When moving to the US, many things are different than from the country you come from. One of the most important things, is to keep you credit record as clean as possible. Here is what that is all about:

There are 3 credit agencies ( Transunion, Experian, and Equifax ) in the US. When you have a credit card, phone bills, electricity, loans (such as for car, house, education) or anything that you would pay on a regular basis, those companies with whom you have a contract or get a bill from report to the 3 credit agencies whether you pay on time, your credit limit, your high balance and your current outstanding bill amount. The credit agencies keep this information for 7 years.

If you pay on time and keep relatively low amounts on your cards, then you have a good or high credit score. Whenever you want things like a new credit card, a loan to buy a house or car, etc, that company asks the credit agencies what your score is. The higher the score, the better interest rate you receive for the new loan or line of credit.

So you are allowed to get 1 credit report per year from each of the 3 credit agencies. Normally, you would request this report and then check through it to make sure it is correct. If there is a mistake, then you call around to get it fixed. Since you’re only allowed 1 free one per year, it’s best not to request all 3 in the same month. You normally request 1 credit report and then 4 months later request another credit report from the 2nd agency and then 4 months later request another from the 3rd agency. They might have changed their policy by now, not quite sure…

The problem with making a bad record is that when you return to the US, you will have trouble again getting credit because now you have a credit report that has bad stuff on it. The way to fix this is when you do start to have an apartment or have to pay electricity, you should get it in your name and then make payments on-time so that you start to build up a good credit history. So make sure you can pay your bills and play it smart.

It is also a good idea to request a credit report every 4 months in general, so that you can also see what is going on and what record you have. The only thing is that they appear to have just changed this recently, so that only US IP-addresses can request the report.

Note: Thanks to my sister Gabriele for this information.

I just came across a really nicely done Flex Application called Flex Book by Rubin Swieringa. It’s basically an application, where you have the feeling that you are really turning the pages in a virtual book.
It also supports “goto page”, transparency and tearing out pages, as well as a choice between a hard back or a paper back book. Check it out.

I’ve been working together with Oliver Moser and Christian Reinheimer, on a social web application for amateur and hobby athletes since February. I know both of them from the Stuttgart Media University, the collage we all graduated/will graduate from. To our benefit Hendrik Mächler and Jan Schulz-Hofen joined the team a bit later and brought in some qualifications we desperately needed to make the project really really attractive. Now our team members overall have different academic degrees, such as Media Economics, Media Author, Geography, Software Engineering and Media Computer Science.

After a long phase of conceptional designing, implementation and the typical beginning struggles of a startup, we created a web application that launched a few days ago. Yep, Champagne bottles were opened!!

We originaly wanted to launch with a different name, but two days after we received an award as most innovative project (BWeb2.0 Challenge) in the Bundesland (similar to an American State) of Baden-Württemberg someone registered our name as a trademark. That was one day before we wanted to do that ourselves. Through this issue we had to change our name and lost around two weeks of time to actually work on the project. Thank you Mr. X (the name was modified)!!!

Anyway, we got a lot of attention through this case and acted quickly by deciding on a new name and redesigning the whole application to match the new name in two days. Some wordings needed to be changed and logos and A LOT of the small crap.
But with our amazing enthusiastic team we still managed to launch extremely quickly after this issue.

We launched recently and already have some hundred users who mostly know us from mouth to mouth propaganda. We still have to do more marketing and things are looking good to have success.
Two days ago we had a photo shooting for the city magazine in Stuttgart, Germany called “LIFT” and a nice article was in the news paper “Mittelbayerische” around Kelheim, the area in Germany where I come from.

To our benefit we are in contact with investors, who hopefully will understand what we are up to and will see that we are taking this really seriously. Our team is excellent and our ideas amazing. We’ll see what will happens.
At the moment we are ranked 4th place on startup barometer on deutsch-startups.de, an official page on German start-ups.

So if you speak German, take a look at it and sign up!