Monday was Memorial Day here in the US. So for once, we had a three-day weekend! And let me tell you, in this country, it doesn’t happen very often

It was so warm and sunny that some of us went to the beach. However, some of us are smarter than others, and put sunscreen on their arms and their face!!! You would think Guillaume is one of them… but no. After 10 years living in the Bay Area, he didn’t think about it… So guess what happened? He showed up with the arms all red and burnt this morning!

I personally didn’t have this problem: I took a long walk on Ocean Beach, the windiest beach in the Bay Area… a place where, basically, you don’t want to wear just a Tshirt!

So today back to work. Now that everybody’s rested, we can come back full of energy and good ideas!

Anne-Laure

That’s it, version 1.0.3 of Swapper is out, and is available in Portuguese! em Português! Obrigado Diego for the translations

So today, I want to say welcome to all the Portuguese and Brasilian people. Here are a few ideas of things you can swap

I hope you’ll also enjoy the very cool new features of version 1.0.3:

- FASTER messaging feature. Now all your messages are instantly sent.
- Auto-upgrade on older versions
- A BETTER email system
- And an uninstaller for those who don’t like us so much

Plus, we fixed a few bugs that you guys reported on our forum (few crashes, speedbooster, email notification problems).

ENJOY!

Arnaud

Hi everybody!

We’re international! After translating Wambo in French, Spanish, German and Italian, we’re about to release a Portuguese version. Viva Brasil e Portugal!!!

So now we have quite a big crew of translators. Today, I asked them to tell me what they thought of Swapper. Wanna know what they said?

Alvaro : “Desde que uso Swapper todo es más fácil. Ya no tengo que buscar intermediarios para enviarle un archivo grande a mis amigos. Con Swapper va de mi ordenador al de mis amigos!”

Alvaro, our translator from Spain!!

Gianni : “Swapper è un grande prodotto web 2.0 ottimo per un file sharing che sia affidabile e di alta qualità.”

Diego : “Excelente inicitativa de Swapper ao lembrar do potencial do português abrindo suas portas ao Brasil. Parabens!”

Martin: “Ich freue mich darüber, daß Swapper in so vielen deutschen Webseiten empfohlen ist. Außerdem ist es sehr cool meine Wörter in den Beschreibungen zu sehen!”

JB: “Swapper est vraiment génial et je suis convaincu que ça va faire un carton en France!”

Thanks guys!

AL

Today, we got many new users from Germany. Here’s the reason why:

So we just want to say: “Ein hertzliches Willkommen allen deutschen Swapper-Benutzern”!

Now that Xavier has stopped speaking Italian (well actually not quite, since he now posts comments on Italian blogs) , we’re having to deal with another issue that makes us go really crazy at work: we’re having Internet connection problems! Yes, in the Silicon Valley!!

It all started last night when Arnaud and Xavier were working on graphics for a landing page. Every 10 minutes or so, the Internet was down. After a good night of sleep, we all thought this would be over the next day… but no. Today, it was even worse! At around 11 am, we couldn’t work any more. So Xavier decided to call the Internet provider. You probably already know what it’s like to call one of these (800) numbers:

“For English press one…please enter your subscription number… press 1 if you would like to… press 2 if you… press 3 for…your call is very important to us, please stay on the line…”

Xavier (FYI, this picture has nothing to do with the phone call he made today )

Anyway, after 10 minutes, Xavier finally talks to the operator. Unfortunately, our phone works with the Internet, so guess what happened? The phone call drops! Here we go again… Xavier calls back… presses 1, 2, and so on… waits for the operator and starts over from the beginning.

At noon (finally!), the operator says they’re going to send someone over by tomorrow, and at the beginning of the afternoon we receive another phone call saying the problem has been identified and will be fixed soon. Hooray!!!

So here we are at Wambo, all relieved, and hoping that tomorrow will be a more effective day

AL

WOW! We’re seeing a really good uptake in the number of Swapper users since last Thursday. Guillaume and the team did a really good job of setting up our datacenters. Except for a small glitch on Saturday night, we’ve had excellent performance and very few bug reports. On the software side (Swapper client), we’ve had a few bug reports but nothing too bad. These are small nit-picks here and there which we will get too shortly.

So what’s next? Well, first and foremost, we are going to add more languages. Having localized versions of Swapper makes a big difference, as we witnessed in Spanish and French speaking countries. Second, we are going to continue to focus on performance - namely, improving our caching engine even further to cut down on upload times. Last, there are still a few usability issues with want to address with regards to email alerts. Again, nothing too heavy, the product is pretty robust for an alpha!

Hey there — looks like a system went down at around 1:30AM last night (Pacific time), which affected the login process for some users. We’re back up at 100% now!

(Hola, hemos tenido unos problemas esta noche — pero toda va bien ahora//Bonjour, nous avons eu quelques problemes cette nuit, mais tout a ete retabli).

-Guillaume

ISSUE: “Looks like new users are not seeing their messages when typing. They apparently need to logout/login for them to appear –> We’re working on it and it should be fixed on the server side soon.”
STATUS: Fixed!

ISSUE: “A few people are reporting that the initial address book import isn’t working. We’re looking into this as well”
STATUS: Fixed!!

ISSUE: “The upload caching seems to be a little inconsistent on some file types. Looking into this right now.”
STATUS: Still under investigation.

Other: we discovered a problem for French and Spanish users - who could not consistently retrive their Inbox –> that’s FIXED!

Thanks! Merci! Gracias!

Guillaume

Hey, just quick post to list a few of the issues that’ve been reported:
- Looks like new users are not seeing their messages when typing. They apparently need to logout/login for them to appear –> We’re working on it and it should be fixed on the server side soon.
- A few people are reporting that the initial address book import isn’t working. We’re looking into this as well
- The upload caching seems to be a little inconsistent on some file types. Looking into this right now.

More later– thanks!

Guillaume

Arnaud, Guillaume and I are leaving in a few minutes to go have a beer somewhere in Los Gatos - about 30 or 40 miles south of San Francisco (closer to where our offices are). Anne-Laure is probably not is shape to join us, but we’ll make sure to have a little event in the next few hours to relax and go have some drinks.

This is May 3rd, 2007. Today, after many many many months of intense product work - we are finally releasing our first product, called Swapper. I’m not gonna write anything more about Swapper than what’s already out there on the homepage - and I’d rather focus on giving you guys a taste for what the last few weeks and months have been like, and share my excitement!

Arnaud, Guillaume and I first met as international students at Stanford, in 1999. Guillaume and I attended the same engineering school in France (Ecole Polytechnique) - I’m only one year older, so the connection was probably made at one of these Escondido Village barbecues on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Guillaume was a computer science student at Stanford, with Arnaud. I met Arnaud at a party sometime in 2000. He too, comes from an engineering school in France called the Ecole Centrale.

After studying together at Stanford (more or less since they were CS and I was EE), they worked for NASA for a few years. On my side, I founded a startup in the web acceleration space called Fireclick. Along the years, we continued to be close friends and went out together every week end. It was clear (at least for me) that we had a common dream of starting our own business as friends and launch a successful product. To this date, I vividly remember the countless brainstorms - trying to find an idea. These would go for 3 or 4 hours of back and forth. Yet, the Wambo idea only came about early 2005 - and not from one of these exhausting sessions. It just came up on Castro Street, Mountain View. At Pasta (if you are familiar with the place). At lunch. After a good plate of Pene Al Calabrese.

Fast forward 6-8 months, we were lucky to find good investors who believed in us and allowed us to get out of our “startup garage” (we worked for a few months from a tiny office at Stanford). We used the money to buy real computers, some servers, rent some nice office space and of course, build a business. All of 2006 was dedicated to building the core technological platform - something I believe we did amazingly well, with the help of family, friends, and real users who spontaneously joined us in our adventure. We hired a few people to help us - in engineering: our team in India (Mumbai) helped us develop a large part of our current product - graphic design: we have a designer in Estonia who’s been amazing (Hi Hannu!) - and we also recruited few college students at UCLA and UCSD who volunteered their time to help run our pre-alpha program. Late 2006, Anne Laure joined the marketing team full time - a great hire.

We started 2007 with the ambition to open up to our users and release a few experimental ideas in the area of messaging. We were so committed to learning what users wanted that we spent 3 entire weeks in January on campus meeting students (and going to parties too). We learned a great amount and truly refined a lot of our features - as well as fixed hundreds of bugs. We also met great people from outside California - Vivek in New York, Gianni in Italy, Max and Sim in France, Carlos in Mexico, Alvaro in Spain — to name but a few. All of them patiently gave us valuable feedback and truly, shaped our future.

Early April we felt like we had all the ideas and tech we need to start working on the actual first product (Swapper) - having learned that the two most important features for users were SPEED and EASE of use for our file sharing service. With the help of a few partners (to be announced soon) we continued to refine the feature set and narrowed it down to a handful of them. With the help of the users, and the best designer in the world (Hannu Livaar), we crafted the first Swapper interface. A few weeks later, we had a working version of Swapper in English, Spanish and French (Oui). and just a few days ago, enforced a true feature freeze to only focus on bug fixing. Today we finally spent a few hours tweaking the system, and testing testing and testing again. We were all smiles today. Yes, there are still a few issues that need to be fixed, but the product is robust and gets the job done.

I certainly hope the months ahead of us can be as awesome as what we’ve lived since Wambo was incorporate September 22nd, 2005. Today is a milestone, one very special day we’ve been looking forward to for soooo long. The future looks bright, and we’re going to continue to work hard for all of you. THANK YOU AND LET’S GET ROLLING.

Xavier, Arnaud and Guillaume

Wambo live. May 2nd.

<div style="width:176px;text-align:center"><embed src="http://twitter.com/flash/twitter_badge.swf" flashvars="color1=255&type=user&id=5690252" quality="high" width="176" height="176" name="twitter_badge" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="always" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /><br>swapper countdown</div>

Yes… This is true! And you wanna know why? Because I had all of my wisdom teeth pulled out last Friday.

At the beginning, I was pretty confident it was gonna be OK. To me, pulling out four teeth in the very back of my mouth did not seem to be too big of a deal. I was thinking it would just be a little bothering to chew for a couple of days, but that was it. I was almost laughing at my dentist when he told me I might have to stay in bed for 3 days.

Well… I was mistaken. I actually did stay in bed for 3 days. And not just comfortably in bed watching DVDs, no… In bed, either passed out or banging my head against the headboard out of pain.

And now, I feel better so I’m back to work! Working is actually fine since it makes me focus on something else than pain. However, it’s probably not so fun for my coworkers:

Guillaume, for example, has to wake up earlier to pick me up in the morning, and also has to drop me off at night (thanks Guillaume, I promise I’ll buy you coffee every morning for the next few weeks! ).

Other than that, it’s a pain in the neck for everybody whenever comes lunch time… Not only do I pick when and where we go eat, but it also takes me hours to eat my lunch (even when it’s just soup and mashed potatoes). So everyone always has to wait till I’m done… Not to mention they’re probably embarrassed to drag along a chipmonk with them all the time

Hooman on the other hand is really excited about it. First of all, he keeps IMing me to call me names which more or less refer to the shape of my head. He even suggested to take me to a party (thanks Hooman!)… but with a plastic bag on my head . Like a “good surprise” he said.

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to share with you what I look like. Check it out!

AL

I meant to call Joel for weeks to learn more about his world. Since I’ve met him in LA a few weeks ago on campus, I’ve been wanting to ask him more about his music, what it’s like to be at UCLA, etc. Here it is. Xavier Hey Joel, thanks for calling me back. How are you? Joel I’m great, you? Xavier Not bad - hey, wanted to ask you a few questions for the Wambo blog? Joel Sure.

Xavier Soooo, who’s Joel Rose?
Joel Ah-ah, like how you say it. Well, Joel Rose - that’s me, I’m a 3rd year UCLA student majoring in Political Science - English minor.

Xavier Did you grow up here in the area?
Joel Yes I did - I grew up in LA, went to school here at Montclair Prep in Van Nuys and then came to UCLA.

Xavier That’s cool. Hobbies?
Joel Tons - I’m a big sports guy - and also have a passion for music and the arts.

Xavier What sports?
Joel Basketball, football, soccer,hockey,golf,tennis,baseball…

Xavier You have a favorite team?
Joel Lakers. I’m a huge fan of the Lakers.

Xavier Let’s talk about music - how did you get into that?
Joel Well, my dad was in the music industry in the 70’s in England. When I was in 8th grade I started writing songs and singing/rapping. When I was in 10th grade, I started to see my music as a serious hobby.If there is any genre it can be labeled as it’s hip-hop/rock. Then at the dawn of myspace music I began promoting myself with MySpace.

Xavier What inspired you to pick “IceMix” as a name for your band/etc?
Joel The cliche goes that it is a “cold world” out there, and what substance can withstand the cold, and even thrive? Ice. And the mix is reference to the mix of emotions that are conveyed within my music.

Xavier How so?
Joel Well you know, I went through a lot of things through my life - growing up in LA, having family issues, etc. Icemix is really about staying cool, and just going on with life. I’ve got a good perspective on life. I consider myself a little more mature than people of my age. Many kids around live in a bubble, not knowing what’s really going on till they get hit with reality.

Xavier Is this something that inspires you as an artist?
Joel Absolutely - my songs are about my past life situations, and how I’ve overcome then time and time again.

Xavier What’s your favorite song in your album?
Joel I’m about to release a new album very soon - and the one I, and many others like best( of the ones finished so far) is probably “Trouble”. It’s a good summary of my life, and the other artist on it (Finesse’s) trials and tribulations- and the message is really that you should go on .Life is too short to be dwelling on sadness,and dissapointments of the past. The future is the present, so it is best to make the most of each moment.

Xavier Last question: do you have a hero or someone you look up to?
Joel My Mom. My Mom’s gone through a lot personally yet she was always there to support me and the family and keep us happy. She’s extremely independent, has overcome so much adversity, and always comes up with good advice on how to deal with life. My favorite sports hero is Kobe Bryant, as he has and continues to battle critics, overcome a variety of problems he encounters, and strives for greatness each and every second he steps on the basketball court.

Xavier Is your mom in LA?
Joel Yes, she’s a physical therapist. She was actually born in Iran, spent some time in Danemark then Israel before coming to the states where she went to college. A remarkable woman and a role model.

Xavier OK, very last question. Wambo?
Joel Wambo? Endless possibilities for growth - file sharing’s got enormous potential and Wambo’s the one that’s really innovating. To tell you the truth I’m kinda pissed right now because my PC Crashed, - but can’t wait to get back on it real soon.

Yes, shinny and everything the small incident…

All our users know Wambo for sure and sometimes our first names too. However, nobody knows how life at the office is. Let me give you a little taste of it

First thing in the morning, we always go to Mission City Café, the little coffee shop next to the office. The owners know us so well that we no longer have to tell them what we want. Last week, we even gave them Wambo Tshirts and Wambo mugs! I haven’t paid for coffee since that day

The morning goes by very quickly. At 12pm, Guillaume starts to be hungry, so he’s always the first one to suggest we go have lunch. However, his suggestion is hardly ever met with excitement, so we eventually go at 1:30pm (sorry Guillaume ). Then comes the important decision we have to make every day and that greatly influences our activity level in the afternoon: where should we go eat? The Thai restaurant, Saint John’s, or the sandwich place?

Our favorite is the Thai restaurant, although it’s a little bit of a challenge to get exactly what you ordered. Saint John’s is pretty good too, however, it’s a little more difficult to stay awake in the afternoon after eating a greasy hamburger with greasy French fries (sooo good though!). Anyway, whatever we eat, lunch is always a good time to brainstorm and talk about new ideas on an informal basis. That’s for example how we got the idea of video messages. And whenever a good idea emerges, we spend the whole afternoon (and the following days) trying to implement it, boosting ourselves with chewing gum and caffeine (our daily ammunition )

And when a new feature is completed, guess where we go celebrate… Ruby Skye, baby!!

Anne-Laure