My life has been moving forward extremly fast lately, so that I couldn’t keep up with this blog. But I hope the time I can spend on it will get better.

After the Euro-Tour 2008, I was trying to visit most of my family and friends in Germany and of course stop by the original Oktoberfest in Munich. Meanwhile, I had to do some major rearrangements with all the stuff I owned. Sorting out, organizing and reducing were the key words. A big change in my life was about to take place, which made selling my long-lasting Mazda necessary.

I moved to Los Angeles for work and to live (again). After having already spent a year in LA in 2004/2005 to study at the University of Southern California and to work as an intern at the award-winning web agency Hello Design, I decided to come back again with Melody for a longer term.

With a new Era, comes a new Blog theme I’m not done with the design yet. I actually don’t like the color defaults at all and am going to modify them over time. But the Layout is nice and I hope you enjoy it for now.

So, since I have been here, many events have happened that I will just give you a quick overview:

• Visited the American version of the Oktoberfest in Torrance, CA.
  Accurate German band, but shitty beer.
• Celebrated Halloween in West Hollywood as Kurt Cobain (Mel was Courtney) and participated in traditional American pumpkin carving with the Mayer family
• As a citizen of the U.S., I voted for my president Barack Obama and hope he can use his excellence to majorly change the States as we know it today.
• I saw DANZIG live in concert.
• I saw Mudhoney live in concert
• I am becoming a fan of the L.A. Lakers. They’re on fire this season! Watched almost every game.
• I saw a SUV in the middle of a 6-line freeway missing a wheel?! What the…?
• Been playing my Fender acoustic guitar, Gibson Les Paul electric guitar (thanks Erik) and Fender fretless bass (thanks Alan)
• Oh yeah, I almost forgot. We were evacuated from the house, because the fires that you probably saw on the media was heading straight towards where I am living. We packed all our essential belongings and moved to a hotel for 3 days. Luckily the fire men could stop the fire less than a mile away from the house. It was scary watching the fire approach the house on the news from a helicopter camera. But as always, it was less dangerous as it sounded in the media.

I’m currently working on a concept for Identity Sponsorship for the Stuttgart Media University (Hochschule der Medien). As far as I know there are no current papers on this topic. If you find one, please let me know.

Thanks. Harry

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!