myCELEBRITY - The complete and comprehensive celebrity database

While trying to find out more about a lesser known Indian celebrity, I could not find a site where I can get all the latest information about the celebrities on a single page . I had to hop between wikipedia, youtube, google images, google news and twitter to get the information I needed. That really sucked.

So we created myCELEBRITY that enables users to get all that information about almost any celebrity in a single place. (See the lady gaga page above). We did not want to limit our users to a specific country or category so we covered the celebrities across all categories and countries.

It required huge effort to create a system that dynamically get all the latest information from a number of different channels but finally we got it working to our satisfaction. Currently users can get the following info about their favorite celebrities (more in the pipeline):

Photos News Quotes Wiki data

Videos Tweets Relations

While in the middle of our development, we realized that it would be even great if instead of single celebrity users can get all the information about their favorite celebrities collectively on a single page. Just the same way as they get info about their friends on Facebook. That sounded great and promising so we worked on the concept of lists.

Users can easily create the lists of the celebrities that they want to follow. To boost the user experience we populated our database with thousands of popular lists of related celebrities e.g.

People in the news

Trending on Twitter

American film actors

Sounds exciting? Go check out the site

gdgt received $3.17M in Series B funding

Its been less than a year since gdgt was launched and it has been able to secure a series B funding of $3.17M. It gives an immense pleasure to see a venture that you had worked hard for become so successful. The funding for gdgt does not come as a surprise to me. The concept is really good and given the popularity that it has achieved in a short amount of time, it would not take much time for a site like gdgt to pile up a huge database of gadgets and the invaluable statistics about those gadgets. Any company in the consumer electronics field would be willing to pay anything to get access to this kind of information.

gdgt launched

What a long night but finally gdgt is launched and running successfully. The gdgt team @ manusis was on standby for the whole night. We had tried our best to simulate the production environment and tackle all the scenarios that we could expect but still there was a sense of fear in our minds. Almost an year of hard work was at stake. We were keeping our fingers crossed.

Before the launch we sent out emails to all the users that have registered on the gdgt podcast site. The podcast site had already set up the stage and built the hype. Users were anxious to checkout the real site. As soon as the site launched the traffic started going up. We were monitoring the the server statistics, application logs and database counters on various screens. Soon the stats started touching the limits and before we could realize the site was down. The rate at which users were registering was beyond our expectations. In few hours tens of thousands of users have registered and about 8000 products were added to the system. Our fear has come true. Fortunately it was not that bad. A few tweaks to the database configuration, and the site was back up again. This time the stats were looking much more stable and traffic had also eased to some extent. Trying to get some sleep now.. we need to continue paying close attention to the site for the next couple of days to make sure the site stays up and fast.. It definitely helps to have two teams working in opposite time zones so we can take turns to monitor the site.

Introducing Manusis Technologies

This is the first official blog for Manusis Technologies. So the first question that we asked ourselves before starting this venture. What differentiates us from other players in the web development field? I noticed there are two types of companies catering to the web development market. The big players that are too big to attend the small business, start ups and individual investors. And there are other players which are not that organized, get the work done somehow without worrying about the scalability or standards compliance. So there is definitely scope for somebody who caters to the small business and provide service with a quality that is usually reserved for big clients only.

Next question is how do we achieve this objective. Providing quality comes at a cost and higher costs will deter the small business or start ups from choosing us as a preferred vendor. Thats where Technology will come into picture. Our first step will be to automate the routine processes and work flows typical to a web application. The key is code once and for ever and to virtually eliminate the efforts spent on duplicating a particular functionality for multiple web applications. That coupled with the latest technologies will make it easy for us to develop enterprise web applications at lower cost.

I have spent a lot of time on figuring out how to make it work. Five years at E*Trade exposed me to a number of top class frameworks and programming languages. That exposure helped me understand the nuances of extreme programing and best practices to develop a good framework. The exposure to production environment and deployment practices for mission critical applications, the ones that deals with people's money, and there is a little chance to screw up, taught me what works and what does not in a real life scenario.