Today AmiWorks completed 2 years of existence.

As I had mentioned last time, we know where we are going, now i can actually tell you. We are going WordPress based service way and we announced WPoets earlier today, this will be our top priority next year.

Apart from that, this year we learned lot of lessons, some very costly.  One of them was that whenever you do client work, always have a legal service agreement with them.

We have increased our team count to 12, and moved to new office location at S.B. Road. We also released two new experiments ‘magazinify’ and ‘move your photos’, one of them got us covered in CNet, while other into Techcrunch and Economics Times. We also received best industry guide award for summer internship.  Oh, and we are now a PVT. LTD. company.

And for those of you who know AOE-ROR, we are still in tools age, though we have established a town centre, we just don’t have enough resource to change the age .

One more thing, just because we are focused on WordPress it does not mean we will stop experimenting, it just means now our experiment will be bit more focused.

So experiments continue…

We have been working on ‘WPoets’ for over a 9 months now.

In January, this year, we decided that we need to switch our focus to WordPress based development when we noticed that everyone in my team has skills need for that, even our tester.

Since then we started reducing our other service engagements so that we can create a team dedicated to WP, and finally we are in position where i can say that we are ready.

So if you need to any thing built with WordPress, I mean anything, just talk to poets.

Just wanted to let you know that Amity School Of Engineering And Technology(ASET)  has awarded me with ‘Best Industry Guide’ award during there Corporate meet 2011.

Anuvarat who has done his internship with us also received ‘Best Summer Internship Project’ award for his project.

These pics we took next day, still waiting for official pics to arrive.

Anuvrat, who did his internship with us between May-July 2011, wrote about his Internship experience on his blog.

Since we released Move2Picasa a week back, we have been covered by following media outlets

1. Techcrunch:  http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/06/how-to-move-your-facebook-photos-to-picasa-soon-google-photos-in-a-flash/
2. Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/5818743/move2picasa-exports-all-your-facebook-photos-to-google-plus-aka-picasa-google-photos
3. PuneTech : http://more.punetech.com/punes-move2picasa-com-covered-by-techcrunch
4. The Economics Times:  http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/move2picasa-and-googlefacebook-allow-users-to-move-from-facebook-to-gooogle/articleshow/9191456.cms
   
5. Technically Personal: http://techpp.com/2011/07/05/how-to-transfer-your-facebook-photos-albums-to-picasa-google/
6. Read Write Web: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/move_your_facebook_photos _to_picasa_share_with_google_plus.php
7. YourStory.in:  http://yourstory.in/entrepreneurs/tech-entrepreneurs/6331-move2picasa-web-app-to-shift-your-pictures-from-facebook-to-google-plus (added on 18/7/2011)

Few days back I was in Bangalore for TechEd, and saw the demo of what IE9 could do and started wondering about who will win browser war this time, here is what I think.

Nobody.

We all know who won the first web browser war, but that was then and the real fight was between just two Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator and only one platform.

Now there are 5 major contenders,

1. Chrome
2. Firefox
3. Internet Explorer
4. Safari
5. Opera

And two major platforms desktop and mobile.

Personally I am only excited about the fight between Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox, and to see how they push web forward.

So what will really happen?

Well, they are all going to end up following the same common standards for which HTML 5 is the blanket term. There will be some hiccups/incompatibilities before this happens, but it will happen.

To me this is the only outcome that makes the most economic sense, as they(Microsoft, Google, Apple) all move there native application to web they will want to make sure that the features they are going to use is available on all the browsers as part of standards.

While right now focus of war is on desktop browser in a year or two it will shift to mobile(phones and tablets) and this is when it will become even more interesting.

What do you think, do you really see a single winner in this war of web?

Font from: http://www.vodafone.in/_layouts/1033/styles/css/rupee/rupee.ttf

Bitten by the MNP bug, I was checking out some GSM provider’s website and what they have to offer. While browsing Vodafone’s website it was really nice to see that they used the Rupee Symbol instead of writing “Rs”. Out of curiosity, I started checking how was the symbol displayed and found that the stylesheet looked like the one from WebRupee with few changes:
1) Licence Removed (We had Apache Version 2 license)
2) “WebRupee” changed to “rupee”
3) Links to font file on their server
4) Almost all css same(even the whitespaces) except for the places where they had added some small styling information.

I was still unsure whether the font was copied, so I downloaded the font file to check. And the above screenshot verified it.

So they not only stole the files but were devious enough to change the name. They should really learn from railtourismindia.com, blanketofrelief.org who has been using it without changing the name.

Not only them, rimweb.com has been using it from their own servers, but have left the Licences untouched.

Below are the screenshot of css file contents.

http://www.vodafone.in/_layouts/1033/styles/css/rupee/font.css

http://cdn.webrupee.com/font

I am happy to announce that Meher and Aman, the guys  behind webrupee.com has joined AmiWorks as part of our core team, and they will be responsible for all the experiments that we do here.

Since joining they were working on Magazinify, an experiment where they tried to make it easy to read bookmarked articles later in a digestified format, which is now live.

Today we turned 1 year old officially, though I like to say that we had an Alpha release of AmiWorks, and to those of you who know what AOE – ROR is, we are now in tools age.

When we founded last year, we had no clear direction as to what we wanted to do, other then experiments. As we progressed, we learned lot’s of things, we build few things, some things are in pipeline and now we know where we want to go.

We started with two person team, and now we are five person team, and expanding.

Some more pictures are on our Facebook page.

And experiments continue…

If you have visited PHPCamp or Track Live Tweets then you might be wondering why we call them ‘An Experiment’.

If you would have asked this question to me a month back, it would had been very difficult for me to explain the logic behind it, but few days back I read a book by Dale Dauten  ‘The Max Strategy’ which explained the idea in just 3 words ‘Experiments Never Fail ’.

And before you get the wrong idea that I think simply calling our products ‘Experiments’ will ensure that they succeed, let me explain.

Experiments are meant to be way to prove a theory or hypothesis, and if it does not show the desired outcome it only means that something is wrong in our theory or logic, which means we can either change our experiment or the theory. 🙂

In either case, experiments help us understand what works and what does not. This allows us to provide simple solutions and services that work seamlessly.

This is the philosophy on which we founded AmiWorks.