- Song listing for the 1950s went live on MySwar. You can find song listings for films like Baiju Bawra, Mughal-e-Azam, Adalat, Paying Guest, Pyaasa, Anarkali and Naagin here.
- Bug/fixes cleanups implemented:
- Breadcrumbs – These are now implemented across the website. Good for navigation, good for SEO!
- Login issues – Fixed bug related to case-sensitive username – username is not case sensitive anymore. Also, the “Remember me” feature was not working – it works now.
- Infrastructure related work – We’ve been doing some backend work. The outcome of this work will not be visible to you but it will help us run the website a lot more efficiently.
- We’re hiring! Please check out our Jobs page or our LinkedIn job posting for details.
Category Archives: Startups
Mavrix Monthly Update February 2012
Listing for the 60s went live on MySwar in Feb. You can find them here.
New features.Other than some bug fixes and a few UI/UX related changes, we added these features this month:
- Categorized search suggestions – As you type in the Search box, we provide suggestions categorized as Albums, Songs and Artists to make it easier for you to find the item you are looking for.
- Advanced search – Available as a sub-menu on hovering over the existing Search menu, Advanced Search lets you find songs by specifying the singer, music director, lyricist, period and genre. This works great when you want to see a listing of all R.D. Burman songs sung by Kishore Kumar and Asha Bhosle and penned by Gulzar. Or Kumar Sanu’s songs from the early 1990s. Or Lata’s ghazals for Madan Mohan. For now, this is an AND search. In other words, songs matching all the criteria specified by you are shown. I like this feature the best!
- Browse awards – All the award-winning songs and artists are now available easily.
- Trivia of the day – There is a lot of trivia on MySwar and we’re making it easier for you to uncover them by picking one every day and putting it on the home page. The trivia will also be tweeted out three times a day from our Twitter account. Follow us now if you are a trivia buff!
- Ability to change ratings – This is for the registered users. If you have rated songs or albums and wanted to change them, this feature is for you. In the MyAccount page on the My Ratings tab, you can go ahead and change your ratings and also delete them if you want.
While we have a long list of features we want to implement, this list was prioritized based on feedback from many of you.
Do tell us what you think of these features.
60s Hindi Film Music – Newly Added On MySwar
The first page I went to after the 60s upload was through? Phoolon Ke Rang Se – one of my all-time favorites and the first song on the first cassette I ever owned!
Check out your favourite albums from that decade. Would it be Guide, Kashmir Ki Kali or Aradhana? Or your favorite song – Kehna Hai, Yeh Sham Mastani or Abhi Na Jao Chhod Kar?
Or explore the “Songs like this” feature to discover underrated gems like this beautiful song called Aaj Ki Raat listed on the second page of recommendations based on Phoolon Ke Rang Se.
Hindi film music of the 60s bridges several generations of music lovers because it has the best traits of the 50s and 70s – the melody of the 50s and the rhythm and the modern influences that represents the 70s.
Check out the new listings and tell us what you checked out first.
Mavrix Monthly Update January 2012
MySwar.in opens up to public. We started the new year with a bang by opening up the MySwar beta for public on Jan 10. Thanks to all those who have used the website! Many of you have given us valuable feedback and we will be addressing them in future releases. Meanwhile, if you like what we have built please tell your friends about us by liking our Facebook page.
60s music coming up soon. Many of our users have asked us when the music from 60s would be listed on our website. The answer– Early next week! We spent most of January reviewing and cleaning up the 60s data. Sidenote: Here’s one of my favorite trivia from the music of the 60s:
Koi Humdun Na Raha is a direct lift, both musically and lyrically, of a song composed by Saraswati Devi, written by Jamuna Swarup Kashyap and sung by Kishore Kumar’s elder brother Ashok Kumar for the 1936 movie, Jeevan Naiya. None of the original artists were credited for the Jhumroo version of the songs.
Check out the original song here:
What next? Here is a partial list of things we’re working on now:
- Analysis of the 50s music
- Data cleanup – We know there are missing songs, albums, typos, etc. Some of you have helped us find these out and we’re chipping away at fixing these data issues. Please keep sending your inputs our way.
- Categorized search suggestions – We suggest albums, songs and artists as you type in the Search box. We’re working at categorizing these suggestions as Albums, Songs and Artists to make it easier for you to find the item you are looking for.
- Advanced search option – Our current search is rather basic. With the advanced search option you’ll be able to specify more search criteria and therefore the exact set of songs you were looking for.
- Browse awards – An easy way to look at all award-winning albums and songs.
- Many more…. Stay tuned…
MySwar.Com Beta Open To Public
MySwar is now available to everyone. This is just the beginning. We have plans to implement many improvements over the next few months. We got many ideas and suggestions came from our alpha/beta testers and we’re thankful to them.
Please give it a spin and let us know what you think.
Mavrix Monthly Update December-2011
- MySwar.in opens up for closed beta. We are grateful to the beta testers for the feedback. Most of it was around bugs that needed fixing and features that they felt would be useful. We know we have a lot more work to do.
- Prepping for open beta. While the closed beta was useful and gave us time to clean up, the user base has been limited and it’s time to get more people to use MySwar and get feedback from a broader set of people. We’ll be opening up the beta in a few days.
- We complete 1 year. Our first employee joined on the first working day of 2011. This was a huge and satisfying year for all of us at Mavrix, but 2012 will be bigger and better! Happy New Year to all of you!
MySwar.Com Beta Invites Sent
So we finally got to the gut-wrenching, fearsome moment of releasing MySwar.in to Beta testers (please register on MySwar.Com if you want invites).
We had a few Alpha testers (friends and family) check out the website over the last few weeks and got some good, solid feedback from them. I was happy that we anticipated most of them and already had plans to address them. Most of them had kind words about the website but hey, that’s what we have friends and family for!
So, why “gut-wrenching, fearsome”? We see the Beta launch as the real test. It includes people who I consider music geeks. I am in awe of many of them and feel a little intimidated by the prospect of them checking out the work we’ve done. That said I welcome feedback – it is deafening silence that I really dread.
MySwar.Com has warts and kinks (and we’re working on them) but it also has some very cool features:
- Comprehensive and accurate credits.
- Classification of songs based on musical genre. (Actually we tag a lot of other information but that’s top secret!)
- Focus on artists. (Bios, Awards, Online presence – website, Facebook page, Twitter handle)
- The Story Behind The Music. (Through trivia and user and critic reviews.)
- Song recommendations. (Look for the Songs Like This section. If you register and rate songs, you’ll get personalized recommendations.)
Beta testers – The invitation code is in your mail. Please check out MySwar.Com and let us know how we can improve it. And if you like what we’ve built, please spread the word!
MySwar.Com Alpha Invites Sent
After days of testing and a lot of hard work from many people, we finally got MySwar to the point of an Alpha launch. The application is still a little buggy and it doesn’t have a few features we want to go public with, but it’s still a pretty good view of what the final app will look like.
The alpha invitation codes have been sent to “friends and family” – people, who will hopefully not get turned off by the bugs! If you think you’re “family” or “friend” of anyone at Mavrix, please let us know what you’re email id is (and how you qualify!) and we’ll send you the invitation code.
Other folks who haven’t gotten invites – we respect your time and to make it worthwhile for you, we wanted to spend a couple more weeks improving what we have built before inviting you. I really appreciate your patience so far and request you to hang in there for a few more days.
Mavrix Blog – The Most Popular Posts and Our Favourites
We completed of one year of our blog on November 3 and I thought this would be a good time to do the customary round-up of our most popular posts and the posts that we, at Mavrix, like the most. Here goes:
Most Popular
Coke Studio India Must Be Cheered
People – Please Get Off A.R. Rahman’s Back
R.D. Burman’s Top 10 Lesser Known Songs
Found! The Missing Piece Of The Puzzle! (Meet Our Tech Wiz)
Coming Soon! The Complete Guide To Hindi Film Music
Our Favorite
Indian music needs a kick in the butt
Is Bollywood Overdose killing Indian music?
Mavrix Blog – Completed 1 Year, 200 Posts
The first post on our blog was published last Diwali, on November 3, 2010. Today we complete 1 year of the Mavrix blog and we are extremely kicked that we have published 200 posts as of today. That’s one post every other day for 1 year!
We stepped up our posting frequency in the last few days deliberately to meet the 200 post milestone because a round number sounds a lot nicer! I must also admit that about 50 of these are auto-generated weekly Twitter digests, i.e. a weekly summary of all tweets going out from the @mavrixin account. Still a big deal, won’t you say?
My original intent to start the blog was to give some sense of assurance to potential employees that I was not a fly-by-night operator. Over the last year, I’ve realized that a blog does a lot more than that:
- It helps founders create an online, public identity for themselves. This is specially important if you happen to be an introvert like me, because your blog will help you open up and put yourself out there.
- It helps you think through what you want your company to be about, what kind of team you want, what market you want to reach out to. It essentially helps you think through and adjust your business plan as you build your company. Blogs are also a great way to communicate all this thinking to your team, potential employees, users and business partners.
- It helps develop the identity and voice of your company. I am not proud of some of my early posts. Some were too personal, some off-topic. With feedback from the team and our followers, we’ve adjusted the type of content we post. We continue to learn and adjust.
- Blogs help you find customers before you’re ready to launch your product. We found a small but loyal set of followers through the blog. Many of these people were among the first to sign-up for MySwar.
- For you and people in your team, your blog is a good channel to express yourselves and develop additional skills (writing, social media, HTML, etc.).
- Blogs help develop Google love for your product before you launch. A fair number of the visits to our blog are through Google searches and a number of these visits translate to a visit to MySwar’s teaser page. Not bad, eh?
- The power of social media is evident but unless you’re delivering content, your presence on these media is pointless. A blog is a great way to generate that content.
I could go on and on.
Many people have said it before but given that I still see many small businesses without blogs, I don’t mind repeating – If you’re starting a company, specially one that targets the consumer internet, one of the first things you should do is start a blog and post actively.