Swiss Announces Direct Flights ZRH-SFO

I live in San Francisco but my family lives in Switzerland. I've been petitioning Swiss International Air Lines every year to open up a direct flight Zurich-San Francisco. My wish has been granted. Starting June 2010, Swiss will offer a direct ZRH-SFO flight.

This route makes so much sense: There's no shortage of people shuttling back and forth between Zurich and San Francisco (just ask those weary-looking people with Google shirts in the SFO International terminal). Until now, we've had to connect either on the East Coast (ORD, JFK, etc.) or somewhere in Europe (MUC, LHR, FRA, AMS, DUB, CDG, from best to worst).

I'm so happy about this new route. Thank you Swiss!

Introducing the New reMail

Today, we're launching the new reMail for the iPhone! It's a completely new product.

reMail downloads all your email to your phone and lets you search full-text at light speed.

All My Email On My Phone? Really?

Yes, reMail downloads all your email to your phone. It will let you read and search all your email when you're offline. Just let reMail run overnight to complete the download. reMail needs less space than you think: 100,000 emails take only 500 MB on your phone - only 6% of the capacity of an 8 GB iPhone (the smallest iPhone you can buy).

This Will Save You Money

My family lives in Switzerland and I live in San Francisco. One thing I've found very frustrating whenever I travel to see my parents are the insane fees that AT&T charges for data roaming: For Switzerland, AT&T charges $19.97 per Megabyte. Check out this SMS I get the moment I turn my phone on the tarmac in Switzerland.

Now, with reMail, I don't have to think twice about searching for meeting times or flight reservations. When I'm abroad, I just download all my email over Wifi and have data roaming turned off.

We put together this page that contrasts data roaming prices with AT&T and T-Mobile Germany with the cost of reMail.

reMail Searches Full-Text

Another crucial difference between iPhone 3.0 Mail and reMail is that reMail searches full-text.

The built-in header-only search is frustrating, because so many times, the words I'm searching for don't appear in the To, From, and Subject lines. If the words you search for aren't in the headers, reMail will find the email, iPhone Mail will not. reMail is email search you can trust.

What happened to reMail Search Beta?

We launched reMail Search a few months back, it was a server-based product. Searches were being done on the server, and you had to give us your email password. It turns out people are very opposed to sharing their email and password with third parties, especially a small startup.

So we built the new reMail. Now, everything happens on the phone. reMail downloads your emails directly via IMAP. No more reMail server.

What reMail Users Are Saying

We have beta tested the app with a lot of users, and they are loving it:

• “This app is awesome! I use reMail constantly all day. It's so fast!”
  — Sachin Agarwal, Co-Founder, Posterous
• “I am loving reMail!”
  — Richard Price, CEO, Academia.edu
• “Complete Berlin trip organized via emails found by reMail. No printed reservations and tickets needed!”
  — Bernhard Heinzel, Beta User
• “reMail is a super useful app and search speed is incredible.”
  — Dan Veltri, Co-Founder, Weebly

Get it Now

We hope you'll love it too. Get it now. It's $4.99 on the App Store until Sep 1, and $9.99 thereafter.

Update: Coverage here and here.

World Tour: Australia

I'm driving up the East Coast of Australia, beach bumming away the last days of my world trip. Avis gave me the tiniest Hyundai Getz rental car, and after just a day of driving, I'm now able to manage the combined difficulties of driving on the left side and switching gears with my left hand. I've even stopped wiping the windshield every time I change lanes.


My mental image of Australia had been formed by Outback restaurants, and stories of Swiss friends spending months there after high school, as bumming away months in Australia before you join the military is a quintessential Swiss thing to do. Thus, I thought Australia would be a country of rough individualists, crisscrossing the Outback in their 4WD Range Rovers. I didn't know just how wrong this would be.

Instead of being some permutation of the US, Australia seems most like Western Europe with a huge backyard. Taxes are high, health care is free, education is cheap, workers have lots of vacation. Cities are well organized, and roads are well maintained. Thus, Sydney looks more like Hamburg than LA.


A friend at Google explained that while Americans celebrate fame and fortune, Australians lack respect for wealth, power and assorted pretensions - "tall poppy syndrome" (not tall puppy syndrome, see the comments).


A great example of this might be the Q1 Tower in Surfers Paradise. It is the tallest residential building in the world! Yet, the info brochure doesn't even name the architect, and there was indeed no star architect of the likes of Norman Foster, Santiago Calatrava, or I.M. Pei involved. Instead of praising the vision of the planners, the brochure talks about the labour of love of the hundreds of construction workers. The resulting building is no Chicago Spire, but still very pleasing to the eye. Oh, it also has fantastic views from the observation deck.



Other highlights so far: Fabulously pretty beaches. Wildlife World in Sydney, where they have kangaroos, koalas, and you can watch them feed the world's most dangerous snakes. Climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge was also quite an experience, although it took us hours to get geared up - I've climbed the alps with less safety equipment -, but the views were worth it.

World Tour: Hong Kong

Hong Kong overwhelms the visitor with its great density, dramatic vistas of highrise buildings, and the busy harbor.


From Victoria Peak, you get a good grasp of what it looks like when you have 7 million people living in a small space like this: The highrises look almost a little too tall and skinny for their own good.


Beyond the upscale shopping in Central, the fake watch hawkers in Kowloon, and the crushing density of Mongkok, Hong Kong has many peculiarities.


Against all economic incentive, shops that sell similar goods are all clustered together: For example, in Wan Chai, there is a block of a dozen shops which all sell high-end kitchen goods. In Kowloon, there is a street with pet shops selling only birds. Normally, retailers would want to be as far from their competitors as possible, in order to create a local monopoly. Is this government regulation at play or do all the stores belong to the same owner?


One thing I hadn't realized is that Hong Kong's center is on an island: Before the subway (1980) and the cross-harbor tunnel (1972), the only way to get to the financial center of Hong Kong was by boat.


I always wondered why Britain gave back Hong Kong to China. Here's what the Rough Guide says: The reason, ironically, seems to be the influx of people escaping communism: In the 1960s, millions of people fed from China to Hong Kong. The government was forced to heavily populate the New Territories, leased from China for 99 years in 1898. Dozens of planned new towns sprung up in the territory they were supposed to eventually give back to China, and became an economic unit with Hong Kong. This made it impossible to separate the two without damage to the population. Thus, the British were forced to return the whole thing and Margaret Thatcher negotiated the current "two systems, one country" deal in 1985 which returned everything to China in 1997. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall during that negotiation.


My stay here has been pretty memorable: It'll be hard to forget the tiny Internet cafe full of young Chinese girls chatting on webcam with Chinese boys, some of whom were topless. Lots of giggling all around. High tea at the Peninsula was quite an experience: As I was leaving, some celebrity was getting picked up by the hotel's very own fleet of Rolls Royce limousines. While it wasn't quite the peninsula, the first hotel I stayed in here was quite upscale and had dramatic views of the harbor. It was also quite expensive. Realizing that I had just blown a large part of my budget, I switched to a cheaper one. Only after I checked in did I notice that prices were quoted in hours, and the noise turned out to be pretty interesting as well.

It would be very interesting to live in Hong Kong for a little bit and there seems to be a steady stream of expats from all over the world. Maybe someday.

World Tour: Chiang Mai

I'm in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand (no riots here like in Bangkok). This is a place with lots of temples, but also plenty of activities. Here's me playing with a a five month old baby tiger(!):


Later, I rode this elephant around the jungle, and I'm not sure it had my best interest in mind, judging from the number of tree collisions.


I'd headed to Hong Kong tomorrow. I made the "mistake" of getting a room with a TV, so I've caught bits and pieces of the global economic meltdown. More on that later.

World Tour: In the Land of Squeaky Clean

After almost a week on island beaches, I decided to make the short hop to Singapore to see a friend from ETH who's now working there.


I imagined Singapore to be squeaky-clean, if somewhat sterile and commercial, and it was. The places I went to were lined with malls selling fashion, jewelery, and other useless items. Kind of like what you'd find in an airport.


This has advantages as well: At 31°C/88°F and 100% humidity, walking around outside can be a pain. My aforementioned friend has thus mapped out his walk from work to home such that he maximizes the distance covered inside air conditioned malls. Judging from the architecture, Singapore had its brightest days in the 70s and 80s, when most of the skyline seems to have been built. There is some new construction, such as the casino they dubbed "integrated resort", but downtown lacks any adventures in architecture.


Singapore clearly wants to be all business, at the expense of fun: No chewing gum, no spitting, and no pornography. Alcohol is expensive, and restaurants seem to close at 10 pm. The Internet is censored I couldn't even access YC Hacker News.


On the plus side, the place in an oasis of wealth, cleanliness, and safety. People seem educated and cosmopolitan. As I was geting into a taxi heading back to the airport, I had the urge to negotiate the price - a Pawlowian reflex from weeks of India and Thailand. But then I realized I was in Singapore

World Tour: Bangkok

Once again, I was surprised. From the moment you arrive at Helmut Jahn's Bangkok Suvarnabhumi airport, Thailand screams at you with its newfound prosperity.


I wasn't sure what the country would look like, but 9.4% average GDP growth from 1985-1996 and the ~5% average growth from 2002-2007 have certainly left their mark. Downtown Bangkok is full of new skyscrapers and malls selling designer goods and Rolex watches.


I still have a high level of nostalgia for a weeklong vacation on the island of Crete in 2001, interrupting a 6 month internship at Yahoo Germany. During that trip, I read Charles Petzold's Code and many other books while chilling on the beach. I was worried I wouldn't have enough to read while travelling and relaxing. Yet, in Bangkok, I found B2S, an upscale book store that puts any Borders to shame, complete with its very own Starbucks.


If anything, it's almost too much like America here. But Bangkok has other sides as well. Teeming markets with ventors cooking Pad Thai, fried rice in the open (And other delicacies such as these little delicious pancakes I don't know the name of.) Long-tail boats are zigzagging the river, floating markets - that's Bangkok as seen on TV.


Than there is the Grand Palace, with its impressive temple, impeccably maintained. To see the temple, there "gringo tax" of 300 BHT ticket for foreigners, common in India, but unexpected in otherwise highly developed Thailand.


I'd never been exposed to Buddhism before. I'm fascinated by the ritual of taking off your shoes before entering, but I'm having serious trouble in keeping my toes from pointing forward at the Buddha statue, which is a big no-no.


Then there's the sex tourism. There's nothing covert about it: One of the parts of town with many hotels is full of middle-aged European men, with a Thai "lady" in arms. I'm not sure what to think of this, but it's apparently accepted in the local culture. Oh, and the smog and the density of traffic are also a bit disturbing.


Most importantly, Thai people are very friendly. I don't know a word of Thai yet, but misunderstandings are soon forgotten with a smile and a laugh. Even the hawkers try to charm rather than giving you the hard sell, even while haggling. The Lonely Planet says Thai culture regards visitors as guests from heaven - I've definitely been feeling that way.

World Tour

I'm leaving this Sunday for a trip around world. I've always wanted to do this: before Google, I didn't have the money, and before Xobni, I didn't have the time.

I'm also seeing this as a great opportunity to relax and unwind before starting my new thing, and I hope that a little bit of time off will allow me to find clarity on some things and think more deeply about the challenge ahead.



My trip will take me to Switzerland and Germany to see parents, friends, and more. Then, off to India to see New Delhi, Thailand (I hope all is calm by then), Hong Kong, and the Australian East coast. I'll be moving at a fast pace and should be back in California by late October.

I won't be completely off the grid, and hope to blog and have some access to the wonders of email on the way.

Us vs. the Snow

I haven't written a blog entry in a while, and I wanted to write a post about Xobni stuff and how we're moving the company into 3rd gear. We're still working really hard on adding new cool stuff and fixing bugs, but that doesn't feel like news. Instead, here's a photo story about how we got snowed in two weekends ago.

We started driving to Tahoe pretty late on a Friday night, and thus got stuck in traffic and rain on the Bay Bridge. It rained so hard that on the lower floor of the bridge, rain was coming in sideways and traffic came slowed to a crawl. The car was a rented Zipcar Honda Element, packed full with snowboards, skis, Tyler, the L, the M, and myself.

By the time we got to Folsom, we were feeling pretty good about our progress and decided to stop by the local Applebee's for a hearty meal. Tyler and L are pictured with cheap Margaritas below.



It's always useful to chat up the locals at these places and I told a woman that we're driving to South Lake Tahoe. She screamed "You need to have snowchains! If you don't have them, they won't let you go past Placerville. If you don't have chains, you're gonna die!"

It was 10:45 pm. The Walmart in Folsom, we're told, closes at 11:00 pm. Ignoring every speed limit, we raced to the store, and arrived there with 5 minutes left to go. The sales associate found snowchains that would almost fit, and proposed we should also buy bungie cords to make sure they don't fall off. Sketchy, but our only option. We felt well prepared.



One and a half hours later, we arrive in South Lake Tahoe. The road was barely even icy. No snowchains needed! What a waste, we think. We meet up with my Swiss friends from Google: Markus, Sandra, Robin, and Marius. We sleep.

The next day of snowboarding is awesome! Great weather and good views. Here's the lake and Tyler with his disintegrating parka (It was 10 years old and was continually shedding little pieces of itself during the entire trip):



And this is the rest of the team – unorganized:



And organized:



At the end of the day, Markus decides to jump in the lake! But at first we can't find the way there. Robin almost falls into the covered pool, though.



And here he is. Markus and the lake. Brrrr.



The next morning, we wake up and everything is covered in snow!



Little did we know that the snow wasn't kidding. By 2 pm that day, there's a snowstorm on the mountain, Heavenly is closing lifts, and we're stuck on the wrong side of the mountain where Tyler has to pick us up.





Suddenly, our Walmart adventure 2 days earlier doesn't seem that stupid after all. The snowchain mounting operation begins.



Instead of trying to climb up 50, we decide to drive up to I-80, where we have a better chance of getting home the same day. But a few miles outside of Kings Beach, the police shuts down 267, and we wait 2 hours for it to reopen. While we're waiting, the Honda's battery dies, but a friendly overprepared Russian gives us a jump. I-80 is closed as well due to zero visibility, so M books us a place at the Best Western. I negotiate the price down by $20 (I tried hard!).

The morning after: 3 more feet (1m) of snow! Here's M wiping the snow off the hood.



Four hours and more sliding later, we arrive in San Francisco, half a day of vacation poorer, but one adventure richer!

A Weekend out of Focus

Squeezed between two intense work weeks: A short weekend in Tahoe!



We went to Heavenly in South Lake Tahoe.



It was Adam's first time on a board. He did well, thanks in part to snowboard lessons from M.



With all the adrenaline from quickly gliding downhill, we almost completely forgot for a moment about making your email a happier place. No worries: We're back in focus now.

Timo's Podcasting Empire

I spent the last one-and-half weeks in Europe. "Europe? We have a perfectly good Europe at EPCOT Center. It's not good enough or something?" I forgot how modern this place looks. At least in some places. Quite a contrast to SF.

While in Munich, Germany, I visited my Timo and his fast-growing podcasting empire. Watch us talk about the iPhone in this vidcast (in German) and listen to us talking about Germany's copy-paste Web 2.0 innovation in this podcast (in German).

I also watched a great comedy about speed dating in Munich: Shoppen (German Trailer): The personalities of 16 Munich singles clash in encouters of 5 minutes each. That movie brought back many memories of dealing with German girls and their peculiarities. Highly recommended.

Airport Shop Economics

Stroll through Zurich Airport and you’ll notice that, as in many airports these days, a vast amount of high-class shopping awaits past security: Burberry, Chopard, Hermès, Armani, Gucci, Hugo Boss – they’re all there. If you want to spend $600 on a purse while waiting for your flight, you can.


The only things I’ve ever bought at airport shops are newspapers, magazines, food, drinks, coffee, and power plug adapters that I forgot to bring. I’ve seldom set my foot in one of the boutiques, much less bought something there. Almost everyone I know hasn’t either.

Consequently, it seems like a large percentage of airport floor space is wasted on shops that people don’t visit or buy goods from. Why are they still there?

Boutiques, in airports, as in downtown shopping areas, are high-margin, low-frequency businesses. Sure, they may not have as many visitors, but when someone buys that $600 purse, they’ve just paid for the entire morning’s rent and salary. The road to success is to charge a lot of money to a few people.

The reason why boutiques are omnipresent at airports is that they are especially well-frequented by people with lots of disposable income and a knack for lifestyle: The rich, the jeunesse dorée, executives, middle managers, consultants – these are people who can make that $600 impulse buy. For the other 80% of travelers, this floor space is wasted.


But there’s another reason for their presence: Airport managers love boutique shops. They pay the same rent as anyone else, but make the whole airport seem more upscale. The shops themselves are often beautifully designed and pleasing to the eyes of all travelers. Even if they never come inside.

NYC Profit Calculator

Here's a fascinating account of how businesses in New York - from cab driver to copy shop to the Museum of Modern Art - make money.

New York Magazine: The Profit Calculator

I feel like there are some lessons to be learned here. Cab drivers worry less about tips and more about your destination - if you take a ride out to Queens, they're losing money because they have to drive back through traffic. Yoga gurus sacrifice money for prestige. H&M pricing is essentially a variant of bait-and-switch, but with scarcely clad bikini models on billboards.

A Weekend in Munich

I spend the weekend visiting my friend Fabian in Munich, Germany.

We revisit some of the places that I'd frequented when I was interning at Yahoo, 6 years ago, working my ass off. The building where Yahoo used to be looks derelict, and now sports a for-rent sign with spelling errors in the window.

We drop by Munich's "Pinakothek der Moderne" in a modern, completely white building. We make fun of Dan Flavin's light installations.

Off to a coffee shop named "San Francisco Coffee Company" where we meet Timo plus Nadine and her mysterious boyfriend. I break The News. The crowd is mildly shocked.

I get the feeling that my life is in upheaval, while everything around me is completely constant.

We go out later that night, searching for my friend's future "temporary girlfriend" (as suggested in the coffee shop - he's too picky to settle on any permanent one), but we only meet 35-year olds in a weird bar-slash-coffee-place with awesome music.

The next morning we have brunch at News Bar and walk around in the park. We head home and play Age of Empires against each other for hours.

I return on the direct train to Zurich. In the seats next to mine, a bunch of kids from the prestigious Salem private school talk about their lives in high society. And their life plans after graduation.

The 3-Year Halbtax

In Switzerland, the fastest way to travel is by train. In an effort to segment customers, base fares are pretty expensive, but there is a card for heavy users which reduces ticket prices by 50%. In German, it's called "Halbtax". Typically, you get a one-year card for 150 CHF, but you can get a three-year one for 350 CHF. That's the one I bought.


Oh the audacity of selling a 3-year subscription to anything! Only in Switzerland are biographies stable enough for anyone to think about travel three years in advance. Only here can the railway company sell these without having to worry about what may happen to their cost base over such a long period.

Even more shocking: The expiration date: 2010 – drum roll – "The Future!". Only three years away. Isn't that the date by which all our problems were supposed to be solved?