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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
March 16th, 2009
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!
January 23rd, 2009
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!)
December 13th, 2008
You probably may not have noticed as these were very short and far between, but if you were affected then sincere apologies! We think we’ve fixed the problem and it shouldn’t happen again. Geek talk follows.
We goofed up a bit, here’s how – When we recently had to reinstall our OS on the production server, we somehow managed to switch our Debian apt-get repositories from etch to sid (the unstable version). And guess what.. we unknowingly installed a bunch of unstable libraries, ImageMagick included. And we suspect that the latest ImageMagick (from the unstable branch) has been crashing when trying to apply an unsharp mask to very large images. We use JMagick to connect to ImageMagick, which we realize may not be the brightest of ideas, because if ImageMagick seg-faults, it takes down the JVM with it :(. Have reverted to the stable versions now.. so hopefully things will be normal. I think we’ll have to start work on an alternate solution to get rid of JMagick.
July 5th, 2008
Whenever a new service or product launches – especially a consumer product, there is a span of time the creators have to spend explaining to people just exactly what they do, before they can start selling it to them.
We guys still get blank stares when we mention online photo printing, personalised calendars or custom mugs. I would love to get to a stage where there is instant recognition when one mentions these.
So how is this instant recognition achieved? One great contributor to that is competition. Your competition, to start with just ensures there are more people explaining the same thing often in different ways, and then someone with more marketing moolah will take such awareness mainstream.
Which is why I want to thank Canon. I recently came across this billboard for Canon’s latest home printer called the Wonder Box. And hear hear! They aren’t selling great page throughput, <super high number> print resolution or some other arcane jing bang. They are selling one important use – that you can use the wonder box to make personalised calendars, greeting cards, photobooks and t-shirts!
Of course, you can already make all these cool personalised products at itasveer (some in the works).
(Click to enlarge)
Which also brings us to another question: Home Printers. Do you think home printers have a got a chance in this niche personalisation market? Would you rather use a home printer instead of an online service? Let us know in the comments.
June 20th, 2008
Hi everyone.. we’re really sorry for being out for so long (close to 30 hrs). It was completely unexpected and happened because of a mistake.. don’t even ask how! But we always have backups so all data was intact. And we haven’t seen the orders coming in for so many hours because of that, so pour them in, and we’ll take a peaceful sleep for a while :)
June 18th, 2008
On 15th April, itasveer will be two years old – it has been a long and eventful journey and we will share some things with you on that day, but in the meantime – we are going to celebrate with abandon!
That means you will get fantastic prices across our product range. For starters, you can buy 4″x6″ prints at Rs. 2.90 only – That’s probably the lowest price for this size across the country.
For those who like the bigger picture, there are 5″x7″ prints at Rs. 6.90 only and upto Rs. 200 off on poster sized prints (12″x18″ to 20″x30″) – that means you can buy a huge 20″x30″ print for Rs. 399 only!
For those salivating for our cool personalised products – they can pick up Calendars for Rs. 399, Mugs for Rs. 249 and get upto Rs. 150 off on Photo Collages! The detailed price list is here.
All these prices will be applied automatically – you do not need to enter any discount codes.
So shop away – bring your photos home or send them to your dear ones, as prints or personalised products!
April 3rd, 2008
It’s that mushy time of the year again – Valentine’s day!
We guys won’t say much about our disappointing love lives, but that notwithstanding, we have some great stuff lined up on itasveer.com for all you love birds out there.
Come to think of it, what better way to express your love than a personalised gift? The various moods of a person on a mug, or the best times together on a photo calendar, or perhaps just a huge collage with lots and lots of photos.
For example, this a mug which one of our customers had designed with the Doodlepad.
We also have a special Valentine Gift Hamper this time. You can turn any personalised product order into a hamper and we will ship it with a nice little bag of some beautiful heart shaped handmade chocolates (about 120 g).
So, get started and send your special someone a personalised gift !
Also, enjoy our special discounts! Free Shipping on all orders above Rs. 100; Classic mugs, Two-tone mugs, Large mugs, at Rs. 50 discount and Calendars at 20% off!
February 5th, 2008
We will be off to our homes for Diwali, so you might find us a little sluggish in replying to your queries till Monday (12th Nov). Ashish who happens to live closest to our office, will be the last man standing for running all our operations (for these three days of course). So we apologise in advance for the slower service you might experience, and we wish everyone a cracker of a Deepawali. Looking forward to seeing your Diwali shots on itasveer soon :)
November 7th, 2007
We were making a pretty much regulation (bug fixes) release today, and we kept running into problems. So sorry about the frequent “itasveer is out on a coffee break” page. All batch uploads also got turned off during that time!! Also, users might have experienced a 20 minute outage yesterday night, we moved our DNS servers to new ones, and it seems we were impatient in updating that in our system, which translated into unwanted outage :(. Our sincere apologies for the trouble.
BTW the new release has some speed optimizations, so itasveer should feel zippier. Doodlepad has cut down on its already feather light weight (it has gone down from 225kb to 200kb) and is better than ever. So you’all.. keep the feedback coming :)
Update: We’re still facing some issues it seems, we’re trying hard to get things back to speed.
Update (late in the night now) : We’re finally looking good. Spent our whole day figuring out what was wrong with our Mysql server. Turns out it was a DNS resolution problem and had been lurking there for quite some time!
September 4th, 2007
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