Today we turned 4.  This year was ‘year of stretching’ for us.

We continued to stretch our limits, we increased our team size from 19 last year to 38 this year and few more members will join us by December. We increased number of complex project that we executed, we conducted many small experiments on optimizations. We have released record number of websites for our various clients. We also organised first WordCamp in pune, which was considered best WordCamp till now in India. We were able to establish “WPoets” as the brand for best WordPress developers in Pune.

This year, apart from stretching, we continued to experimented with various process for team structures, project deliveries, hiring and training new developers. While last year we had almost zero process or very rudimentary processes, this year we were able to create first draft of all the functions in the company and iterated over them.

We are especially thankful to all our current team members( it is now too big a list to name them individually), most of them on multiple occasions went beyond call of duty to help us keep our footing while we were stretching.

In terms of AOE-ROR, research that we had started last year is complete and we are now effectively in Bronze age. Which means we are going to focus more on expansion and upgrades.

Our Experiments continue…

Yesterday we turned 3. It is kind of important milestone for us.

This year we were focused on consolidations, making sure we survive the costly lessons and ensuring that we establish ourselves as WordPress Experts. We are now 19 people, with few more members joining us from January.

Our experiments this time were not in coding, but more in business to see what type of work we should do, what kind of pricing will work and what it takes to go to next level.

One more thing I want to take this opportunity to thank few friends who gave us advice during the last three years to help us survive the initial days, bad days and formulate our strategies. They are Navin Kabra, Dhanajay Nene, Arun Prabhudesai, Annkur Agarwal, Dnyanesh Gangamwar, Arun Tomar, Parth Lawate, Ashwin Date, Shardul Mohite, Saurav Mishra, Bhavesh Radadiya, Jaydip Parikh, Nikhil Ambekar, Vikrant Labde, Girish Dhakephalkar, Kinshuk Sunil, Mangesh Yadav, Ranjan Rajgopal and Salim Siddiqui. I don’t have words to express my gratitude for them, as their advice’s and suggestions became critical at various point in time during last three years and helped us survive.

For those with understanding of AOE-ROR, we have accumulated enough food points to initiate the change of age. Actually we have initiated the research and we are now waiting for our age to change to bronze.  🙂

Our Experiments Continue…

Read our story on YourStory.in  – written by Abhilasha Dafria

It was long over due, but we finally managed to do the overhaul of our website.

Do let us know what you think of it, and feel free to point out if we missed something.

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?