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.

Thanks. Harry

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!

The city gets really nuts during the annually film festival in Cannes. Basically everyone in the film business is here during the approx. two weeks of the festival. Besides of the famous actors, directors and producers, you also meet new talents in the scene, a bunch of distributors, agents, marketing people, world-class photographers, the fans and of course the thousands of the other people, who just want to get a piece of the cake. Self-Marketing at it’s best. Everyone is someone and no one at the same time. Everyone knows everything and nothing as well. It takes a bit of skill of differentiate what is true and what not, who is important and who isn’t. It feels like LA sometimes, maybe because Hollywood’s impact in Cannes is highly visible.

For me personally it was great to be part of Adobe’s Reel Ideas Studio mentor team. It was really interesting to see the work of the students progress and at the end the 10 participating teams all made a documentary within a few days that was related to the festival in Cannes. They used Adobe’s Software like Director and After Effects to make the films. You can view the work created by the students from all around the world online at the Real Ideas Studio Web page.
The Mentors were highly qualified professionals from either different film schools like University of Southern California or the Vancouver Film School, Freelancers or Awards winners from film and illustration. Like Adobe Design Achievement Award winner 2006Paul Bellila who Mel and I had some great conversations with…

A highlight of the festival for sure was the walk on the red carpet for a world premiere of a movie. There is a dress code. So Mel in her red dress and me in a tux with a bow tie looked pretty sharp. Walking down the carpet through all the photographers does make you feel special. Even though they were just waiting for Michael Moore, who was a few feet behind us. He was there for his new movie “SiCKO”, a documentary on the American Heath Case System, which obviously sucks. I think it’s his best movie so far. Very touching movie, where you can barely hold back your tears, when hearing how bad these US corporations treat people in need.

I could also see a few other new movies and one on the beach at a beach screening. That was very nice and relaxing. The parties are said to be great at Cannes, but most people I talked to said that they were ok, meaning that they sucked. I guess a party works like a movie. If it’s too produced it usually sucks. Mel and I didn’t care much for the partys. It’s the same game as in L.A. so we know how it’s played, but weren’t in the mood for it.
Instead we liked to hang out with the “Adobe-Family” or with Mel’s friend Geeves, who was in Mel’s team last year at the Reel Ideas Studio and his buddy. Having fun conversations and some beers at the local Irish pub is definitely more real than talking to strangers, who don’t care who you are, on a multi million $ yacht. By the way, team “Cre8tive” made a documentary on that pub. Check it out…

Unfortunatelly 5 rooms of the hotel we stayed at, got broken into while we were at a screening, and over 10 laptops got stolen. Among them Mel’s and mine. That was really bad. Luckly we have backups, but still the insurance mess now begins…

Like us, getting all the stuff prepared for the students from all around the world, the whole city was getting prepared for the most important film festival. Every day more and more pavilions, temporary theaters and stands popped out of the ground and the city got filled with countless people.

I work for Adobe who is a sponsor for the American Pavilion during the festival. The American Pavilion is part of the International Village, where several countries have their own pavilion. In general, it’s a place for press conferences, meet-and-greet, networking, business-talk, hang-out or maybe even a hide-out for people with access to this area. It’s the second time that Adobe a sponsor of the AmPav and while the festival takes place, selected students from all around the world, make a documentary on a self-chosen theme in groups of four poeple. I mentor these students and help with any issue that occurs. Mainly technical and organisational stuff. To follow up what is happening visit the page to the projects: reelideasstudio.com