We’ve had quite a few questions lately about the use of AOL/Yahoo/Google/MSN IDs to log into Swapper. Some of you don’t have such accounts, others wonder what the advantages are as a user… So let me tell you a little more about it:

When you login, you have 4 options:
- You can login with “AIM”, which means you can use your AOL email OR you AIM login and password
- You can login with “MSN” and enter the email address and password associated with your MSN/Hotmail account.
- You can login with Yahoo and provide your Yahoo ID and password
- You can login with Google using you Google/Gmail email address and password

So how does that make Swapper so much better? Come on, you know us… we just want to make it easier and safer for you guys! Here’s why:

1/ Better privacy: all your communications are protected with your own email or IM account. As a result, nobody can access the private messages and media files you sent and received within Swapper. Nobody. Not even the Wambo staff, since we do not store user account information.

2/ No need to create an account: we know you guys want privacy, but we also know how annoying it is to go through a long registration process. This is the reason why we do not ask you to create a Swapper login and password. By using your existing email or IM account information, you can start using Swapper right away! And this way, you don’t risk forgetting your login or password.

3/ And… you have the option to automatically import your address book! This way, whenever you want to send a media file to your friends, you do not have to look for all email addresses and enter them one by one!

Now, what happens if you don’t have an AOL/Yahoo/Google/MSN account? Well, your situation is not that desperate . Just click on “New User?” in the login window and we’ll guide you through this step by step.

It’s that easy! So now that you know everything, tell your friends~~~!@@@!@

We are very happy to announce that the latest version of Wambo.com Swapper can now be downloaded from our website!
As always it is available in 6 languages

A major change in this release is the improved stability of the software. We have worked very hard to solve the issues that some of you reported on our forum, and we think this new release will satisfy you!

We also added some new features like the ability to easily create a public post on your own personal media notepad
(Here is mine!)

Please note that since we made several important changes in the software, you should first uninstall any previous version of Swapper before installing 1.0.6. Thank you.

There’s one thing I’m not looking forward to and that’s the back-to-school frenzy that’s slowly approaching… The highways and restaurants around have been surprisingly empty, which is a nice perk for us staying at work this summer.

This week end I spent some time in the North bay, in a place called Bolinas (Marin). Bolinas is a really small town with a big personality. Pretty laid back — the perfect setting to go get some fresh air and dip our toes into the cold Pacific ocean. And the drive back to the south bay was a breeze… which is unusual!

Is the Wambo team tired of their Sunnyvale offices? Yes and no. No, because this is a great building, with a lot of space, security codes to open every single door (even for the bathrooms! Don’t ask me why…), and a fitness room. But in a way, yes we want to move out, because we’re tired of always going to the same restaurants every day!!!

Should we put up with it? Maybe. But the thing is, it gets worse every day. A few months ago we were all enthusiastic to go have lunch. Here’s what we sounded like:
Xavier: where do you guys wanna go?
Guillaume: I don’t know, thai?
Anne-Laure: Sure!
Arnaud: OK, sound good.
Xavier: Let’s go!

But now it’s more like this:
Xavier: so where do you guys want to go? I don’t care. You choose…
Anne-Laure: Saint John’s?
Guillaume: Oh noooo!! I tired of eating at St John’s. What about Una Mas… It’s right there!
Anne-Laure: no way, it tastes terrible! Please, everything but Una Mas… I put my veto on it.
Arnaud: McDonald’s?
Guillaume: Fast food again?
Xavier: Why not Carl’s Junior, it’s better than McDonald’s
Guillaume: We were there yesterday…
Anne-Laure: I’m fine with it, I’ll take a low-carb burger.
Arnaud: OK, let’s go to Carl’s Junior.
… Xavier, Arnaud, Guillaume and Anne-Laure, walking towards Carl’s Juniors, heads down….

So… time to change offices or time to bring a lunchpack at the office?

AL

Yesterday at lunch, Xavier, Arnaud, Guillaume and I had a conversation about the ideal places to live in the US.

Arnaud and Xavier are both very fond of New York city, although Xavier made it clear that he wouldn’t want to live there. Too big… too crowded… too overwhelming. Arnaud, who spent quite some time in Florida during and after college, would really enjoy a house there, maybe in Boca Raton, and, if possible, not too far from the beach (of course!).

Xavier, on the other hand, prefers California, and more specifically the San Jose area. (good for him, cause that’s where he currently lives!)

Guillaume, the “Parisian” of the team, would like to live in… New Orleans! And if he could live in the French Quarter, he probably would. I totally agree with him: what’s better than listening to live jazz music while sipping on a Hurricane?

When it came to me, well… my answer was: San Francisco. Without a doubt. Yes, it is foggy in July; yes, it can be cold and windy in the summer; yes, there are a few sketchy places… BUT it is eccentric, it has a lot of character, and it has a good nightlife. To me, this is the most amazing city in this country.

We talked about other places, of course:
Colorado: very cool for me since I ski, too “central” for others (everybody here wants to live by the sea…).
Boston: why not? Irish pubs, delicious Italian food in the famous “North End” and lobster: sounds good.
Hawaii: absolutely, if we change careers or devote our time to surfing until the rest of our life.

Unfortunately, we haven’t been to all the beautiful places of the United States, and I don’t think we plan to relocate Wambo anytime soon. So, let’s stop dreaming now and let’s enjoy our little Sunnyvale.

Oh-oh… I looked at our blog this morning and realized that we had not posted any news for the last 10 days! What’s happening? Have we all taken a 10-day vacation to Tahiti and left all poor servers alone there in California? Hmmmm… No.

Last few weeks have been busy as ever. We are working on additional media sharing features which should allow Swapper users to very easily post their favorite media files on their personal Swapper profile pages. It looks like a fairly small task - but to make it consistent and easy to use with the current Swapper software we have to make a few changes to both the software client and the profile page themselves. i.e. it’s “hard work”

Alas, we should be launching these soon. Maybe another 4 to 8 days!

Saturday was an important day for the Wambo team. It was Bastille Day, the French National Holiday. In France, people celebrate it with fireworks and a military parade on the Champs Elysee, in Paris. You would think that being in the United States, nobody even knows what Bastille Day is. Well… in San Francisco, THEY DO!

On Saturday night, there was a street party in Belden Place, the “little French quarter” of San Francisco. It was packed! People began jamming the bars at 5pm and the party soon spread out to other places on Bush and California streets. Many French expats gathered at Cafe Bastille, Cafe Claude and Cafe de la Presse, but surprisingly the crowd was mainly comprised of American people! Believe me or not, but for the whole night I heard a lot more “Happy Bastille Day” (in English) than “Joyeux 14 juillet” (in French).

Well, when you think about it, it’s not that surprising. In San Francisco, every kind of foreign festival is always a good excuse to go out and party. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve had Chinese New Year in February, St Patrick’s day (Irish) in March, Beer Fest (German) in April, Cinco de Mayo (Mexican) in May and, as you know, Bastille Day last weekend… And you know what? Whatever the event is, wherever it comes from, it’s always a good opportunity to go out and enjoy a beer with your coworkers.

AL

Today is the 3rd of July and tomorrow is… Independence Day!!! Meaning: HOLIDAY. For the Wambo team, this is the ideal day to catch up on sleep and do something different.

So I decided to go to Lake Tahoe, the perfect place to rest, breathe some fresh air and hike. However, now I am wondering if it was a smart choice. Not because I don’t like Lake Tahoe (I absolutely love it!), but because a wildfire recently devastated the forest and destroyed more than 100 houses and barns!! So I guess I’ll try to hike away from the flames…

As for Arnaud, Guillaume and Xavier, they plan to… sleep in. As you know, they just had a bad flu, and they’ve been working the whole time even though they kept coughing, sneezing (and complaining… just kidding guys!). So everybody will come back rested on Thursday and I promise I’ll post some nice pictures of Tahoe on our “Team Wambo profile”. Happy 4th of July!

AL

Success loves company This morning we were delighted to see two excellent articles about Swapper, one from PCAstuces, the other from Generation-NT, two leading French sites for the latest technologies and tips:

Partager ses photos et vidéos avec Swapper by PCAstuces
(”Share your photos and videos with Swapper”).

Test Swapper: compresser / partager ses fichiers multimédias by Manuel N. from Generation-NT
(”Testing Swapper: compress and share your media files”).

The PCAstuces article on Swapper is a practical guide to using Swapper for sending a large amount of photos and personal videos. After clearly stating the problem (”Alors que la course au mega-pixels fait rage dans le monde de la photo numérique, comment partager les énormes photos et mini-vidéos de mariage, de naissance ou de vacances ?” - “While the MegaPixel wars are raging in the world of digital photography, how do we share the huge photos and mini-videos of our weddings , child birth or vacation”), the article then focuses on providing a step-by-step guide to sending 100+photos/videos.

The Generation-NT write-up is a little more technical, while covering the business aspects of Wambo and briefly outlining a practical example. What’s interesting about both articles is that they focus on the compression aspects of Swapper’s technology, and the ease of use. Generation-NT goes as far as listing the photo and video formats which are supported by Swapper for compression.

There is a nice photo of the three founders we took a few months ago. The journalist did an amazing job of digging in to find out what Wambo and Swapper were about, and the results is quite frankly amazingly positive. We also liked PCAstuces calling Swapper a “must-have” (”logiciel indispensable”). We think so too!

THANKS TO PCASTUCES AND GENERATION-NT!

Answer: Everyone’s got the flu.

Well, except Miss Anne-Laure of course, who has a superior immune system, and the remote Wambo’ers, who were safe far away from the 530 Lakeside.

So yeah, the flu hit Arnaud, Guillaume and I. On our way to coffee this AM, after a long long night for Arnaud/Guillaume, I told them that I wasn’t able to sleep till 5AM or so, then sweating in my bed like a horse. “Me too”, said Arnaud. “Same here”, said Guillaume.

My doctor taught me something — as you grow older, flu symptoms tend to be less dramatic (no big increase in body temperature, no sore throat problems like for younger children). I was sort of surprised, but checking the wikipedia soon thereafter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza), it did seem to confirm that elderly people don’t respond to flu as strongly, therefore sometimes ending up with pneumonia.

"Influenza, commonly known as flu, is an infectious disease of birds and mammals caused by a RNA virus of the family Orthomyxoviridae (the influenza viruses). In humans, common symptoms of influenza infection are fever, sore throat, muscle pains, severe headache, coughing, and weakness and fatigue.[1] In more serious cases, influenza causes pneumonia, which can be fatal, particularly in young children and the elderly."

As far as Arnaud, Guillaume and I are concerned (we’re still in our very early 30’s…), I guess we’ll just drink lots of water and take Vitamin C.

That’s the new word for “we’re backup”, Wambo-style. (knock on wood!).

Well it’s been a lonnnng day, but it was all worth it and overall, I think everyone has won: the servers now are better optimized, we tweaked a few things (Database, application server), and … we plugged in a few more boxes that should keep these file transfers humming for the next 50 years or so. Just that.

Anyway, thanks for your patience everyone, it was nice seeing the posts on the forum and the nice emails - there are a few good surprises in the works… stay tuned

Guillaume

Folks, in spite of a long night of work (Guillaume went to bed at 4AM…) some users are still reporting issues with login, messaging and file sharing - due in part to extremely strong user growth for the last 2 weeks.

When this happens, users:
- may experience long delays when creating user accounts
- may get an error message when typing a text message in Swapper
- may lose access to their profile page (comes blank)
- may get a “Oops. The file could not be sent” when attempting to share a file

If you are experiencing these issues, please accept our apologies for the inconvenience. The team is working hard and we should be back to normal really soon, hopefully by the end of the day. If earlier, we will report on this blog.

On another note, you are always welcome to send us email at support@wambo.com or better, ask any questions on our forum http://www.wambo.com/forum/

Thanks everyone for your patience

Xavier

Finally after a little over 12 hours fighting to regain access to our databases, we are back online!!
And for the record we did hit Murphy’s laws number 1 to 6 in that order…

Sorry for the inconvenience, you should now be able resume your favorite activity
I’ll leave you with a picture of the culprit:

Happy Swapping,
-Guillaume.

Yesterday was a big day for me. I had to fly to LA to give a presentation at the P2P Media Summit, organized by the Distributed Computing Industry Association.

At the beginning, I thought this was not going be a good day. I went to the office first, had unexpected things to work on (of course…), and I was running late for my flight. I was supposed to leave the office at 11 am, but at 11:45 I was still there. Right before leaving, I decided to print my presentation and… the printer didn’t work! No time to fix the problem, of course… . Thanks Murphy. Fortunately, I quickly found out that it just didn’t work with MY computer (go figure…), so I eventually managed to print everything from another PC.

This small incident could have made me miss my flight. I left the office only 45 minutes before my plane took off!

Fortunately, it didn’t cause any more stress during the day. I arrived at the conference on time and was fully prepared for my presentation. It was a great opportunity to listen to other speakers and to hear about new ideas of cooperations between P2P companies and content providers. I also had a great time talking to key people in this industry, including a few CEOs. After this busy day, I flew back to San Jose full of interesting thoughts.

It really was a great conference! When is the next one?

Xavier

Today Xavier asked me to translate a description of “Swapper” from a German website. I replied: “Swapper is the fastest parcel service on the net”. So his first reaction was: “What??”.

Obviously, this short review wasn’t about “our” Swapper at all. Since this is not the first time it happens to me, I decided to google the word Swapper for fun and see what’s out there… Let me tell you, it’s crazy how many definitions I found! Some of them are quite funny actually. So today I want to share with you what Swapper is NOT :

- Swapper is not a puzzle game where you have to swap blocks to complete the puzzle

- Swapper does not change your desktop wallpapers

- Swapper is not a software for searching and downloading files from strangers.

- Swapper is not a website for Euro collectors to swap their coins

- Swapper is not a plugin that lets you exchange links

- And… Swapper has definitely nothing to do some kind of “couple” behavior.

So if you too experienced the same confusion, don’t worry, we’re still making this great application that lets you privately swap with your friends. Go Swapper!

AL