Butterflies in our stomach...

It has been a long drawn week - the last one, as well. We have been trying to get everything in place for the forthcoming US launch. Testing and finding issues were, at times, getting under our skin. Getting fixes ready, telling the world that we will be serving information about places of interest in the USA is just the tip of the iceberg. There are umpteen other stuff that I cannot recollect that has been going on. All to make sure everything goes well as per plan. When you are at the eye of the storm, all seems peaceful, life moves in super slowmo and you tend to feel that sense of calm, because all that you can look at when you lift the head is more things to do.

Now that we are almost ready and are cleaning up after what was madness, the madness is starting to take hold of us. The uncertainty of what will happen when US destinations become available on FmC, is killing. It is like the night before your kid goes out to school for the first time. You are thrilled at the fact that she has grown up to go to school. But at the same time, there are umpteen things going through your mind that can go wrong. You run over everything that was to be done one last time every few minutes and still cannot get those butterflies out of your stomach.

This is the feeling that you look back to, fondly, when you are way past this stage. These are the small things that make this journey what it is - Enthralling. I hope you like the US carrots we bring to you, as much as we like bringing them.

The grass greener on the other side?..of the pond

A few days back, we made it public to whoever cared to listen, that we have set our sights on crossing the pond. Almost everyone wished us luck. A few expressed astonishment at what seemed audacious to them. Some of them put words to the question in their mind. Are we done with India? Why such a hurry to get to the USA? I believe we owe an answer to all of you.

We are NOT done creating information in India. On the contrary, we have begun a phase where the information creation graph in India is going to hit a plateau. There will be painstaking and time consuming machine training phases where, we will have to spend significant effort and will be able to show small, incremental but fine grained progress. But the learning that we have had so far in creating information out of data in India is now ready to be replicated. We want the machines to help create information in the USA while we spend time training it further up in India.  Hence, we have kicked off the information build up on the greener side of the pond. All that we do every hour we are awake counts for nothing if it is of no use to you, our beloved users. Hence, we have decided to bring FmC to USA to hear and learn from you, feed the learning back into FmC, so, our quest of a little learning every day makes us the automatic option when you want to Dream, Search and Experience your next vacation.

In search of liquid propulsion...

   We attend a few fun(d) raising events to pitch to Angels and early stage VCs, looking for liquid propulsion for our intergalactic launch. Most mortals refer to that as money. Guess what is the most popular rebut to FmC, from the money bags? Big daddies of travel with deep pockets will throw money and solve this problem in a few days and you will be left looking like the idiots that you already are. While we completely agree, that we are utter idiots, we tend to come back and sew together whatever is left of our tattered self-esteem and confidence with this 1 thread.

    There has been no dearth of money in online travel. There has been consistent research reports and opinions from the online travel industry leaders that this is precisely the problem to solve. Hell, some of the big daddies of investment have invested sizeable money into pumping out information from the depths of travel data through some well known startups, both in India and abroad. So, if we have not seen any movement after quite a few years of engine revving, FmC, perhaps, fails to reflect how big an idiot, we are. Perhaps we make this pipe-dream look so real and achievable, it seems money can be thrown to solve it in a few days!! 

There in lies our success, till we succeed in making that intergalactic trip on the spaceship named FmC.

Our Humpty-Dumpty days

Everyday, as we try and build up FmC, we are trying to scale a wall. The wall of our mind where we set limitations on ourselves - about what we can achieve. So, everyday we try to climb this wall, we sit on it for long, staring at what lies on the other side, tentatively, thinking if we can take a plunge. But as you might be expecting, more often than not, we have a great fall in this endeavor and, boy, does it hurt!

The sad part is, no horses or men from the King's cavalry come over to lift us up. Forget that, to add insult to injury, the naysayers and the enlightened of the world heap scorn explaining how stupid we must be to try such improbabilities. After all, who will want to use FmC when the Advisors and the Makers have Clearly won over the Yatra ecosystem of the travelers. But then, when you start digging the earth to mine, you are not expecting results before you started digging. Mining for Carrots is tough and we knew it from the moment we enlisted to go underground for your carrots. Therefore, the self conviction does not erode. The taste of dust in our mouth, we help each other up in the team, shouting out a curse here an expletive there, to give vent to our fury at not having succeeded, but doubling our resolution that the next leap will not be far off and success is just on the other side of the wall...

Proud to be Humpty Dumpty for 30 days of the month. Because we live for the 31st day of the next month, when the naysayers will hide their head in the sand. Let us change the rhyme to:

Humpty Dumpty got up from the fall.. 

Humpty Dumpty scaled the HUGE wall..

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.