4AM DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY LABS - BLOG

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!

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.

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.

Have a blast!!

The 4am Team.

After a little more than a month in closed Beta, Vamooz currently tracks thirty news sources categorized into close to three hundred ‘moozes’. What this translates into is the the tracking, by Vamooz, of just over half a million news stories from across the world.

We recently took some time off from doing whatever it is that we do ( such as this and this ) and decided to see what the media is actually talking about. Some of the trends we found were as expected and others were not! Here is a quick look into what we found just so the impatient have something to play with before we add this to Vamooz itself!

First off, the Google story:

Google VS Yahoo VS Microsoft - the media glare

Notice that between the 30th of November and the 5th of December Google dropped its advertising partnership with Yahoo and decided against any possibility of an acquisition – This left Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang with no option but to step down and re-opened the possibility of a previously canned acquisition by Microsoft. Its interesting that the same events have given Google almost twice the publicity as Microsoft or Yahoo. Granted Google could have been up to other things but the significant difference is indeed noteworthy.

Moving on to some politics:

Obama VS Mccain VS Hilary - News stories over time

Most spikes in this graph are expected – however its quite unexpected that the number of news stories related to Hilary Clinton when she was announced as a possible candidate for the post of ’secretary of state’ is more than six times that of when she was actually made the secretary of state.

And finally some cricket:

Dhoni VS Sachin VS Yuvraj

Almost as expected execpt that it would have been nice to know which got more publicity – Dhoni applying for a gun licence or him threatening to quit.

It must be noted that the number of sources grew over the given time period.. Although this should not affect the comparisons, it might have some effect on the overall number of stories related to a topic over time.

DISCLAIMER: This article displays some preliminary data from Vamooz, which despite our best efforts might have errors. The author of this article has, in some places, given his interpretation of this data. These opinions are in no way the official views of 4am Design and Technology Labs. This post should be seen more as an exploration into improving the functionality of Vamooz rather than one that analyses the media.

After 3 days of non-stop coding, reading up on facebook API documentation , and lots of caffeine -  we finally have a Facebook App!! If you are on Facebook you can check it out at http://apps.facebook.com/vamooz-news-ticker/. As usual we look forward to everyone’s feedback and support, to make a great app/product. And you don’t need to be registered on Vamooz to try out the Facebook App.

Here are a few links that Should guide you to Vamooz on facebook

1. Vamooz App Page
2. Vamooz Canvas Page
3. Vamooz Group

Some links which helped us:

- Facebook Developer wiki
- Facebook Developer Forum

And Last but not least a screenshot of the App

Vamooz Screenshot on Facebook

Usually when you want to get something done the first thing most people would do is to probably search for it on some popular Search Engine. Invariably one finds blog posts, wiki entries, manuals and help pages that describe various solutions. A lot of the time one would follow the steps described in the first (or shortest) such page, and just when you think you have got a solution, there is a small glitch that makes it all fall apart.

So….more reading, more tweaking and you realize that the source that you were following forgot to mention ‘those details’ like…”this doesn’t work on Linux” or “To get this working on older browsers however you will have to do some additional work which is beyond the scope of this document”.

By the time you get everything to work you have gone through at least five different pages describing the same task – so far so good, but what if you wanted to do the same thing again a month down the line.

We at 4am, document some of our adventures and have shared it publicly on a wiki, just for the fun of it!

So all you hackers, coders, geeks and aliens out there … check out TechWiki, add, edit etc…and let us know what you think.

When we started 4am we thought hard to come up with the one thing that will eventually set us apart – after much discussions, arguments and disagreement we finally agreed that it would be our commitment to end user satisfaction. We decided that we would start out by building a culture wherein we would do whatever it took to ensure that our end users were satisfied – even if that meant working at the oddest of hours.

After looking around (and asking around) a little, we found that most people, when asked to name the oddest possible hour in the day, would, more often than not, come up with 4 in the morning. 3 am, most people agreed, was night. 5am on the other hand was morning (although they were quick to admit that they hardly ever woke up then). 4am however, was neither here not there – it was not really night, nor was it day.Whats more, it was nearly always too late even for a really late sleeper and just a little too early for an early riser.

When we started to research this seemingly interesting hour of the day, we found that we were not the first to have found the eeriness of the hour. A performance poet and multimedia artist named Rives gave a talk at Ted in which he “folds history into a series of coincidences surrounding that most surreal of hours, 4 o’clock in the morning.”

We later also found that 4 in the morning is what is called “Brahma Muhurtham”

Brahma Muhurtham is a time early in the morning. Since most people are asleep at this time, one is neither disturbed by their physical presence nor the  vibrations of their Minds. This time is considered to have a calming and encouraging atmosphere.

Although it is not clear that four in the morning is actually “Brahma Muhurtham” there are sources that claim that this is in fact the case.

Our interpretation of the subject is neither spiritual nor religious but instead more of a reference to the “Atmosphere” at that time of the day. We hope to have a similar culture within our organization.