Here’s what we’ve overheard about the cute, lovely, adorable and completely harmless (even for the few guys who get hit with it) cuddlies so far.
Note: I had xkcd.com at the back of my mind all the time while I made this (I know it shows) so here is accrediting my favourite webcomic xkcd.com.
1 comment June 3rd, 2009 Posted by Nishant
iTasveer Tournament. Click on the image to see large version
Continuing our tradition of our yearly birthday photo (see here and here), here’s our latest. And ofcourse there’s three of us each in this one. This took almost the entire day to create. Well worth the effort I’d say.
Cheers to all of you! Thanks for being with us in this tremendous journey so far. Nothing more to say.. I’ll just part with the line - “the best is yet to come” :)
15 comments April 15th, 2009 Posted by Animesh
Our relative silence in this space makes me feel a bit uneasy. So I just thought maybe we should throw some light on what we’ve been up to and what’s happening under the veils of this prolonged silence (mwahahaha! the evil laughter means we are onto something substantial). For those of you who don’t know us, we’re a (almost) three year old startup (or rather a small business now, three years is quite a time). But the term startup gets across the essence of our business and work culture pretty well so I’ll stick to it.
Let me put some more background to this post. Basically when we started off, we were a bunch of half learned, not too good engineers (and knew even less about running a business). Infact, that is putting it modestly.. we were outright poor in a lot of aspects (i know, yikes!). But one thing that we knew well was getting things done. So inspite of the fact that we made the poorest of design choices, we made sure everything worked well enough! And I can only say all that in retrospect as we were mighty sure we were doing things right all along at that time :) I also think that belief and confidence contributed in large parts to getting things to work as well! But as we’ve learned our crafts and business along the way, we’ve come to know that those bad decisions have started weighing us down in a lot of ways that hamper productivity/scalability of our day to day operations. We’ve also learned the various shortcomings of our service by all the generous feedback that you guys have always sent our way. We’ve continued to make incremental improvements, but we’ve grown more ambitious now and we think its time for something bigger.
Luckily we’ve put ourselves in a position where we can afford to look at everything from scratch and get to the drawing board. By the way, the lucky position being that we are an operationally profitable business now. And there’s no venture funding baggage with us yet.. so we can afford to think in a free manner about how we’d like to evolve iTasveer in the future. So admirers and haters, this might be a great time to chime in with any more feedback you have for us. We promise to listen to it all and we’ll try and make the right decisions. We promise to keep the user at the center of all our design decisions and will not hamper user experience at the cost of doing something cheaply or easily, to the best of our ability.
Work has been on on all this since the past 6 months and is moving along at a fair pace.. the new stuff will start arriving 2-3 months down the line. The changes will most likely be incremental and not a sudden unveiling. First up in line is a revamped Doodlepad.
That’s all folks.. wish us luck, and ofcourse, tell us if you have a wishlist :)
Obligatory nutty picture: Nishant and Ashish at war at one of the drawing boards.. the sketch pen is mightier than the sword
4 comments March 16th, 2009 Posted by Animesh
Ladies and Gentleman, we are proud to announce that on 29th December 2008 - the one millionth image was uploaded on itasveer.com. We are incredibly grateful to you guys for helping us reach this milestone.
So what kept us from updating this space and sharing our happiness with you? Lest you think we are lazy, actually we were thinking up ideas on how we can play around with the figure to make sense of it.
After all, 1 million may not seem like a huge number in this age of gigabytes and terabytes. But nevertheless, we are patting ourselves on the back for this achievement. In case you are wondering how much 1 million photos are, let us put that into perspective -
1. If all these 1 million photos were printed on 5×7 prints and laid side to side, they will form a line of prints 177.8 km long. That’s about the distance between Delhi to Agra if the road were a straight line.
2. Stack ‘em up in our albums of 80 photos each and you’ll need a medium sized truck to carry all those photo albums.
3. If these were not the digital times, all those photos would have needed about 27,700 film rolls to snap!
4. If a collage were to be made out of these photos, with each being on an average about 4×6 in size, it would cover 152 meters * 102 meters. That is about 30 Olympic sized swimming pools in size. Thats larger than a big football stadium.
5. If these images were made into a motion picture with each frame being taken by each image, the movie would last about 12 hrs - Karan Johar fans rejoice!
My imagination kind of runs out now. So drop in with a comment if you think of a cool idea to represent a million!
Also, belated though it might be, it is very heartfelt - we wish you a really rocking new year ahead.
We promise to make it more interesting with new ideas and products at itasveer, and, of course loads of great deals. In case you missed our new year offer on calendars, do not fret, our Valentine’s Day offer is on - Avail free shipping on photo products till the 20th of Feb (Coupon Code: VDAYSHIP).
Afterthought: Any one who comes up with a slumdog millionaire pun here gets a cool discount. We thought and thought, but nothing seems to rhyme!
10 comments January 23rd, 2009 Posted by Animesh
Apologies for making a bad pun on the Banana Split, but we’d like to believe our new ‘Split Calendar’ is almost as delicious as one.
This calendar has split pages for the dates and your design area. So what, you say? That means you can put any photo against any date, instead of waiting for the end of the month to flip you calendar!
This is selling for a special price of Rs. 349 only (with an additional 15% off till 15th Jan with the code NEWYEAR) - so grab one - you might even gift it to a dear one and get a banana split treat in exchange!
Also introducing a wide desk calendar and mini calendar this month to give you the maximum choices for a personalised calendar for the coming year 2009 - and inspite of all that has happened this year - let’s all wish the next one is a good one.
(All this talk about the banana split has got me craving for one - so I’m off to get one!)
7 comments December 13th, 2008 Posted by Ashish
Ramniwas, Ankit, Ashutosh, Nishant, Himanshu, Ashish, Animesh and our faithful ping pong table
Our clones unfortunately did not survive, as you might know human cloning is still in pre-alpha. So we decided to go the conventional way to expand a team and hired pure old-fashioned good human beings :)
We welcome Ashutosh and Himanshu to the team. Ashutosh is a Java web developer and Himanshu is a graphics designer. Both of them have brought fresh energy here and we think our work will start picking up pace in a couple of months as a result, which of course means lots of new stuff for our customers. And a delayed official welcome goes to Ramniwas who has been with us since quite a while now. He’s the one who runs around to make sure your orders get ready on time.
By the way, if you’re a programmer and you’re reading this - then please contact us if you want a challenging and fun job. Badly need one more programmer on board! We do some amazing stuff in Java and ActionScript (Flex)
28 comments October 4th, 2008 Posted by Animesh
I literally dropped my jaw while I watched this video about 25 times. This short video is shot by Vincent Laforet - a New York based commercial and editorial photographer. Smugmug has hosted a full HD version of the video (1080p !!) - Click here (warning - huge video). Mind you people this is a DSLR - and these were not supposed to be video cameras till now. 5DmkII is way ahead of the league now - ground breaking, goose bump giving, fantabulous awesomeness!
Update: Sorry folks, the video is no longer available. Smugmug has been asked to take down the video, apparently Canon didn’t like the free publicity!!
Update 2: And Smugmug has put the video back up now - click here
4 comments September 23rd, 2008 Posted by Animesh
We’ve been nominated for the TATA NEN Hottest Startups awards. This award is organized by National Entrepreneurship Network and TATA Group, in association with Helion, Mint , Seedfund and Wadhwani Foundation. It is India’s only community-chosen awards for Indian start-ups.So here’s calling all the itasveer lovers to vote for itasveer online here or via sms. SMS “HOT<space>92” (without the quotes) to 56767. Giving out our code for you to vote for us, feels like we just performed a number on reality TV .. haha!
8 comments September 3rd, 2008 Posted by Nishant
“Bhaiyon.. aur.. ” err! Sorry
“Pyari beheno.. is baar apne bhaiyon se extra special gift ke lie, ek extra special rakhi ho jaye !”
iTasveer brings to you for the first time ever.. Personalized Rakhis! We start taking orders by Sunday (3rd August). So keep your purses ready :p
Update: Orders are on.
5 comments July 31st, 2008 Posted by Animesh
If you like to tinker around with your camera but are not “into” photography to really figure out what all those manual settings affect, then this one’s for you. Have you always wondered what those weird fractions like f/2.8, f/5.6 meant (they are the aperture values or f-stops), or what that ISO 200 showing up on your camera viewfinder was all about. And how do those shutter speeds matter anyway - 1/125, 1/60 and so on.
So if you shoot on the automatic mode, then believe it or not, all these play together to create the right photo for you, and your camera sensor does all the hard work behind the scenes. But when you really want to create a photograph that is “hatke” - for eg. that dreamy portrait of your loved one with a fuzzy background, or a freeze frame photo of water splashing, well then you’ll need to get your hands dirty with these numbers. So here’s a really effective way to learn those nuances - the SimCam. This virtual camera will programmatically reproduce the effects of those camera settings on a pre-set image. You can compare how two different settings will change the final output. Its a surprisingly good learning tool as you see the results side by side. Check it out and be a pro with those nifty controls!
7 comments July 7th, 2008 Posted by Animesh