The long absence on the blog posts can be attributed, in no small way, to the unending joy of fixing the long tail of bugs!
Bugs, in the language of the geek, are lines of code that occasionally ‘break’ to produce unexpected results that have to be fixed in a most humain way without the sanity of all being put at stake. Generally a humorous process that involves serious amounts of coffee 
We have featured some work that’s been cooking on the 4am website. Do give us a shout if you have any reaction to anything!
4am recently celebrated a year of existence. So what have we been up-to? Are we doing anything? Have we done anything? I mean what is it that goes on at the 4am Office?
We thought that a neat way to deal with these questions would be to have a live video feed of our office on the web! However it turns out that there are some technical difficulties in bringing that idea to reality! So we figured that a new website would be a good start!
Of course its hard to put in everything we have done over the last year into a single website – but it has a fair bit of what we have been up-to
So check out the new 4am Website and let us know what you think!
http://www.blog.4am.co.in/2009/06/one-year-and-counting/
At 4am we have been wondering what the results of an extensive audit of the loss of productivity because of common illness cause a developing economy.
Illness that for the most part is not prevalent in more ‘commercially developed’ nations seems to be quietly chipping away at productivity in developing economies.
Wondering if the approach to public health will change if the impact on economic growth is clearer?
Lots of meetings with companies, organizations and individuals with very varied possibilities of how we should commit our time. It is a challenge to evaluate the possible synergies that will be mutually beneficial.
Traveling is always fascinating, very interesting now that you have only the eyes of your fellow passengers to read what they are thinking.
A lot of additional work on Vamooz in progress. We should be out with a beta real soon.
New people.
( Always looking for good people with similar motivations )
Very intense atmosphere right now. Loads of work. Lots of fun.The whole office has moved up a notch in the last couple of months.
Another visit to Ahmedabad. Very cool project going on with a company in Ahmedabad.
I taught a course at The National Institute of Design. Teaching is fulfilling and very taxing. It was hard to reconcile the motivation levels of the students. I seem to have gotten used to the 4am rhythm. Some of the students, if they can focus a bit, can be dangerously good.
Meeting and speaking to Aditi and M.P.Ranjan was super. More insight, more work to do.
Happy Birthday Harish !
Party?
We went down to Ahmedabad a week back.
Always good to go to Ahmedabad -There is a pervading entrepreneurial energy in that city.
Met with a couple of companies that have been speaking to us and it was time to meet in person. Meetings went well. We are looking forward to working with them.
Our past work in the products for the Education space inclines us to try and work with a company in Ahmedabad that is creating interesting products.
Had a fantastic meeting with Prof M.P.Ranjan. He is one of the sharpest minds around and a super person. His thoughts on Vamooz have stimulated us and we will keep working to make Vamooz what it can be. We hope to have Prof Ranjan visit our office, speak to our small team and see a larger spread of our work.
About seven months ago, before the launch of the closed beta version of Vamooz we spent days trying to finalize the products feature list. The debates that raged around this issue were elaborate ( eg: Person 1: I like this feature, lets include it; Person 2 : I don’t like it; Person 3 :Guys, is it true that if a plane flies low over a penguin, the penguin keeps trying to look at the plane till it falls over? ).
After numerous debates we established that the penguin does not fall over. This however did not bring us any closed to finalizing our feature list. What these debates did establish however was that it would be best to let our users decide what the final feature list should be.
With this in mind the closed beta of Vamooz was launched in early December of last year. The response we got was simply overwhelming. Hundreds of users signed up to test Vamooz and gave us extensive feedback, on everything from the features that they would like to what they thought about our color scheme.
Based on this feedback and what we learnt from the experience of building the earlier version of Vamooz we set out to build a version of Vamooz that would better meet our users needs. We are currently in the process of updating Vamooz to this new version. Over the next couple of weeks we will take down the existing version of Vamooz, upload the new one and then make sure the new version is working fine. Unfortunately Vamooz will not be available during this time.
During this time you can keep track of our progress right here on the 4am blog or if you are the twitter types you can follow us @vamooz.
Wow… we have been so absorbed in our work ( read – Lazy ) we forgot to blog!
Well… we are now just over a year old ! It’s been a crazy fun ride the past one year. Starting straight into a major recession was no fun – but as they say: “the show must go on”!
We are really close to releasing a open beta of Vamooz. We would really like to thank all our closed beta users for providing us with so much data and extensive feedback. Hang in there people… the open beta version of Vamooz is just round the corner.
Over a year back we started from scratch, putting the ingredients that we knew were required into the big idea of ’starting-up’. The only thing that can be said about the last one year is that it was crazier than our wildest dreams, and we have loved every moment of it.
During this time 4am Design and Technology Labs has grown from an idea to a Private Limited company with seven people and our own product – Vamooz. As we look back at the year gone by we are excited by the possibilities that lie ahead.
The new look of the Vamooz Facebook App
As always we are looking forward to having your feedback so we can further improve on the application in the coming versions!
This Wednesday was a hectic and exciting day! Bharani and myself were at the Chennai Mathematical institute, my Alma matter. It was great to visit the institute after close to two years and the then new campus seems to changed significantly.
We started off on Tuesday, heading off on a fairly long ( 6 hour ) train journey and reached Chennai central at around 9 in the night. We then went on to meet Madhukar a PhD research scholar at CMI before turning in for the day.
Wednesday began at 8am as we hurried to make it in time for the ‘CMI shuttle’ that took us to institute, located just over 30 KM from the Chennai city- (approximate location on map below).
View Larger Map
Thanks to Madhukar, who organized nearly everything for us, we were able to meet a bunch of students interested in finding out what the first start up from the Chennai Mathematical Institute was up to!!
We headed back the same night – on a freezing train journey.
It was great fun re-visiting the Chennai Mathematical Institute with its unbelievable drive for excellence and even greater fun meeting a bunch of smart and ambitious students.
We hope this is the first of many such visits to come…
