3 Cheers to Collaboration!

One of the main reason people travel is to have fun - to experience new things, to relax, to spend some "Me time". And when there are multiple people traveling with you, the fun multiplies.

Making travel arrangements is nuisance, sort of necessary evil. Coordination, planning, booking - who wants to do that? It would be really nice if somebody else can take care of those and we can just go! Ah, ideal world :)

Alas, until we achieve that kind of magic-ness, we have to take care of such things ourselves. While more often than not, it's a few people in a group who make all the travel arrangements, almost everybody chips in with their contribution and help the group. Somebody does the research and find out about cool waterfall that "must" be visited, while somebody else dials a few numbers, negotiates and closes the lodge bookings. A few others help with the sandwiches, recharges the camera batteries. A couple of souls agree to drive Maruti in the backyard 6 hrs. That's the social creature in us. That's who we are.

And once we decide to do it, it becomes the part of fun. We enjoy that too.

In an online world, we call this collaboration. People come together, help each other out, have fun and along the way create something great that we cherish rest of our lives.

Collaboration is one of the core ideas around which this site is built. We want to carry on that fun to the online world, and along the way help in your travel arrangements. And how?

When you plan an outing, you can create a trip on Must See India. You can invite people going out with you and track their responses of whether they are going or not. There's a dicsussion board where you can discuss trip related items - what all places to go, options for accomodation. All trip members can contribute to all parts of the trip - be it trip details, photos, travelogues. (Toddlers are excluded, until law permits them to have an email account.)

To maintain sanity, we've kept a few things reserved to the so called moderator - the person who created the trip. Moderator has extra rights to invite people, delete photos and change trip privacy. While this can be restrictive in some cases, in any collaborative effort, it is required for one person to have the deciding power in case of conflicts. We're working on additional set of features to reduce the responsibility off the shoulders of one person and make it easier for others to facilitate as well.

While more features will get added with time, this is the soul of Must See India, and will remain at the center of all activities.

It has been a good July month for us, with starting of the public beta and lots of people participating in it. People have been sending us feedback and we have working hard to get it implemented sooner. We are sending out new invites almost daily. If you haven't got it yet, do get in touch, we'll be more than happy to extend you one.

The more and more people try it out, the better we sleep. After all, what's more incredible than to see happy customers.

We have a new home!

This weekend we shifted our servers to a new location. We have heard great things about SoftLayer and moved with them.

The biggest issue we had with our previous hosting was reliability. It randomly dropped requests. One of the irritating thing was it requiring restart after every code change and we didn't had permissions to do it! But then, it was $6 per month. It would be cruel to expect more than that :)

Moreover, with the kind of traffic growth we had in recent months, we felt it moral obligation to move to a better one!

We hope to provide better services with full control of servers. We are already noticing better speed. Way to go!

8 months

That's the time it took us to go for a public beta. Despite the early delivery, the baby is doing excellent :)

Yes, we are ready for the big game.

I left Trilogy/Versata last Oct to embark on a journey that I always wanted to take on - start my own company. It was a dream. Somehow, the timing felt just right. I was finishing on a very exciting part of my career at Versata - the Versata University (VU), a fresher training program. It were action packed 3 months. I didn't really wanted to go back to less exciting enterprise stuff. I was toying with the entrepreneurial idea for a few months now. It felt like a natural step to take on something bigger.

8 months later, I am very excited to be a part of this venture. I am enjoying myself more than ever. While the idea has evolved quite a bit since the time I started, the vision is still the same - we still want to be the no. 1 travel application in India.

Thanks to all who supported us in the alpha and early beta stage. The bugs you sent were indeed very valuable. I hope you all enjoyed the journey so far and continue to support us in future.

We realise that this is just the beginning - we have a long way to go. We are working hard to make sure we create an application that is useful to you. Something that solves your travel pain-points, an application you can use reliably. There's lot of brain-storming going on daily basis. If you have more ideas on how we can achieve that, please do get in touch with us, our lines are always open! You can write to us at feedback@mustseeindia.com

Back to work now!