blog.ulfw.com

Hi guys,
I’m looking to grow my team and hire a new Product Manager, Mobile for MySpace in Beverly Hills, CA. If you know about good candidates, feel free to reach out to our recruiter Cari Gilbert.

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.

Last time I came back from my (one and only) vacation I took during my Google days, the stock jumped 21% the day I came back.
Now that I’ve left the company, the stock is going nowhere but down after not as high-as-expected Q2 earnings announcements.

Coincidence?

It turns out, my silly Mobile Trick video made it to Germany’s largest newsmagazine and website DER SPIEGEL. See here.
Of course, DER SPIEGEL (The Mirror) being German there had to be a slight negative angle to the story:

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.

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.

Today Effie and Lawrence organized a little going-away meeting/party in our Building’s microkitchen. Effie baked an awesome chocolate cake that looked like an iPhone with the sneezing Panda video on it while Lawrence set the whole thing up and took a video or two as well.
Creative as Googlers are, we organized a little round of Four Square to keep us occupied:

Effie’s super awesome cake:

A funny Saturday Night Live skit I found on hulu:

Setup your MySpace page at the Learning Annex

Yes, I did it. I gave notice yesterday. 07/07/08 will be my last day at Google. While I know, 08/08/08 would have a nice ring to it too, I figured it’s as good a time as any.
Now - I won’t use this space to rant or praise Google. There were good times and bad times. I made lots of friends. I met some amazing people. I met some pretty unimpressive people. I guess - after all - Google is just like life everywhere.

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.

i just wanted to let you know that the aforementioned iGoogle for iPhone video i was filming with our Google video team has launched together with a redesigned mobile.google.com destination website today. Have a look:

Bill Gates is finally stepping down from his duties at Microsoft. Today a hillarious internal email was published that he sent to a few of his employees depicting his difficulties of downloading and installing Windows Movie Maker.

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…

Today we launched a mobile tricks campaign, where Googlers and everyone else alike is sharing a few (quirky) tricks and tips what they can do with their mobile phone.

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: