Tag Archives: Mavrix update

Mavrix Monthly Update September-2011

  • Beta launch. You should see our ‘Coming Soon’ page come up in the next few days. When it does come up, please do sign-up to stay informed about the beta launch. If all goes well (fingers crossed!), the beta will be launched in the late October – early November timeframe.
  • Completed UI development. The UI components are complete and undergoing QA this week. A few back-end components need to be completed in the next few weeks before we launch the beta.
  • New team member. Anitha Reghunathan joined us as Developer. Check out her profile on the Team page.
  • Completed analyzing the 70s . We finally completed the analysis of another decade of Hindi film music. We have come a long way since we started this work in March. We started with the 2000s music and worked our way back to the 1970s. Between six people in our team, we have listened to every song in Hindi films composed in the last four decades. We’re quite proud of our achievement.

Mavrix Monthly Update August-2011

  • New team member. Jyothirmayi RK joined us yesterday as Content Writer. As we mentioned in the last post, the content writing firm we had engaged for developing artist bios wasn’t delivering to our expectations. We finally decided to reduce our dependence on them.
  • Analyzing the 70s . Compared to the 00s, 90s and 80s, Bollywood produced some very good music in the 70s. It also produced a heck of a lot of movies. Our stats of albums analyzed per year so far: 2000s – 83, 1990s – 57, 1980s – 79, 1970s – 99 (Work in progress). This – in other words – is our excuse for still not being done with the 70s analysis!
  • Development work in progress. Thej and our IT partner firm are cranking it out. I wish all our business partnerships were this professional. We may be churning out code fast, but we’re adding to the feature list faster. But, we’re ruthlessly deferring most of them to future releases. Nothing but the most important features will get implemented at launch.
  • A Mint Lounge article features me.  What started as quick exchange on Twitter between Sidin Vadukut and I, went on to become an article in Mint Lounge.

 

Mavrix Monthly Update July-2011

  • A month of revisit. One thing about starting a new venture is that you figure things out on the go. Early on we made some decisions about the attributes we would catalog against each song. After spending a few months of analyzing Bollywood music, we got pretty good at our job. We also realized that some of our early decisions were not right. We felt that some of our mistakes were significant enough to fix before launch, and so July for us was a month of revisit. We reviewed the three decades (2000s, 1990s, 1980s) of Bollywood music we had catalogued and fixed our mistakes. We may launch with one decade less of Bollywood music, but I know we will launch with a better quality product. Only time will tell, but I believe we made the right call.
  • We started our website development work. According to plan, we should be done with development by October. You can look forward to our launch in October or November!
  • Artist bios. We have engaged a content writing firm to write artist bios for us. That track of work has not progressed very well, unfortunately. We have re-prioritized that track in a manner that allows us to launch with the most important artists.
  • First Mavrix customers! We started experimenting with affiliate links. Our first customers – a friend in Walnut Creek, US; and a cousin in Ottawa, Canada!

Links For Buying Stuff (Mainly Music)

You may have noticed links leading to iTunes and Flipkart from our website. A few things about these links:

  • They are affiliate links. If you click through these links and buy something, we get a small commission.
  • There are up to 4 links for each item (if we can find them) – one for each country – US, UK, Canada and India. The iTunes links are for people based in US, UK and Canada. The Flipkart links are for people based in India.
  • The iTunes links point to track downloads. Flipkart links point to CDs.

While these links can be found in various posts, we’re consistently adding them in our weekly Freaky Friday Playlist feature.

If you do follow through these links and make purchases – a) Thanks!, b) Please let us know ([email protected]) if you encounter any issues while doing so.

Mavrix Monthly Update June-2011

  • We become famous. Actually, we just had our itsy-bitsy moment of fame when Coke Studio at MTV shared our post on them, on their Facebook page. For the first time, a post on our website got 4-figure hits. Thanks a bunch to everyone who visited us and a big WELCOME to those who have started following us through subscription, Facebook or Twitter. Your interest and support means a lot to us.
  • We finished cataloguing information for 3 decades of Bollywood songs, from current day to 1981. Whew! The 80s are over. No more Bappi Lahiri. No more “disco” songs. Rolling up our sleeves for some awesome 70s music!
  • Tech work . We didn’t start development as planned. But, we did complete the HTMLs for our website. They look pretty good.

Mavrix Monthly Update May-2011

  • We finished cataloguing information for 2 decades of Bollywood songs, from current day to 1991. Good news – We were making good progress! Bad news – We have to started listening to the songs from 1980s – probably the worst ever to come out of Bollywood. Please excuse our team members if they’re posting weird videos of like this on FB – I think they find it cathartic. Good songs are few and far-between and hog the office music system, when we do find them.
  • Online stream vs CDs. Since we analyze songs at a fairly detailed level, we find it difficult to do a good job of analyzing songs when the stream quality is not good (“Was that a dholak or a tabla?”) – which is a lot of the time. We therefore try and buy CDs if they’re available. We didn’t have any trouble sourcing CDs for the 2000s (we used Flipkart for the most part) but beyond that, sourcing CDs has been a pain. Recently though we were able to get in touch with some helpful folks at Saregama who put us in touch with a distributor who is now supplying us with a large number of CDs. We are not getting the entire set but it’s a lot more than the small numbers available on Flipkart. The conversation with Saregama was interesting – they made sure we were not pirates (or just plain dumb) before they gave us the distributor’s info.
  • Cover Art. We’d like to be able to display album cover arts on our website but we still haven’t been able to figure out a way to secure rights to do that. If you have any pointers, please send us an email at admin AT mavrix DOT in.
  • Tech work . After a few iterations, we are getting to the UI we want. Finalizing the designs next week. Thej is working fast and furious on finalizing the architecture and technology decisions. (Check out his post on Github vs Bitbucket). We’re shooting to start development work on Jun 20. Our quest to find a smart and dynamic Python/PHP/MySQL developer is still on.

Mavrix Monthly Update April-2011

  • Our Tech Architect joins. Check out Thej’s profile, and the story of how we bumped into each other 8 years after we first worked together.
  • We finished cataloguing information for a decade of Bollywood songs.
    • Why Bollywood? While we want to catalog everything with an Indian connection, we had to start somewhere. Bollywood undeniably produces the most popular music in India and seemed as good a place to start as any.
    • What do we catalog? Other than what’s already available in the public domain, we are cataloguing a bunch of information that’s available only in CD inserts (at least some of them) – recording studios, instrumentalists, other credits.
    • Is that it? Nope, that’s just the easy part. The tough and also the interesting part – we listen to each song and analyze it for a bunch of musical attributes. Attributes like genre and tempo, and a whole lot more. We buy CDs if they’re available and rely on online (legal) sources if not.
  • Our partner starts work on UI designs. Exciting but also scary! What we decide now is what the world will see at launch.

Found! The Missing Piece Of The Puzzle! (Meet Our Tech Wiz)

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the role of serendipity in recruiting our Technical Architect. I did not reveal his name because he was still serving the notice period but I am glad to report that he joined us today.

Meet Thejesh (or Thej as we call him) – the mystery man I referred to in that post. Thej and I first met in 2003 when both of us worked at Infosys. I was the dreaded PM and he was a developer in what was probably one of his first projects at Infosys. After that project, we parted ways and never connected again. But that one project was enough for me to slot him in the “Hard-core Techie” file in my memory. Years later while I was struggling to find someone to lead the technology work at Mavrix, I knew I had the right person for the job when I stumbled into Thej.

During that project together, we had written up a short brief about everone on the project. This is what we put together for Thej –

Thejesh likes to be called “Thej The Lord Of Light”! 🙂 He loves exploring new things and shows others the path to areas unexplored. A witty guy too. When told “Thejesh your method is throwing an exception”, his response was “Then catch it”.

I am happy that some things (and people) just don’t change! Check out the team page to see Thej’s profile.

Mavrix Monthly Update March-2011

  • 100 blog posts since inception. This is the 100th post!
  • Updated FAQ. We tell you more about what we are doing.
  • Went through a quick RFP process for the UI design of our service. Decided on a partner.
  • Switched from BSNL to Tata Telecom after months of poor and unpredictable connectivity and bad customer service. We will run both in parallel for a month before we completely disconnect from BSNL.
  • Employee # 5 joins. The first lady (!) in our company and we announce it on Women’s Day!