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” :)

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

“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.

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!

Turning two recently, this is the gift we had in store for ourselves. We just moved to a dedicated workspace, from an apartment cum office one. The new office is actually Ashish’s basement and it has more space than we’ll ever need in the near future. Its also surprisingly cool in the summers so it might cut down on the power bill :)

For those of you who’re wondering where’s all the printing equipment, here’s a look at the top secret printer that powers everything at itasveer. Its the all in one printer that we’ve developed with insane amounts of r&d.

No I’m kidding :P. This is actually one of the first failed attempts at making our own t-shirt printer. We’ve already ruined 4 printers and yet to see success, so the project is stalled till we have more funds to waste. Donations will be welcome, lifetime supply of t-shirts to anyone who finances further development.. no kidding this time :)

Now news on the development front.

We’re getting ready to start photobooks, they’ll take a couple of months to appear on itasveer, but if you’ve got any requests then drop in with an email and you can be the first beta customers to receive and give us some feedback on the product. We’ll offer some real discounted rates till it goes live online to all preview customers :). For those of you wondering what a photobook is, have a look here for photos tagged as photobooks on flickr.

Also, summers are here so we got a few internship requests, and we’re happy to have working with us Sanyam Goyal who’s a second year CS under-grad at IIT-Mumbai. He has a “in-need-of-a-desperate-update” half finished personal webpage here, but he fares much better in programming stuff, so he’s built our first demo integration with the print API we recently finished. And now he’ll be trying to solve the upload problem that many of you face with a better uploader (more on these projects later).

Thats some of the news for the past one and a half months.. and thanks all of you for the wishes! Lots of good stuff coming your way.. so stay tuned. Cheers.

Let me share with you whats happening with us and what is coming up:

- We’re going to launch many more products like wall calendars, photobooks, even bigger posters and much more. I’d say roughly at the pace of a product a month.

- We’ve also just finished work on the first version of the itasveer API. This will enable us to power printing through other websites too. We’ll keep you posted on that.

- And we just added 4 new members to our team, and we’re 8 of us now! We decided to hire look-a-likes so we can have half the week off without being noticed :D

The itasveer team: “We’re two!”

So expect twice the fun and creativity, and wish us luck! Feel free to drop in with comments about your raves and rants. We’re always listening :)

Here’s a sampling of the ways in which you can play Holi with your friends there -
Dauda dauda ke rang lagao, Keechad me letao, Rangeela bhoot bana do, Nahane ke baad phir se rang laga do, Bhaang pilao, Daanton pe rang se manjan kar do and lots more. Do share your top tactics for Holi (we all have a few ingenious ones under our sleeves don’t we!) and we’ll add them to the list.. just drop in a comment :)

होली है!!

PS. Holi discounts are on. 20% off sitewide and free shipping on all orders above Rs. 100 – use the coupon code ‘HOLIHAI‘.

Edit: We’ve been robbed. Facebook just updated our user count and its down to a more humane 700 users. Happiness was short lived :((. And one would assume that this data would be correct, but we just looked up and found that many more developers have also noticed huge discrepancies in facebook’s reporting of app data.

Update: So the final count reached about 4000 users on Holi. Not bad I’d say :)

I’m sure some of you are curious as to how the car was made. So here’s a comic book story.

(So all you guys out there who want to pimp up your car – get in touch with us and we will send you to the right people).

And that’s not all, this car will be doing the rounds of Delhi till the 14th of Feb. If you send us a pic of the car (taken on or before 14th Feb), you get a personalised calendar from itasveer.com absolutely free! Ain’t that cool? Just send in the pics to contact[at]itasveer[dot]com with Pyaar ki Car’ in the subject line.

PS: Kaby (Mohit Gupta) is one of our friends who came up with this idea, and has helped us out throughout the process. He is a mechanical engineer, but has recently left the corporate life to pursue his passion – Music. He has even volunteered to drive the car around for the first few days – so women, keep your eyes open and status single – for Mohit might just be round the corner to serenade you.