Getting the timing right.. Of our US launch..

Perfect timing! That is what transforms a good to sublime. A little too early and our Carrot dish will be under cooked, a little too late and we run the risk of burning up the taste. Hence, choosing when to launch FmC in the USofA is tricky.

As I write this, we are getting the first tastes of US Carrots in our kitchen. And boy, are we loving it! A couple days back, when the first few queries came online in our lab and we saw the map of  USA lit up with our custom pins, we were hyper. We wanted to bring those pins and queries to you, immediately. After all, who does not love a pat on the back? But then, slowly, reality set in. There were some queries that were failing, some information like "hill stations" showing up, which is not in the American vacation-dreaming vocabulary. So, we decided to give ourselves a little more time to scrub up the information and ensure that the learning we have had from query-fixing for Indian vacation-dreaming are used to add the final zing to the US dish. Our ovens are on the full blast and we can almost smell the final delicacy. Hope you love the taste of the readied FmC platter as much as we are loving cooking it.

Introducing the FmC Super Star

Luis Suarez... This goal scoring machine is dominating the World Cup 2014 news, today. And why not? He is the Super Star that transformed a listless Uruguay team that was drubbed by the CostaRicans, to a potent force that has almost ensured the exit of England from the biggest stage of the Beautiful game at such an early stage. Your FmC team boasts of a much bigger Super Star. But unfortunately, I do not have a picture to post for the introduction. And this definitely has nothing to do with hiding our trump card from the competition in the worry that they will offer an astronomical salary and steal our star.

As we get ready to launch FmC in the USofA in the next few days, we have to take our proverbial hats off to this member. We have been at work for this launch for the past fortnight and every day has been a revelation. The quantum of work and the massiveness of the data that we have to handle to bring FmC to USA cannot be fathomed. So, this member's ability to accomplish this herculean task in a matter of weeks, left us dumbstruck. Therefore, it is my pleasure and honor to unveil this star member of our team to the world. 

Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the (Artificially) Intelligent Computing Resources of the FmC team. Some are as small as a laptop, while others come to us from the cloud. But whatever form they take, they are the force multipliers that make our dream of making FmC a world-wide phenomenon, a possibility and an unfolding reality.

Tiki-Taka?? Bring it on, says your team

Watching the Dutch team run circles around the Spanish football machine in the 2014 FIFA world cup was unbelievable. Most of the Spanish footballers are maestros, much better known in the footballing world than their Dutch counterparts. And yet, on the pitch, where it mattered, name counted for nothing, what mattered was thinking on feet, execution as a unit.

The FmC team has some of those Dutch traits. Thanks to the self confidence,faith in each other and determination, we do not get overwhelmed by the well known Indian travel giants. If we did, the team would never have started taking the sticks to find you your carrots. We know that the only currency that works in building something new, is if we build something useful that solves some problem.

Its the pride, fun and love for what we do, that ensures that we stick together as a unit to become the dutch team that can upset the tiki-taka of any travel behemoth.

The Days that keep us going..

Building a new product is painstaking even when you know that there is a sales and marketing corps to take it to the customers and help make revenue. If you have to build a product and sell it too, that increases the complication, exponentially. That is the reason, why a typical day in our lives consist of some pretty serious head-scratching sessions. But law-of-average applies to our lives too, and once in a while comes a day, like today, when, we take a break from trying to analyze every bit of south-pointing stats and soak in some happiness.

Telling enough people how FmC can help make discovering their next vacation destination, an experience to enjoy, is tough. We have been trying to tell this story with limited success, for the past few months. Therefore, we chase the master storytellers (the journalists) to tell our story in a way that grabs and keeps a reader's attention. We achieved a major milestone when the revered online journal TechInAsia featured us here: http://www.techinasia.com/findmycarrots/

We are elated, that we could make it to the feature. The number of startups are huge and space available on such journals, limited. That is why it brings a smile to our face. Days like this, shoot some vital energy into our system and keeps us going till we get another shot in the arm. 

We are loving it!!

Blogs... Our lifeline.

Reading, is a wonderful way to get back some sanity in life. So, is wandering to a destination that is "Just right". Without much of a plan, I have merged the two - reading about nice places and learning to identify the next "Just Right" destination for my family and me. Blogs from people, therefore, are godsend. But the reality is brutal. Reading blogs and daydreaming, in the process, can grow to fill our entire day and can bring in stress at having not worked much. How nice would it be, if someone could read up blogs for us and tell us which of the blogs provide the information that we are looking for. We then, can have our cake and eat it too.. The information we desire and the read of a few blogs in between work, to relax and refocus.

This is precisely what drove us. Desperate to make the right decision and still not wanting to spend the time that it required, made us turn to the only friend we know who could deliver - our computer. FindMyCarrots is all about making information from data - and that is exactly what we were looking at FmC to deliver from blogs. We were unsure, but gave it our first decent moonshot at the Tnooz hackathon. 2 days of mad coding later, the basic functionality of understanding blogs automatically, worked and we were happy. However, the training that our machines needed was big and the "quality control", we humans had to put the machines through was long and arduous. 

But as they say, good things happen to those who wait, but better things come to those who hustle. We hustled our machines through the learning process, and here we are today bringing you information gleaned from blogs that some of your fellow travelers write. We are eager to know what you think about this endeavor. Tell us. We are listening, intently... 

We fight, therefore we are... fanatics!!

Building FindMyCarrots one excruciatingly small step at a time, is painstaking. Behind every dragged circle to get more results, every blog that adds value to a destination, are countless hours of, well,  fights!! The 3 nuts that take all the sticks to find your carrots, are opinionated, to the point of being fanatics.

Well, that is to be expected. If we did not believe in our ideas, so overwhelmingly, a small whiff of doubt would have sent us back, packing to our day jobs. The reason, why we are still able to get up every morning, and believe we will turn the world of travel on its head, is because we are fanatics. And there is obvious fallout from it.. The FIGHTS!

These fights ensure, only the best of our umpteen ideas survive and see implementation. However, when there are no clear proof or overwhelmingly supportive data to go by, we iterate and try to look at data to define the direction of iteration. So far we have moved using each fight as the source of our inspiration. We love these mental and verbal duels. They keep us planted and focused. Be our referee. Tell us how you feel we are doing and help us decisively in these fights...

A Drive through Heaven

We approach the blue gate with sky high expectation. We have chosen the time with lots of care. Even then, the odds are pretty high that we might not see the Lord in his heaven.
The customary entry has to be made in the entry logs. We are asked to specify our source and destination, The sentinels of this heaven will NOT accept that this drive is indeed our ultimate destination and source of all the inspiration to wake up the 2 sleeping kids early in the morning, pack up and leave home. After understanding the futility of our effort at truth-speaking, we put in Hunsur as the source and Kutta as the destination - the 2 mortal habitats that lie at either ends of this heaven.
The gate opens and so do our bags. Cameras, binoculars on the ready, we slowly drive in. I even take the car key out of the key fob, so as to avoid the noise of the fob hitting the steering column. We are not about to give the Lord an alibi for a no-show. Not that he is answerable to us!!
We enter a completely dry paradise. What you would expect to see in extreme winters is what we see here in the middle of what has been a punishing summer. Trees standing tall and bald, bereft of any greenery. Stare at the woods for long and the subtle change of hue from bottom to top give the illusion of smoke rising up. Never before have I seen anything as brutally beautiful. To sink it all in, we stop the car. The silence around, is deafening! 4 pairs of eyes scan every visible part of the geography for any sign of the Lord. A deafening peafowl startles us out of our stupor. We start rolling again.
The road is poor! Broken surface and narrow. But instead of complaining, we thank our stars. We will be driving way below the 30kmph speed limit of the heaven, ensuring a longer passage and hopefully, a better shot at the moksha. Helping us immensely in our desire to kill the speed are umpteen adrenalin pumping blind turns. Nope! We are not taking them at full speed and coming out with a wide grin at having hit the apex. Instead, we approach each such turn with a wide grin and expectation that our Lord is waiting at the other side.
We have chosen this time of the year with great care. A very reliable source had counselled us on our last visit during the monsoons that the odds of seeing the Lord significantly improves during summer. Watering holes dry up deep inside. Therefore, His Highness descends down closer to mere mortals. The woods around, seem  to suggest that we have timed our visit to perfection.
We drive on for a couple of kms through this parched landscape. What started off as an elation at the realization that we have perhaps chosen the right time, was slowly giving way to frustration. We have not yet spotted even the pedestrians of the heaven - the Chitals (Spotted deer). All we have seen is lifelessness and heard is silence, broken by the occasional scream of a peafowl or chirping of an unknown bird.
With prayer on our lips and still some hope in our hearts we turn yet another blind corner and freeze. About 40 feet away on the side of the road is an elephant, busy plucking leaves from the nearby trees! Leaves!! In our single minded focus on spotting the lord, we have not noticed that the surroundings have become significantly more green. Close in a little more on the towering giant and we notice that its a tusker. We are about to stop next to it, when my navigator (our 8 year old son) reminds me of the jungle driving rule we had both learned from this wise man of the jungle. When you spot an elephant in the jungle never stop till you have crossed it. Ensures an easy getaway, if the giant decided to get irritated by your presence and reacted in any way other than melting into the forest. Thereafter, we get lost in what we get to see. Never before have we seen or heard about a tusker with opposite tusks. Normally, both the tusks point outwards. But for this giant, 1 tusk was pointing inwards towards itself. In between its leaf plucking, it turns towards us, and we are mesmerized by this majestic creature standing face to face about 10 feet away. While we were experiencing National Geographic in real life, I was entrusted with the responsibility of watching the other side of the road for other mates of this giant. Elephants are known to go around in herds and if there are other members on the other side, there is a possibility of getting into a sticky situation if we get too mesmerized with the unfolding prime-time show. We were just starting to whisper how lucky we have gotten, when I spot a movement in front from the corner of my eye. Oops! Its an oncoming vehicle, approaching pretty fast. Once it gets closer, its clear the driver was after something much more important than a real life TV show. The vehicle passes on through the blind turn and disappears, leaving us to continue our experience. After some flying kisses from the kids for having treated us to such a show, our giant friend decides, he has had enough of the homo sapians and starts to slowly walk into the jungle.
This was well beyond our imagination. If morning shows the day, the day holds major promise...