Meet Sandboxer Sascha Mombartz! A German with a twist (with his mother originally from Malta), Sascha grew up in Ethiopia, Thailand, Germany, Egypt and has studied and lived in New York for the past 6 years. He worked for the New York Times, Google and is now mainly working with startups in creative directing and improving their user experience design. Find Sascha on Facebook and Twitter.

1.Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation.

I’m currently working on a content platform called Urtak that combines the advantages of polling with the advantages of commenting. It basically enables anyone to find out in a much more friendly way what their readers, viewers or visitors think.

2. What are you doing and how did you get there?

I am making information more accesible and improving the experience of understanding it using the method of trial and error until reaching success.

3. Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

There were moments when I was really disappointed or even hopeless but looking at them in retrospect, everything worked out in one way or another. The “failure” was merely a turn at a crossroad and not an ending.

The biggest and probably most unforeseen recent crossroad “turn” was after I started working on a project without a proper agreement. Unfortunately things broke apart after a while. Lesson: Trust but verify, verify, verify.

The fact that I managed to get a full scholarship degree at the Cooper Union in New York was one of my biggest successes. Lesson: Being persistent, and doing things the way that you believe they should be done.

4. What do you want to achieve in

a) the next week: normalize my schedule and go swimming more.

b) the next year: start my own studio.

c) the next 10 years: be able help others make their ideas happen.

5. What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?

The most inspiring moment was realizing that having the right angle to an idea, that is how to approach and explain it, can be more important than the idea itself if no one is able to understand it.

6. How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them.

Exchange, exchange, exchange. the movement of knowledge, ideas, feedback, opinions, thoughts, ramblings are so important.

7. Sascha’s favorite:

-book: Ill fares the land – Tony Judt
-music artist: Exit through the gift shop
-place on earth: Malta
-travel destination during last year: Istanbul, Berlin, Cairo
-food: Ice Cream
-drink: Bloody Mary
- quote: There are no facts, only interpretations. – Nietzsche

Zain was chosen from a pool of over 1,600 candidates from 85 nations to spend the summer at the NASA Ames Research Centre where he will learn from hundreds of Nobel Laureates and Business Leaders including Larry Page. The students will work together to solve some of humanities greatest challenges using accelerating technologies and will participate in hands-on excursions to leading Silicon Valley labs and companies, Zero G sub-orbital flights and be exposed to NASA’s many technologies.

Zain is also one of the youngest on the program at only 22 yet has demonstrated an exceptional track record of achievement during his career. He launched his first internet company at the age of 15 and soon built-up an impressive list of clients including Google, Mozilla Firefox, MTV and Hilary Duff – all before his 18th birthday. At university, he founded one of UK’s top enterprise societies (KCLBC), was a Founding Member at a national organization for university entrepreneurs (NACUE), and won a national award for his charity endeavors abroad (SIFE).

He currently runs a profitable start-up in the technology industry and is in the process of launching an early-stage investment firm. He is also pursuing a part-time MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship at UCL and takes MBA electives at near-by London Business School.

Sunday being Valentines and the Chinese New Year, I tried to find a theme somehow connecting the two – ultimately settling on our love affair with the internet. Google’s first TV advertisement in the US captures the sentiment quite well.  The internet enables and initiates almost everything, from information sharing to  something potentially much more.

Ironically, as the ad tells the story of the internet being woven into our personal lives, Google threatens to withdraw services from China while Iran bans email and nearly shuts down its own internet.  Similarly, in more progressive countries, workplaces and schools seek to limit private communication, ranging from blocking social media to enforcing penalties for texting. The collision of interests is cultural as much as it is political.  Stefana Broadbent, an ethnographer studying the way social habits and relationships function in the digital age, concludes the internet facilitates modern intimacy.  Efforts to regulate this intimacy will be strenuous and short lived at best.

This exposes a deeper cultural dynamic. As the millennial generation merges the physical and virtual worlds and as ubiquitous, borderless, and instant communication become the norm, authorities with outdated worldviews will fall.  Fearing limits on their ability to maintain control, institutions corner communication technologies as a scapegoat, sometimes even blaming external powers for stirring domestic affairs.  China, for example, believes that the west is “wielding communications innovations from malware to Twitter to weaken it militarily and to stir dissent internally.” 

It’s true, online communication amplifies the collective (sometimes critical) voice.  Instead of silencing this voice, figures of authority must engage in conversation and establish a dialogue that demonstrates genuine concern. If the government or workplace can’t trust its own people to communicate freely, the problem is rooted much deeper.  Last week’s Economist Special Report on Social Networking briefly discusses this topic in relation to the workplace.

Image thanks to ivoryocean on Flickr.

Limiting access to communication won’t work for a generation of ‘digital natives’.  Online communication, in many ways, is an extension of and facilitator for physical interactions.  Connectivity is the new cultural norm and it’s woven into daily routines.  As younger people enter public service, the number of supporters understanding and championing this cultural norm will grow (Alec Ross and Jared Cohen being great examples in the US) — hopefully the trend is similar in other parts of the world.

As we celebrate the Chinese New Year and Valentines day, let’s hope China and all other countries with questionable internet policies realize that just as physical walls failed in the 20^th century, virtual walls will fail in the 21^st.  The internet must remain uncensored, information must move freely, and countries need to embrace the cultural norm valuing connectivity.  It’s time for internet lovin’.

Paul Gleger previously worked for the International Office of Communication and Information Policy at the US Department of State.  Among other things, the office was tasked with promoting internet freedom.  It was successfully lead by Sandbox Advisory Board member David Gross.

Remember these childhood dreams, where you imagined that you would once work in a place that consists entirely of chocolate and where you could just indulge in sweets all day, maybe taking a nap in between? Well, as you probably have realized until now, this place doesn’t exist. But: The Google offices in Zurich come quite close.

Antoine and I were lucky enough to get a tour of Google’s Zurich offices, where more than 450 people, most of them engineers, work on search quality and many other projects. Our competent guide to the five floors of Googleland was Matthias Meyer, Spokesperson for Google Switzerland. Matthias clearly enjoyed showing us around – no wonder, because what Google offers its employees is almost certainly unparalleled.

There is food and drinks almost everywhere – and it is all free (and, by the way, excellent). In addition to the main canteen serving three meals a day, there are “mini-kitchens” on every floor, stocked with drinks, ice cream, bread and snacks. To counterbalance this diet, the office also has a nice gym, complete with trainers. If exercising isn’t your thing, you can also get a massage or take a nap in the massage chair.

Or maybe you’re stuck in the work you’re doing and need to get some fresh ideas? For that, there are not one, but several playrooms with billard tables, table tennis, air hockey, Nintendo Wii’s and almost every other imaginable game. And to top things off: There is a huge slide going down from the first floor to the canteen. We tried it, and it’s awesome.

All of this is of course nice – but the reasons for Google’s success also lie in the way the company is structured. Google, although 22’000 employees strong today, prides itself on still working like “a lot of small startups”, as Matthias told us. Teams can work very independently, and innovation is driven by the famous “20-percent-rule” that allows every employee to work one day per week on his or her own projects (GMail originally was one of these projects).

But if it is fun, it is serious fun: As Matthias says, Google engineers are obsessed with two things: The user – and data. Google collects enormous amounts of nonpersonal data (Matthias emphasized that they take data privacy seriously), analyzes it meticulously and uses it to take decisions and improve their services. (For a good example, read this fantastic Wired article on the economics behind the Google advertising system).

The enormous innovative drive that made Google so successful thus seems to be based in a combination of focus on data, flexibility and independence – and giant slides. It very obviously is working.