mobile websites in the world, with more than 20 million users worldwide across our mobile properties. It is available in in 13 languages. With the new site we estimate to increase that number significantly going forward.

The original:

Darth Vader coming back from the dentist:

Techno remix:

Christian Bale meets David:

(Too bad it has too many f.. words, but it’s still funny )

At the beginning of the year some blog statistics from January 1 2008 through January 1 2009. It turns out that readers of this blog are more tech affine than the general population and are happy to use alternative web browsers:
1. Firefox 51.9%
2. Internet Explorer 26.2%
3. Safari 11.8%
4. Chrome 6.8%
5. Opera 1.9%

The overall web statistic for Internet Explorer seems to be more like 70%.

I would like to wish you all the very best this holiday season and a successful and happy 2009!

Ulf

Danny Boy:

So now I had to go through every single embedded Youtube video on this blog and add the &showsearch=0 parameter. Thanks Youtube for messing with an experience that has been fine for years. Why not make the search bar blend in after viewing a video?
I wonder if they are THAT desperate to increase their search numbers now. Why would anyone want to search for a video on an embedded player before (or even instead of) watching the embedded video they came to see in the first place!? Beats me. But hey – what do I know…

Anyways fellow bloggers – here is how to get rid of it.

Update: Dec 5th – apparently they must have fired the useless designer & PM or something and now replaced the search bar with a more black/gray (instead of pale blue) and not-as-invasive one that only blends in when you mouse over the video. I still don’t see the point of searching instead of viewing the movie you intended to see in the first place, but at least now it’s not as annoying.

Since then BlackBerry users sent and received more than 15 million messages and updated their mood and status settings via MySpace over 2 million times in the first week.

Go get it while it’s hot at http://www.myspace.com/blackberry

Here is my latest futile attempt to get online:

Time Warner Cable
Price point: $57.95 per month + $20 sign-up cost. Useless. Completely useless. Alleged connection speed: 10 MBit/sec. It’s Sunday morning. There is barely anyone else online.

Today I am proud to announce that our new fullscreen photo viewer launched on iPhone.
- Switch from picture to picture with the swipe of your finger
- Add comments, view and edit captions or change your profile picture
- Turn your phone around to change from landscape to portrait viewing

To welcome the Android platform, I am happy to announce that we launched MySpace for Android today – the first social networking application to hit the Android platform and the T-Mobile G1. More than two million daily unique users visit MySpace�s mobile website, and according to ABI Research 70 percent of people who use social networks on mobile have visited MySpace.

Features:
- Instant photo uploading from an Android device to a MySpace profile
- Check out tour schedules on band profiles
- View and comment on photos, profiles, and bulletins
- Search and add new friends
- Send and read messages
- Update and view mood and status
- Integrated with Shazam for Android. Just tag a song via Shazam and befriend a band at MySpace

Besides m.myspace.com, we now have developed native applications for Android, Sidekick, iPhone, and soon Blackberry.

Just go and grab a copy from the Android Market!

And the sad original:

I’m now being portrayed as the ‘Anti-Googler’, the disgruntled ex employee who isn’t loyal to his former employer. Fact is that my little intro-post of my personal opinions on Android was taken completely out of context and without waiting for the announced series of posts to start.

All I did was merely critique the look of the G1 device. Which I stand behind. I am sorry, but I think it’s dated. I was not talking about the hardware being crap (in fact many things are better than in an iPhone e.g. the autofocus 3MP camera or a removable battery or a full size keyboard) nor did I say a word about the Android OS being bad in any way (which it isn’t). Fact is: I wanted to write POSITIVE posts about the OS – which is developed by Google and has made GREAT advances over the years. I wanted to write about the advantages of an OPEN OS where anyone can build applications for.

I know many of the people on the Android and Google Mobile teams, who’s work I highly respected and still do. I feel sorry that I am now portrayed as a disgruntled ex-Googler, which is far from the truth. I will stop voicing my opinion (positive or negative) on this going forward because I learned my lesson that you can very quickly be singled out by the valley’s main stream media. Which is weird because there were articles in very significant blogs, such as Gizmodo which have a 10x more negative view on things but weren’t highlighted as much. Fact is: I have been and still am a big fan of Google. Why else would I have decided to work there so long?
Fact is also: I do believe Android has a future ahead of it that’s bright and has the potential to become a major player in the market space. The G1 is just the first of many devices.

I really TRIED to like my white 16GB iPhone 3G, but I just couldn’t. The phone is completely incapable of doing a 3G->2G handover, resulting in 1 to 0 bar coverage and subsequent call drops or ‘No Service’ notifiers. Never in my life had I seen more ‘Call failed’ or ‘No Service’ notifications on any phone (even back in the day on my Ericsson T28 nearly a decade ago).
At home? No possibility to hold or make a call reliably. 0-1 bars reception. No 2G fallback.
At work? No reception.
On the 5 mile stretch to work? Reception, but 2-3 times the call is dropped.
Essentially I had a phone with ‘no bars in more places‘.

Also when the phone was on 3G it barely even lasted till the afternoon, let alone a full day. If there ever was reception, download speeds were barely twice that of EDGE. Most of the time they were pretty much the same.
So I ended up having 3G deactivated the lasts two weeks. Now that I was nearing my 30-day return window, I did the only sensible thing I could do and returned my 3G. This in itself was a horrible multi-hour experience at The Grove Apple store in LA and subsequently the at&t store on Beverly and things are still not worked out right (e.g. they haven’t reverted my 2-year contract extension, even though they should). AT&T says I need proof I returned the phone to Apple. Apple says there is nothing they can do. Their system should automatically do it. So now I’m on a 2-year extension without getting a cheaper or free phone. Just to show my love to ma’bell at&t.
Speculation is running wild on whether it is at&t’s bad network (though other 3G devices allegedly work well), Apple’s secrecy behind developing the phone and thus limited testing or Infineon’s 3G chipset.

Update September 27: With firmware 2.1 a lot of those problems went away. I now have a black 16GB iPhone 3G from work (I have returned my personal one last month) and while I still have reception issues, it’s not ‘as bad’ as it was before. Sadly in my apartment reception still jumps from 0-1 bar of 3G to 5 bars of 2G which still results in call drops from time to time.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Invent or enhance new mobile products and features to improve user experience and promote inter-site interaction.
- Write concise functional requirements for each new product or existing product enhancements, including business justification and operational impact.
- Create preliminary design concepts and mock-ups.
- Lead the relevant teams to efficiently implement and rollout each product or enhancement.
- Work with business and marketing teams to find the best way to monetize and promote new products and features.

SKILLS/QUALIFICATIONS:
- Internet or mobile product design or product management experience.
- Experience with and deep knowledge of the mobile industry and landscape
- Exceptional interpersonal skills including the ability to communicate with both technical and business experts across multiple parts of the organization.
- Experience managing simultaneous projects and demonstrated team leadership abilities in a fast-paced environment.
- Proven ability to manage direct and indirect teams
- Ability to balance technical and business issues
- Strong organizational skills.

Whenever one of these dreadful things shows up on a website (e.g. to add a user on MySpace or change your user info on Yahoo! or change your password on Google etc.) I have to give to between two and three tries on average before I get to the next screen. No matter how thoroughly I try to read them for some reason I always get the wrong at first.

I mean, come on. What do these really mean?

Coincidence?

Now, I am moving in 12 days (9 business days) and the fact is:
- Apple is not willing to sell to me even though they have plenty of devices in stock
- at&t is not able to sell to me directly, only by order and PICKUP instore
- I have to be physically at the store I ordered the phone in (i.e. I can’t order in LA now as I am not in town yet, and I can’t order in SF as I will be in LA by the time the devices get here)
- No mail order. Period. You HAVE to be PHYSICALLY at the store even though they don’t actually HAVE any ACTUAL phones to sell to you.

So – no iPhone 3G for me. No $300 for Apple, no $375 for at&t (the ridiculous $15/month price increase over 24 months). For some odd reason, I don’t feel so bad about this now.

which translates into:
“Scrolling-Display

In the video titled “Mobile Messenger” you’re not seeing fantasy functions as before. But the messages in large scrolling type, which can also be read across the meeting room table are bringing true high school behavior into a meeting.”

Whatever… I’m on DER SPIEGEL! Woot woot!
Original video is here.

For me, it basically were three reasons that drew me to them:
- I genuinely liked all the MySpace folks I met throughout my interviews, from the SVP of Engineering to Products and many in between. Thanks for inviting me to your pizza Friday, guys!
- MySpace is a massively used product, in scale with Google, Yahoo or Facebook.
- The opportunity is just awesome. I am fortunate enough to be on the intersection of Social Networking and Mobile, THE future area of growth for social platforms.

So I am happy to announce that starting August 4th, I’ll be joining MySpace as their new Product Management Director for Mobile!

MySpace is coming up with a lot of new products and features, for example last week a new homepage design launched:

Here is a look at the current MySpace mobile website (m.myspace.com):

This is MySpace’s current building with Fox Interactive Media in Beverly Hills 90210:

Apparently a parking nightmare is awaiting me there.

Starting in June 2009, we’ll be moving to a new campus in Playa Del Rey though, as Techcrunch already reported recently:

All FIM companies in Southern California will move to the new facility starting from June to December 2009. The site will house over 300,000 square feet of commercial space and is part of a development called Horizon at Playa Vista (a rendering of the development is above). The area is quickly becoming LA�s media hub, with EA, Rubin Postaer and others now with offices in the area.

Effie’s super awesome cake:

Setup your MySpace page at the Learning Annex

It was time for me to move on though and I am excited about the changes ahead in my life. More updates on that to come later, but for now let me just say – a move not only to a new company, a new role, a new job level – but also – to a new location is coming up next month. I’ll be moving down to LA!

Watch out for more info coming in future blog posts.

My favorite excerpt:
“Someone decided to trash the one part of Windows that was usable? The file system is no longer usable. The registry is not usable. This program listing was one sane place but now it is all crapped up.

What an absolute mess.
”

Couldn’t have said it better than him…

I felt compelled to volunteer two of my own. The way those came together were pretty much:
Effie: Ulf, I need you to do at least two videos.
Ulf: Hm ok. No idea. When do you need them?
Effie: Can you come down NOW please?
Ulf: Er… hm.. ok…

Frankly I couldn’t come up with something valuable yet funny on the spot, so I just went with two time wasters.

Mobile Messenger:

I love Pandas:

One thing to mention though: the ‘cheap’ price of $199 for the 8GB model is a lie. Don’t be fooled.
Fact is: AT&T is raising data prices by $10 a month or 24x$10 = $240 over the course of the 2yr (mandatory) contract, thus increasing the total price for the phone to $439 (vs. $399 for the current model). Weird how Steve Jobs completely forgot to mention that…
Update 2: at&t is going more and more ridiculous. So – SMS are NOT included anymore either (used to be 200 SMS included), making a $5 SMS plan necessary and driving up monthly cost for the ‘cheaper’ iPhone 3G to now $15/month extra = $360 over the contract term. Thus the new ‘cheaper’ iPhone is estimated to cost a total of $559 vs. $399 for the older ‘more expensive’ iPhone.

PS: Oh and in the series ‘Ulf is traveling to LA and sees someone he knows from TV’, this time it’s Tim Speedle from CSI Miami (real name Rory Cochrane) who was buying a pair of Seven Jeans when I was in the store in West Hollywood buying myself a pair.

I wish everyone a great long weekend!

Here is a video of her going through the Miraflores locks on the Pacific terminus of the canal:

This will give you an idea of the stages of progression from entering the canal through the Gatun locks and Lake Gatun all the way out to the Pacific ocean through the Miraflores locks:

And here are a few pictures at various stages of the route:

Gatun locks near the Atlantic entrance of the canal

Passing through Centennial Bridge

Exiting Miraflores locks towards the Pacific Ocean

So – horray. No 80GB is suddenly enough again!

Truthfully though, I am happy I got the machine. I was seriously considering getting a black Macbook instead as it is 50% faster, can have 6x the storage capacity and twice the RAM. But at the end of the day the GORGEOUS LED display and the way the Air is constructed won me over. It truly is an outstanding machine that can only be enjoyed when seen and used in person.

Anyways, here are the must-have unpacking pics. This is the smallest box I ever had the privilege of unwrapping a computer from.

Trains in China

Trains in Tokyo

Trains in India

Trains in Bangladesh

Trains in Melbourne

Trains in London

Trains in New York City

and of course, let’s not forget the awesomeness of Thai transportation reported earlier.

Google on the iPhone makes News, goes around the world and to your Apps domain

Posted by Ulf Waschbusch, Product Marketing Manager, Google mobile team

Google f�rs iPhone jetzt auch in deutsch! Et en fran�ais .. en in Nederlands and in many more languages. When we launched our new Google interface for the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco last January, a number of you approached us at our booth and asked when you could use our new interface in your home country. (Yes, San Francisco IS a very cosmopolitan city.) I am happy to say: the time has come. Today we’re launching our new integrated Google experience for the iPhone and iPod Touch in 33 new markets and 16 new languages, from Argentina to New Zealand, from Swedish to Chinese.

Google on the iPhone is a great way to access your most used Google services. Some of its benefits include
- Fast and fluid search with one-tap access to News, image, local, or web results and search query suggestions when you start typing.
- Automatic delivery of Gmail messages (no need to refresh your browser!), and auto-completion of email addresses when typing
- A combined month-and-current-day view of your always-in-sync Google Calendar, and the ability to share pictures with friends and family using Google Photos

Today we’re also launching a special Google News edition for the iPhone. Browse the front page or search for results straight from the home page. Enjoy the full catalog of Google News sources and even watch associated YouTube content.

To try out the new Google interface, just point your iPhone or iPod Touch web browser to www.google.com.

Furthermore, if you use Google Apps – now is the time to use your domain name on the iPhone as well. Just bookmark http://www.google.com/m/a/YOURDOMAIN for fast one-click access to Google. Please make sure to replace YOURDOMAIN with your actual domain name.

Now my friendly MINI is up for sale (interested anyone?) while I await the arrival of my new vehicle.

See list here.

Makes me proud to be an alumnus of the Class of 2006.

(my old business card)

Best Business Schools (Ranked in 2008)

1. Harvard University
1. Stanford University
3. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan
4. Northwestern University (Kellogg)
4. University of Chicago
7. Dartmouth College (Tuck)
7. University of California–Berkeley (Haas)
9. Columbia University
10. New York University (Stern)

Anyhow I just want to use this post to wish Phil, Sanja and Ivan the very best for their future endeavours and… see you soon!

Here’s a very favorable shot of him in Bangkok btw:

(and no Ivan – I won’t take this picture off the post)
Check out his new blog here.
And oh yea – should anyone see a guy dressed like this in Dubai. Make sure to say hi. There shouldn’t be too many…

So we were in our Mobile All-Hands meeting. Packed in a small open tech talk area about 100 or so people listened to what new things our teams around the world came up with. When our VP gave an update, someone who was not even part of the meeting came by and loudly interrupted.
Standing right in front of the projection screens he addressed the audience and uttered his dismay about how hard it is for him to �

� reach the bathrooms(!) as we were apparently blocking the walkthroughs.

Now here are a few alternative options he could have pursued instead:
- Use the bathroom on the lower floor
- Walk past the bystanders, excusing himself and making it through quickly and nearly effortlessly
- Wait 5 minutes

All valid options I would say, but he instead chose the most natural way and addressed the public with his issues. Democracy at it’s best I guess.
The fun thing is that he didn’t want to let go and started arguing about the whole thing. Aw… engineers.. you just gotta love them.

Supposably it’s even bigger and nicer than the one I’ve been to a few times in Las Vegas:

Now the kicker though:
A couple of days later when reading a magazine article about how Venice, Italy is about to sink when the sea level rises just a few inches I had my brain stop for a second or two.
When looking at the Piazza San Marco…

…I actually thought…

Oh my! There’s a Venetian in Venice too now!

Yea. I know. … Don’t say anything…

Yesterday I dropped off my car at E.Harms in Frankfurt to have it trucked to Bremerhaven hopefully shipped to Port Hueneme this weekend. The whole delivery time is estimated to be around 8 weeks. Urgh.. those will be tough!

Anyway, as part of the European Delivery program, I’ll pick up my car in Munich, drive it for about a week or so and then drop it off near Frankfurt (to have it trucked to Bremerhaven and ultimately shipped all the way through the Panama canal to California). Believe it or not, but it is actually cheaper to buy a car this way than ordering it directly from the dealer. More info on the program here. After that I’ll have another 1.5 or so well earned vacation days – as a matter of fact the first ones since I joined Google over 1.5 years ago. Yes. I was THAT busy. I’m definitely looking forward to having a break, eating mom’s cooked food and maybe driving down through the Alps to Rome (with stops in Lucern, Milano, Florence…). Not sure if that’ll happen yet, but right now that’s the plan. So – expect to see more photos and infos on here soon.

Now I have to go get some jumper battery kit for $80+ as I’m traveling to Europe for the next three weeks. I know I can’t rely on my car to start after such a period of time, so I better get it now before I’m stranded when I come back.

So as you can tell, all in all I am not too happy. Pretty does not necessarily equal reliable. I guess that’s a general lesson in life.

The simple moral of the story is that investing in a safe car is money well spent in my mind. There are many opportunities to save money in life. This one shouldn’t be one.

Oh and btw, my mom’s new car will be the Mercedes A Class Coupe:

Oh and above all – thanks to my friend and colleague Jonathan who put this crazy video together. Thanks buddy!

Since getting my first intel Mac I was waiting impatiently for Microsoft to update their Office suite as a Universal binary. Frankly I’d have been fine with just an Office 2004 code port to the intel platform, but I understand that Microsoft wanted to go for a new release. Makes sense.
Now after waiting seemingly endless two years… I am still waiting now! More than ever actually!
Huh? The software is out, no? Well yes it is. And that’s the sad part. Since I started using it for the last 2 weeks or so, my productivity in doing anything MS Office related dropped by an estimated 90% or so. It is USELESS. U S E L E S S.
How on earth they were able to make an intel native app run (seemingly) 10x slower than an emulated old PowerPC one is beyond me. Honest to god. It flabbergasts me. Not only did they add no noticeable new features, but they did take features out of Excel (the only Office app I use. I think Pages is a better word processor and Keynote is a considerably better presentation software) like VBA or the Math ToolPak, Solver, whatnot. But no. The app is so slow that I can’t do anything with it anymore.
A large 20 MB pivot table (12000 rows) takes about 22 seconds to be generated on Excel 2004 on my MBP. While I am typing this, the same table is still being generated in Excel 2008. It started 15 Minutes ago and is now at ’85% complete’. Unbelievable. This and the fact that Excel takes longer to start up as a native app than Excel ’04 did with Rossetta does it for me. I am seriously disappointed and happy I didn’t have to pay for this myself, but rather got it through work. Now Microsoft does do great software, including Office 2007 on Windows, which I really like. But this? Gee…

Update: Was completed in 19 mins. Sadly I had to force-quit Excel 2008 two mins later because it bogged down my system so much that I couldn’t do anything with it anymore. Back to Office 2004 it is.

Update2: Had to reinstall OS X, this time without Office 2008. Turns out something in Office generates a spinning beach ball in many network-related tasks, even if Office isn’t running. Reinstall of OS X fixed it. After installing Office 2008, problem re-appeared. Second reinstall fixed it again. This time Office 2004 will grace my hard disk again.

To my surprise though, when I went on a brief trip down to San Diego on Saturday on the table next to me Jamie Alexander (Jesse from Kyle XY) had lunch with a friend. Sorry for the bad pictures, but she IS actually really beautiful in person. More so than in the TV show – surprisingly.

The idea is to try out how mobile search looks like on your mobile handset and what you can do with mobile without having to pick up your phone. So play around with it and let us know what you think!

Nuff’ said. Gotta pack my bags!

PS: I decided to rent a car, so as to be more flexible. Don’t really wanna hang out at Disneyland all day…

So why did I do this then?

(this is before tax, with EPP discount)

Frankly, I love the idea of the machine and it truly is a beauty to look at. I’m pretty sure I’ll be first in line again to order when a newer, better revision comes out.
But right now, there are just so many compromises that needs to be made, where I just can’t see myself get an $1800+ luxury item like this. The thing is, I don’t have a ‘main’ personal computer right now. My trusty old Powerbook 15″ 1.67GHz is getting old and isn’t exactly a racehorse, whereas my Google-provided work laptop (15″ MBP 2.33Ghz C2D) is awesome. The thing is just: what should I get?
- another Macbook Pro? Why – I already have the very same thing (even if it’s not my personal machine)
- a Macbook? Maybe. If it just had the backlit keyboard, didn’t feel so cheap and the black color didn’t cost more (I really don’t like the white plastic).
- a Macbook Air? Seemed to be the most logical choice.
The thing is. The Macbook Air just ISN’T a proper main personal computer. It’s great if you just use it to check websites, email, IM or whatever else one does 95% of the time. The thing is: there is this 5% which just renders the machine useless.
For once, I have wayyyy more than 80GB of data. And no way I slice or dice it, it just wouldn’t work to put stuff on Timecapsule (another $499 extra!) or constantly move data back and forth between stationary backup drives and the portable computer. Not fun.
And the fact that I can’t even fit my Sprint U727 EVDO adapter without using a big ugly cable and holder totally tipped me over. The Macbook Air is made for being always connected and without 3G built-in, it just isn’t.
Now I just wonder if I should hold out for an iMac 24″ revision or get a black Macbook and put a 320Gig HD in (with the 4gigs of RAM I have lying around). Besides being 2 lbs heavier and a good deal thicker, it funnily is the SAME SIZE as the Macbook Air.

“Tens of millions Americans will have a check in the mail,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said at a Capitol Hill news conference. “It is there to strengthen the middle class, to create jobs and to turn this economy around.”

Sources on Capitol Hill and at the Treasury Department said the plan would send checks of $600 to individuals and $1,200 to couples who paid income tax and who filed jointly.

Those who earn up to $75,000 individually or up to $150,000 as a couple will be eligible for the payments, said Republican and Democratic sources familiar with the tentative deal.”

Cool. Thanks for nothing. 75K/year before tax in the Bay Area doesn’t even pay the rent if you’re single. Out of all people, Pelosi should know.

Yes, this is GOOG and AAPL stock vs. Dow and NASDAQ just for the last month. Happy new year to us all.

Alas, here is a video that Lawrence Chang (who surprisingly enough has no relationship whatsoever with Sidney) took yesterday:

Update: Linked right video this time.

Here are a few quick impressions from the show:

Oh and one of my shots has been feature on the Official Gmail Blog!

This new version now is significantly faster, due to lots of Ajax integration and prefetching of things like emails and calendar entries. So, even over an EDGE connection it makes you feel like you’re in an application rather than a website.
Just try out google.com on your iPhone.

See you there!

And no… I can’t await what Steve J will show off at his Tuesday morning keynote either!!

The CTIA Google and Youtube mobile team:

The booth:

Ulf

So today I finally got around to rewrite the imageviewers in� PHP and while I was at it, I updated the front page to show headers, post dates and descriptions of the five most recent posts here on the blog. Yay for technology!

Anyways, I wish all of you a very happy new year 2008! May all your wishes come true.

Yay for having four days off in a row. It definitely has been a while that I had so many days off (well since Christmas last year in fact). Since joining Google I haven’t taken a single day off, as there was always so much to do and now I feel I really miss it. I’ve got like 20 or so vacation days saved up by now and hope I’ll take them this Feb/March and go on a big Asia tour. We’ll see

The new Pirate of the Mobilean – Google Mobile PMM team (Lawrence et moi).

Cyber Pirate. A little lost in today’s world…

Urban Pirate. Completely lost in this world. Arrr.. what are carrrrrs?

Lot’s of people came to Crittenden Campus.

Our new mobile PMM lead – hail hail, Marc!

This is a train running through a grocery market in Bangkok, Thailand. Apparently this is a regular occurance. Also see this video.

(and yes, I do think I sound weird)

Anyhow, besides throwing away lots and lots of stuff (it’s surprising how much you collect over the years but never use!) and packing looooots of boxes, I just went through the process of transferring my utilities and other bills to my new location.
PG&E – check, simple phone call – took 5 minutes, cost me nothing. Grade: A
Comcast – oh dear. Was logged into my account and clicked on ‘Move?’, only to see a web form that asked me to input my current address (while being logged in! Shouldn’t your system be intelligent enough to get it yourself?) only to then transfer me to some web chat thingie to ‘answer final questions’. So I thought, ok. Can’t take so long. I don’t actually have any questions. Oh was I wrong. The chat took 40 minutes to complete, with me reciting every single information I entered before (from old to new address to service choices, 20digit customer account number and more). Grade: C for annoyance, but at least they got the job done and offered a Saturday ‘installation’. Why I have to pay $39 for the whole thing is beyond me, but oh well – at least I signed up for the 8Mbit internet thingie (god knows how much of that will effectively come through).
Citibank, American Express, Netflix – check. All online. Zero issues. Super quick. Grade: A+

AT&T – the SuperMaBellReloaded Telco. Oh my god… Where do I even start?
I wanted to move using their internet site, because they offer free moving (aka waive the $42,xx moving charge) and give you deals on the internet access, such as 3 months off and a free new modem (my current wireless modem is a non-working pain in the you-know-where, which I just replaced with an awesome Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n/Gigabit, so I’m just looking to get a regular modem now).
So what does Ulf do? He goes to http://www.att.com, only to find a weirdly put together page that doesn’t tell you anything. Well, that’s what Google is for right? A search for ‘AT&T Move’ reveals the ‘AT&T’s Mover’s One Source‘ website. Silly as I am, I’ve been using Safari on my Mac, which apparently is incompatible with PacBell’s, I mean SBC’s, no sorry, AT&Ts URL redirects (which still use sbc.com half the time). To cut a half-hour story long: at&t created an endless loop that went from Mover’s page to ‘do you want to move’ page to ‘click here to move page’ back to the Mover’s page.
Switching over to Firefox and still clicking on ‘Yes, damnit I do want to move’ about 500 times finally took me to a signup page on which you have to answer silly questions via radio buttons before going to the next screen. One of the silly questions? – You guessed it! ‘Do you want to move service?’. Urgggh, yes I do!

Well to cut another long story short: I inputed all the required information and logged into my current account to transfer service, just to get a little nice screenshot telling me that ‘an error 647′ occurred and that they are just incapable of processing my simple request. So I thought, okay, I’ll call them up, tell them that their website (which I already spent 2 hours on) is worthless and politely ask them to transfer my service. The nice gentleman on the phone took all my info, only then to inform me that the move costs $42, that he won’t waive it because it’s ‘only free when you sign up over the website’ and that he can’t offer me the internet discounts either. He suggested I should try again the next day and call back if that doesn’t work. Well, of course it still didn’t work the next day and I wanted to call back to see if the whole move-thing of my DSL line is even worth it.

A bit of background, re: DSL: The only reason I went with DSL in Mountain View to begin with was that Comcast had so many dropouts in their service (and lost packets) that could never be resolved, which made it just not usable. So I turned to SBC. When I did sign-up for DSL though they let me know that only 1.5Mbits/s would work, because I’m too far from their service station. I was flabbergasted. Living in a cute little German town with a population of less than 40,000 literally in the middle of absolutely-nowhere, my mom who barely uses the net, enjoys a 16Mbit ADSL2+ DSL line from Deutsche Telekom, whereas here in Silicon Valley – the birthplace of high tech and the hometown of the largest internet company in the world, all that SBC/AT&T actually offered me was…. drumroll please… 384Kbit/s! Yes I kid you not. That’s what they signed me up for! Thankfully I could chat with an engineer who did activate the 1.5Mbit for me, but still, even this is pathetic if you think about it.

So I called at&t again this morning, only to get another bad experience. All that was available at my new location is 3Mbit/s (not the fastest 6Mbit one they offer, which frankly at this point I doubt even exists). Getting this information though took 25 minutes of me repeatedly telling the customer service rep that, “No Sir, I do NOT have a phone number at my new location yet. I am trying to decide whether I should stay with you guys or not, depending on the speed of internet you offer. Can you please use my new address instead.”

Let’s just say, I was happy to cancel service, which interestingly enough was my best experience with at&t. It took only 10 minutes, the customer rep was very friendly and no one tried to sell me anything, nor did I have to deal with the retention department. I guess they don’t need customers. For the statistics: they now have one fewer AT&T Yahoo! DSL and AT&T local landline customer.

Okay okay. Let me first say, I was a bit… shall we say.. skeptical about the iPhone before it came out.
And if you look at a pure feature-by-feature comparison with say, a Nokia N95 – the iPhone does not stand a chance. Where’s the 3G, where’s the GPS, where’s the 5MP camera, where’s the user-expandable memory, where are user-installable apps?
But the interesting thing is: That isn’t the point.
The user interface and speed together with the slickness of the device gives you pure joy day in and day out. In fact I loooove browsing the web on the iPhone when I’m hanging out at Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto, sipping a yummy dry Cappuccino. Apple was able to take the WebKit developments that made Nokia’s S60v3 great and added performance and awesome usability on top of it. The touch screen interface with zooming is just beyond believable.
Now, the as with every relationship – this one is a bit of a shaky one sometime:
- Switching between WiFi and EDGE can make you drop connections, which becomes a real problem with the built-in (and otherwise beyond awesome) eMail client. In fact I have to reset the device to have the email app running after a connection change or drop.
- Battery-life is ho-hum, especially when you’re constantly using the device
- I really really really would love to be able to install ARM-compiled Cocoa apps. Apple please do. Seriously.
- I need AIM/Y!/MSN/GoogleTalk on it. Now. JiveTalk is nice for now, but really – we need native apps to make IM wonderful.

PS: I’m cheating with the pic. It’s not that sunny today…

I’m wondering who they actually try to reach with this. The billboard is placed against traffic on the leftmost side of an 8-lane grade seperated highway and partially obstructed by bushes and poles, but hey – whatever spreads the mobile word is good for everyone, I think.

I won’t actually comment on the accuracy of their billboard statement. I’ll just quote Wired:
“Yahoo jumps ahead of Google on mobile phone search [Reuters]
Cleverly phrased to sound like a market share story, it isn’t. It’s just one of those weird “news” stories that takes a jolly, light-hearted editorial tone, like a sports report, because the writer knows he’s just writing a fluffy marketing piece. Here, it’s about a new search app for mobiles, with which Yahoo vaults ahead of Google by delivering relevant answers, after making strides in recent months. Yahoo’s service serves up a list of actual information and flickr images (surely the only kind!). That the whole thing plasters your phone with ads is left to the penultimate graf.”

PS: Too bad that the 3/20/07 quote is also a week before Google launched the new Google mobile search experience…

The interesting full conference video can be found over at our friends of Youtube here .

Say hi when you see me there!

All in all though – I have to say – I lke the number 30.

Because it IS corporate America’s toy of 2007. RIM is really on a roll here and no matter what other companies are doing feature or design-wise (Nokia E90, Apple iPhone…), RIM is hard to beat when it comes to easy IT deployment and manager-appeal.

So what’s new about it?

- It’s slicker and thinner. About 25% thinner than the older 8700 and finally up to par with the competition (re: Nokia E61)

- It’s got GPS built in. While not being a first – especially for CDMA – still only few GSM devices rock GPS. I can totally see people use this as an el chepo navigaton system in their leased BMWs and Consultants in their rental cars.

- The Pearl-esque ball is so much easier to use than the scroll wheel before. I know I know, many will disagree with this, but the addition of horizontal scrolling (as opposed to the old Blackberry-approach of only scrolling vertically) does open up new opportunities (all I say is… Google Maps…)

More about the Blackberry to come later. I’ll be attending the new AT&Ts and RIMs BB 8800 Launch party up in San Francisco tomorrow night – so let’s see what else they say to praise their new toy…

Update
- Party in the city was packed! I’m sure there were 150+ people, all waiting to see and get their new BB toy. Thankfully I got one too
- The food sucked.

About the device
Positive:
- it’s a great form factor and the dark blue, black color is very attractive with the chrome sides
- the UI is fast, especially compared to my … yawn… Series 60 v3 UI on my Nokia E61
- Data applications work beautifully. It’s so great to run Gmail and Google Maps without having to click on ‘Do you want to grant data access?’ and ‘Please choose your data bearer’ each and every time I run an app

Negative:
- The device just doesn’t work perfectly. I lose data connectivity for no reason and then neither emails nor other data gets pushed. Maybe it has something to do with me being on TMUSA instead of Cingular, but still – it’s pretty unacceptable having to reboot the device to get data again
- Where are my missed calls/outgoing calls etc?
- GPS works beautifully. When it works. Problem is: Like data – it doesn’t work consistently.

One really great software that I’d love to have on the Mac is Live Writer (beta) from Microsoft. It makes blogging a real fun event. And with Parallels’ virtualization software it integrates beautifully into the whole Mac experience. You should especially check out their new integration mode: ‘Coherence mode’. It makes the Windows desktop transparent, gets rid of the taskbar and background icons and integrates windows apps into the Mac dock. Alltogether it gives the seeming impression of running a Windows app natively in Mac OS X.

And to show that beauty can be timeless:

See Concorde at Heathrow on Google Maps

Of course everyone I asked was immediately willing to go out and take another mortgage on their home if need be, to buy this thing. Being the uberGadgeteer myself I have to admit I can’t wait for it to be released! Now that the fog has settled I have to say, the iPhone seems to be more of a technical demonstration device in Generation 1 and we’d have to wait at least for G3 before it becomes usable (see iPod 3G – dock connector et al).

Why do I say that? Let’s go through their three focus areas:

It’s an iPod

Well yes it is. And a really slick looking one! In my mind,a 480×320 3.5″ screen is finally a suitable Video iPod and a thing many people have been waiting for. Awesome! Oh wait… it’s got 4 or 8 GB only… how many videos can this fit again? 4-8 movies maybe? That’s enough for when I’m on the move, right? … Oh wait, then I can’t fit any photo or any music file on it anymore. Hm…

It’s a phone

Yay for that. Though how comfortable it will be to hold, as compared to your standard Razr’esque phone remains to be seen. Visual voice mail looks fancy, but honest to god, I think I never had more than 2 voice mails at a time and I do listen to every voice mail I get anyway. Plus, VoIP providers had ‘visual voice mail’ for years. And yes, my Nokia E61, like most phones today can do three-way calling and conferences. I don’t know why this was highlighted by some media outlets.

It’s an internet tablet

Yay! Safari for the first time on a mobile phone! Er… well…okay that’s actually…er… not the truth. While the brand name ‘Safari’ might be new, the Safari webkit (aka all the underpinnings that make it Safari) has been on Series 60 v3 Nokia phones for a year already. The sad thing is: it looks like the Nokia implementation is even better than the Apple one. Having no ability to display Flash is a MAJOR drawback in my mind. The E and N series phones are perfectly capable of displaying Adobe Flash files inside their Safari webkit browser.

So what else is not new?

- It’s got IMAP push email. Yes, as does my E61 and with BIS every Blackberry out there etc etc..
- It’s an iPod!!! Er okay, it syncs better with iTunes, but MP3 functionality is nearly in every phone today and SE and Nokia are stressing that functionality specifically with their Walkman and N series music phones.
- It syncs with your Mac. Oh well thank god, so does my E61 and nearly every other Symbian, SE and Motorola phone for that matter. And I don’t even have to connect a USB/iPod-Docking cable to do so. Bluetooth all the way.

What is missing?

- A decent camera. 2MP, non-autofocus is already giving people yawns (especially outside the US). SonyEricsson and Nokia had 3.2MP autofocus cameras built in for over a year and the N95 with 5MP is just around the corner. I’m not even gonna mention Korean and Japanese phones…

- HSDPA, HSDPA, HSDPA. With all due respect, a phone in (realistically) fall 2007 that doesn’t support 3G networks gives me a big yawn. What good is an internet tablet if the internet’s super slow. Latency and bandwidth of EDGE is becoming very tiresome.

- A VGA front camera. Where is my iSight? Where is iChat video telephony (over WiFi now, HSDPA in G2/G3…)?? This I thought was a MAJOR missing point. Many new phones have this build in already, yet Apple had a chance to build a really great franchise with iSight built into every Macbook, Macbook Pro and iMac and yet.. I won’t be able to video chat with any of them with my Apple phone. Really sad.

- GPS. Google Maps really shines on Helio’s GPS equipped phones and in general, a mid 2007/2008 high-priced phone in my mind really shines with a little GPS chip built in. The gorgeous large screen would have been awesome for in-car navigation for people like me, who don’t need a full blown navigation system, because we don’t use it every day or even every week. Most Sprint/Verizon phones now have it, as will the Nokia N95…

- VoIP. Voice over IP is an integral part of several new smartphones. Nokia’s N and E series WiFi-equipped phones come with a SIP voice client that’s fully integrated into the phone/contact book etc. And new UMA phones even do soft handovers between VoIP and GSM calls, similar to the handoffs the Apple iPhone will do for data.

- No user installable applications (for now). I like my phone’s applications, but honestly, for me it would be worth half as much if I couldn’t install extra apps and games. If it turns out to be true that the iPhone can’t install other ‘OS X’ apps, it’d be a pity.

- A user replaceable battery. This is something every $20 phone from Walmart has these days. I’m not even discussing this because I think this is a ridiculous oversight and I doubt anyone would disagree.

It’s completely and ridiculously expensive

One tiny little weeny bit that people forget to mention is the pricing. If you factor in the typical $150-$200 carrier subsidies on a 2year contract, we’re talking $899 unlocked for a 2MP, GSM/EDGE phone with 8 GB non-replaceable memory. Oookay.

To summarize it: I LOVE LOVE LOVE the user interface. Honestly, like Steve Jobs said it’s 5 years ahead of any competitor’s. The Blackberry UI is ridiculous in my mind (the font alone kills me), Palm was cool in 1990 and Windows Mobile I won’t even mention. Symbian is okayish, but often very confusing (where are Connection settings again?) and way to slow to be able to make me happy. This in my mind is the one area where the iPhone excels above everyone else.

So for me, this is a great concept. A platform that I definitely see myself, as a consumer, be a part of in the future. Yet I believe G1 is not all it’s cracked up to be and besides looking cool, all it will give you is some fun time browsing through your phone album and reading emails – for $800. G3, here I come…

I’d like to wish you the very best for 2007. May you be healthy, happy and prosper and that all your wishes may come true!
Fun fact of the day: I’ve been trying out this whole hotornot thing. Why? I don’t know. I know it’s so 2002, but I guess I was lazy over the holidays or whatnot. I thought it was kinda fun and yet I was surprised over the rating, especially ‘cuz I thought the pic looked kinda weird. Oh well…

so I thought it would make sense to introduce a few of the cool products I or my colleagues are working on over the coming weeks. For mobile, I thought what better to start of with than Google SMS.

Why is that? First of all, not many people know about the product, yet it can be incredibly useful. And above all: it’s the only mobile product we have that has pretty much no requirements. Well okay, you have to be in the US and okay – you have to have a mobile phone, but that’s pretty much it. No data plan, no Java engine, no limited handset compatibilty.

So – what is it and how do I use it?

Google SMS is a cool service that allows you to ask it a large amount of questions and get immediate answers via text message. Unlike our search engine, we won’t be returning URLs, but rather end results. So, for example if you’d love to know how the weather in Beverly Hills will be, just send a text message with “Weather 90210″ (or ‘w 90210′ or ‘weather beverly hills, ca’ ) to GOOGLE (that’s 466453) and you’ll get the sunshine news right back as a text message. All it costs you is your carrier’s texting fee (note: they often offer plans with hundreds of text messages for just a few dollars a month).

What are other things I can ask Google SMS?

How about finding out about Sushi, a dry cleaner or any other local listings where you are? Text ‘sushi 94040′ to GOOGLE.
Or you’d like to know how the Anaheim Ducks played yesterday night? Just text ‘anaheim ducks’ to 466453.
Then again, I prefer a good movie to a hockey game, so ‘movies 94040′ would give me more info on what’s running in my area right now.
Sometimes I wonder what strange words mean in my native tongue. By texting ‘translate love to German’ I get the 411 on what that weird word means.
Also cool for me to know is how my cars fuel consumption translates into proper measurements… ’34mpg in liters per 100 km’ does the trick for me.
For more info, check out our mobile pages at http://mobile.google.com or go directly to http://sms.google.com to try some sample queries on the web.

wow – what a busy start at Google this was.

Right now, I’m covering a LOT of different mobile products, from SMS over Search, News and the new Gmail app up to a couple of other projects we’ll be working on for 2007, doing overall mobile research and will now be making sure that our website is made ready and newly setup so it can be launched in several non-English international markets early next year.

Wow. That’s the best three letter word I can come up with. While I’m obviously incredibly busy, I think I’m learning so much more than I could have ever imagined. It’s been a great ride so far and I hope 2007 will be topping this.

I’m wishing you all a very happy holiday season and all the very best for 2007!

May all your wishes come true,

Ulf

My first big launch at Google happened today!

No, I didn’t launch it just by myself. I most certainly didn’t develop it, nor did I even market it alone either – but there is still pride in a task accomplished well and doing my part in making it happen. My congrats go to the whole Gmail and Google Mobile teams who made the release possible. It was a considerable cross-functional team effort and a long time coming and we’re all happy to have it out for our users starting today.
So – what makes Gmail on your mobile phone so cool now?

The new Gmail for mobile devices application is incredibly fast:

• Gmail users are a simple click away from reading, replying, archiving and searching through emails. Instead of having to go through a mobile web browser and typing http://gmail.com on a numeric keypad, Google for mobile devices, once installed, can be found in your phone’s ‘Application’ menu and be started with a simple click.

• Opening Gmail messages is faster than before. Thanks to Gmail for mobile device’s prefetching technology, opening an email on your mobile phone is nearly instantaneous.

• It reduces keyboard input and scrolling. Search through your contact list simply by inputting the first few characters of your contact. Reply to email instantaneously with easy to use menu access: no need to scroll around anymore.

• You can search through your complete Gmail archive in seconds by simply invoking the search menu option and typing a search query.

Try it out yourself! Check out our Google Mobile pages to get more info on how to download the client to your phone.

At Google alone, 8 of my classmates have started and for whatever weird reason I see another one of my classmates walking around the Google campus nearly every day. Must be the great food we’re getting over there.

It’s been a hectic but exciting week. Having been in business school at Stanford for the past two years, this is upping the ante on speed, performance, excitement and I’m sure – personal development.

This Tuesday (Monday was labour day) I started in Google’s Mobile team as a Product Marketing Manager, covering their consumer products, from Search over SMS to GMail and beyond. While many will now come to me and expect all the nighty gritty about the company – I won’t be able to give you that – I’d be way too busy for that, because you never know what legal implementations anything you say has when you are talking about a public company (doesn’t have to be Google). Therefore there also won’t be info about unannounced products (d’oh), expected earnings (how would I know) or general stock or please-hire-me tips. Furthermore, I want to stress that (BEGIN LEGAL) this is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer. (/LEGAL END)

I understand this might disappoint one or two of you readers – but hey – that’s life

Anyways – to make things a little less boring, here are some facts:

- Google supports more than 100 interface languages

- As of June 30th, 2006 there were 7,942 full-time employees worldwide

- and yes: Googlers in Mountain View alone consume 500 lbs. of breakfast cereal each day

Stanford is not just the first place to mention because I loved it there, but also because the Stanford campus is one of the most beautiful university campuses in the United States.

Palm trees line the whole campus including Stanford’s famous Palm Drive

Memorial Church – or MemChu – was built in the late 19th and early 20th century and nearly destroyed only a few years later in the great 1906 Earthquake. By the way – this picture is one of the regularly featured sceneries photographed at the digicam website dcresource.com among other Stanford vistas.

The Main Quad – heart of the campus.
By the way – to check out more images from the Bay Area and other cool places, such as Istanbul, London or Los Angeles – check out the Galleries section at waschbusch.com.

starting a new blog can be a daunting task. It’s like writing an essay when all you have is an empty sheet of paper. Yes, we all do have a lot to say – but where do we begin? What’s really worth writing about? I truly think, this blog will grow and shape over time – may it be the looks or the content of it.

One can certainly try to write a blog from an abstract point of view, focusing on a single subject or even have a whole editorial staff (like one of my favorite blogs – Engadget). Yet here, I would just like to post my personal views – life as seen from the eyes of a single person: me.

Thanks for checking in!