blog.ulfw.com

I guess the best way to describe what I’ll be doing starting next month is from Tim’s really nice article on Trendslate:

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

Now this is something Silicon Valley press would rarely talk about:
According to research company Ground Truth (and this) m.myspace.com has been the top-ranked mobile website in the United States of America (counted in pageviews) last month. Facebook and Google follow on number two and three.

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

I had a few days to think about wether I should write this post or not. But it seems people have noticed my absence. or chose to write a similar post before me.
So with this I would like to dedicate the post to the awesome people I had the chance to work with at MySpace.
As we all know, all good things come to and end eventually and thus it’s time for me to say good-bye. A move to the Bay Area will be next for me in a month or two. And from there? We’ll see.

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 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:

Did you know, you can update your status on multiple networks via text messaging?
Once your account is setup you can send a twitter tweet to 40404 and the content of the text message becomes your status text. You can do it similarly by messaging FBOOK (32665).

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!

I am happy to announce that Myspace for BlackBerry has been out for about a week now and the numbers are staggering. The MySpace launch has been the biggest one in RIM’s history. Since the launch on November 13, the application has been downloaded more than 400,000 times, which represents an all-time high for both MySpace and RIM in terms of first week application downloads.

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

I’m a big fan of our iPhone applications. Yet one of the things that I saw quite a bit of improvement potential on was photo viewing on our iPhone application. Photo viewing is one of the most requested and most used features on mobile phones and social networks.

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

The launches keep on coming. I am proud to announce that we now support uploading your mobile photos to your MySpace account by sending a simple eMail to MySpace.
Once you have set up your account on www.myspace.com (go to My Account -> Mobile) and choose your own PIN. A special email address will be generated for you. Just save this eMail address in your Address Book and off you go. Anytime you send a picture via eMail/MMS to this unique address, it will be added to your MySpace account. Your email subject will become the picture caption.

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!

This for me is tech journalism gone horribly wrong.

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.