Greetings from Singapore

OK. Not really. I'm back in the office. But I really thought about posting this when I was on the road. In any event, just thought I'd share a few of my impressions of muvee, Singapore and Thailand.

First off, muvee. A really interesting and cool company. Their technology is indeed quite nifty. With muvee, you can create a very professional looking home movie from video and photos, complete with transitions and overlays, simply by dragging and dropping your pictures and clips into the application and choosing your music. The software does the rest, even identifying points of interest in photos (like faces, for instance), deleting bad video and synching the entire thing to the beats in the music. The technology has been around for a while now, but not too many people have heard of them. We're going to change that.

The people of muvee are great. They are a truly global company, with its 90 person staff comprised of people from 17 countries. The culture is straight out of Silicon valley. Their offices include a beach, a diner, a video game room and pool/foosball room. They are young, very hip and totally obsessed with pop culture. They are going to be introducing a new website in the fall that incorporates their core movie making technology with a new approach for photo sharing that is aimed primarily at groups. More on that in the weeks to come. They also have a Google-like approach to product development. People are encouraged to try out new ideas that might be interesting to the world at large. One of them, a new way to share photos and chat in real time, is mezmerizing, though I can't really explain it. Check it out at www.schwup.com. Let me know what you think.

Singapore is a very modern city with some touches of traditional Asia. As we learned, the two main passions of the people here are shopping and eating. Like muvee, Singapore is a rich blend of cultures. On one block I saw a buddhist temple, a hotel/mosque, a Starbucks and a noodle house with traditional fare from many Asian countries.

Since we were already in Asia, Chris and I made a quick side trip to Thailand. If you ever have an opportunity to go, you should. It's an amazing place. We stayed in Phuket and took a day trip to Ko Phi Phi. The impact of the tsunami is easy to see pretty much whereever you look in this part of Thailand. But the people are still warm, friendly and cheerful. If you're interested, check out the rest of the photos here.