After my thesis work with Ericsson I was very ambivalent about where to work. I looked around, but ended up working at the same place I did my thesis. Ericsson was perhaps not the place that paid the best, but I really liked the people and the fact that it was a mix of research and development work with ties to markets.

Since my job was in Stockholm I decided to move there. Not only because it was more convinient, but also because Stockholm is a bigger and much more happening town. Getting an appartment in Stockholm is not very easy, but I shared one with a colleague from Ericsoon, Peter Bergman. He later became one of my closest friends, so that was a lucky pick!

At work I pretty much right away joined a very special project. There was an idea about making life easier for mobile people. We set out to create a service that would relieve people of keeping track of all different numbers, mail boxes etc. Without going to much into technical detail it was about giving people one single contact number. This number when called searched for them at a range of numbers like their mobile, office etc. The service also included a unified message box where voice, fax and email messages where stored (way before the now days buzz about unified messaging). The service could be handled by normal phones, special mobile phones created for the project and of course the web.

This project was a great experience. The project manager, Martin Creathorn, is great at building teams. The team was hand plucked with members from both Sweden, Belgium and Australia, so it was a very diverse but lively team. After about one and a helf years intense development work it was time for the project to move down to Melbourne, Australia, where the trial operator Telstra were. I decided to take my chance and landed a one year contract. So off I went... With my usual great timing I had just bought a very charming little appartment in the Old Town, but more about that later.

Once back in Sweden I resumed work with Ericsson Research. It was great fun catching up with all my old friends, and I also begun a very ambitious renovation of my little appartment.

However, my restless gene (or whatever it is) started itching again. I started looking around for new options and found out that Ericsson planned a new lab in Singapore. Singapore was perhaps not the first place I was thinking about going, but after some tough thinking I decided to give it a try. So time to pack the boxes again. In February 99 after a desperate renovation spurt in the appartment I headed off. That's in the next section though...