Gustav’s Mindshare

So I just returned from an awesome week in San Francisco where Anders, Ludvig and I demoed the first version of Spotify mobile on the HTC Magic Android device. We’ve worked very hard on this application for the last few weeks and are pretty pleased with the result. Using it on the trans-atlantic flight was a good test of the offline sync mode, really useful! 😀

I really like the HTC Magic (thanks for giving everyone a free device Google), it’s pretty clear that the form factor is everything when you compare it to the G1. It actually makes my iPhone feel just a little bit big…..

Spotify for Android at Google I/O

The event itself was huge fun. The party on the Wednesday was in true Google style with any and every geek interest represented + ofcourse, the sign of Google, lots of free food and drinks!

I probably don’t need to mention the Google Wave presentation to anyone, how can you have missed it? I would like to say however, that I think the general blogosphere has kind of missed the core of what it is (which is easily done, considering it took 1,5 hours just to demo all the different things it CAN do). But in one sentence, Google wave is about Centralized conversation objects, where everyone edits the same object, rather than the current distributed model, where everyone has local copies of conversations and edits (replies etc) to their individual copy. This basic paradigm difference allows for all of the rest of the features (realtime, simultaneous update, in message editing, collaboration etc). I actually think they should’ve stuck to just the core messaging use case for the demo, to not confuse it too much.

It’s a super ambitious project in itself, but what really blew me away was the fact that they are going after a federated solution right away (i.e. I can have my own Google Wave server), meaning there will be multiple copies of these conversation objects, that need to be kept in sync. I think it was crucial that they did, it just wouldn’t have worked to say that all future communication should be hosted by Google themselvers, but it does make it orders of magnitude more complex I would guess…..

I came to Yahoo! Inc in 2006 through the acquisition of Mobile social software company Kenet Works AB of which I was CEO and co-founder (learn more about me). After two years as Director of Product Management and later Director of Business Development, I’ve decided to leave Yahoo! Inc in order to join music startup Spotify.

Like many others , my first time using Spotify gave me that very rare ”Wooha!, wait a minute!”-feeling.

I got that same feeling using Skype for the first time a few years back. It wasn’t the VoIP technology, I’d used loads of other VoIP apps before, it was the implementation of the service. The fact that it just worked! I didn’t have to care about firewalls, NATs, VoIP servers or user SIP domains (because they didn’t use SIP). And the core proposition of the service, voice, had awesome quality! Even more importantly, because of this, my friends, and even my parents, got it to work!

Though the technology had been around for ages, it was the first time I, and most people around me started to seriously think of telephony over the Internet as an alternative to using the POTS.

I get that same exact reaction from my friends (and parents) today when they use Spotify for the first time. It just works, the technology is awesome, but invisible, and the content is there. It is the first time they realize and seriously consider that there may be no point in physically getting, owning and storing every song in the world on your own harddrive, you can just have access to all of them! The only thing you need to own and keep are your favourite song lists, and in a world where you are always connected, that’s actually a lot more portable and easy to manage across computers and devices. For most people, who never heard of “cloud services”, this is a pretty mind blowing realization!

So back in December, when I got the chance to join this great team of serial entrepreneurs, and work with some of Europe’s top engineering talent, around a topic such as music, that engages just about everyone from all walks of life, I just had to take it!

Starting in February, I will head up something that a lot of users have already requested and discussed extensively, Spotify on the Mobile. We obviously can’t tell you our plans yet, but make sure you subscribe to this blog to be the first to know!

I want to take the chance to say a big Thanks to all of the great colleagues and friends at Yahoo!, from Madrid (you know who you are!) to Germany, London and Sunnyvale. It’s been a lot of fun working with all of you and I’m very excited to see what the recent changes at the big Y! will bring!