blog.ulfw.com

Last week I visited Google’s 2nd i/o developer conference in San Francisco’s Moscone West center. As part of our presence there, we actually had the nice opportunity to demonstrate MySpace Mobile to the Android and Google developer community with our own stand for both days in the developer Sandbox section. Here is a short video that Google filmed while we were there.
Now I have to preface some of the awkwardness you’ll see by saying:
- we only had one microphone to share. Thus I was told to be as close as possible to Scott and Matt in order for their voice to be picked up by the mic
- the interviewer was standing left of us outside the video frame when she asked us the questions
- we were told not to look at her and to repeat the question, as the question will be cut out (which apparently didn’t happen. So Scott’s and my funny faces are actually on the video, which gives it a certain charm I think ).
Anyways – without further ado. Here you go:

I miss Stanford. A lot. I miss the great friends I made, the great experiences I had, the fun, the excitement, the frustrations, the laughter, the late night study sessions, the abundance of brilliance, the palm trees. Everything. It’s one of the great places to be or have been at.
Stanford now has a twitter channel. So when I expressed my joy of seeing Stanford on twitter, someone was friendly enough to write me back from the Stanford account, welcoming me home. Aww I hope I can visit again soon. And god knows – maybe even share my knowledge and teach or guest lecture there at some point. One can dream…

European stays European. One thing that I haven’t and don’t plan to give up since moving to the United States is my desire to have things in walkable distance from the place I live. My first residence in Berkeley was in walking distance to Campus and all the crazy shops out there. It stayed somewhat similar with my stay at Schwab Residential Center at Stanford. And when I moved out from there in 2005, the first thing I was looking for is a place with shopping and other possibilities nearby. My first home in Mountain View had a Whole Foods store, a Target, a fresh grocery retailer, a Trader Joe’s and Safeway – everything in less than half a mile. Even my next home in San Mateo was kind of walkable, though the choices were a bit more restrictive.
When first moving to Los Angeles I thought okay – it doesn’t half to be walkable, but at least I should be close to major attractions. So when I found my first apartment on Mid-Wilshire I figured the relative vicinity to West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Hollywood and Downtown would be cool.
It wasn’t. I realized that taking your car out the garage in Los Angeles is an exercise in frustration. Traffic moves slooooooowly.
Thus when I moved to my new apartment in Santa Monica, I specifically looked for walkability and having a lot of stores, restaurants, cinemas and other things to do nearby.
It turns out, this might very well be one of the best places to walk in all of Los Angeles county!

(Map from walkscore.com)

In a fun turn of events though, I did decide to buy a bike yesterday and can’t wait to take it out for a spin.

After the big bomb has been dropped, here is part 2 of the story. Where am I heading?
I have always been interested in social networks, having signed up for a Facebook account right when they came out (and when they were restricted to just Harvard, Stanford and a few other universities) and used MySpace and LinkedIn for years. So I concentrated my search on social networking and video companies (a second big area of future growth in my opinion). Having gotten multiple offers, I finally decided to go with… MySpace.

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.

Okay and I thought I was crazy. Apparently there are a lot more crazy people out there who are tracking the long voyage of our BMWs from Bremerhaven all the way to Port Hueneme, CA on board of Wallenius Wilhelmsen’s Pacific Breeze.

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

Now if THAT doesn’t make you want to use public transportation, then I don’t know.
Something to look forward to, in times of rising fuel prices. Here is a small collection of train riding experiences from around the globe:

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.

Okay – this post is a sign that I’m not afraid to admit silliness. So a few days ago I was watching a TV documentation about the new Venetian resort in Macau:

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…

As requested, here are a few more pictures of BMWs impressive new delivery center – the ‘BMW World’ in Munich. It’s funny, the only other folks I met that were there as early as me was a friendly elderly couple from Los Angeles, who were there to pick up their 535i (about 4 hrs later).

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!

Yes, people are THAT crazy here. I guess the (now-revised) $5K-if-you-buy-a-envirofriendly-but-freakin-ugly-Prius (TM) program has been successful…