Coming out of hibernation

I have been accused of not updating this blog regularly, and rightly so. It's not that nothing exciting is happening at Germinat. Quite the converse actually. It's just that things have been so busy that I neglected updating the blog. But enough excuses, here's a gist of what's happened since my last post which was over a year ago.

The period from Aug 2007 to April 2008 was a phase where we grew our team to a strength of 19 engineers. Initially, it was very tough for us to recruit people because recruiters did not take Germinait seriously and consequently sold Germinait's vision without completely understanding what we were trying to achieve. We had to start by selling Germinait's vision to our recruiters so that they in turn could talk with conviction about Germinait to the interviewees. As we grew in size, convincing people that Germinait was the real deal became easier and easier because the new joinees drew comfort from seeing other smart people like them who had already joined us.

We were very picky about who we hired with several rounds of interviews with all sort of analytical, technical, attitudinal and background information. We must have interviewed close to 300 people because we wanted a team that not only was individually talented but would be able enjoy each other's company and work well together. I think building this topnotch team who genuinely cared for each other is our great accomplishment to date.

	This picture of us in traditional garb was taken during our first Diwali together.
	And here we are trying to collectively come up with Germinait's vision for the future.
	Here you see us beaming away after our perfect bowling scores of 300 each at Phoenix Mills.
	This is us in Feb 2008 celebrating the first anniversary of Germinait's incorporation.
	Here is all of us at Diwali in 2008 with some of us looking at another camera.
	On the left is a picture taken during our annual picnic to Kamshet.

Work-wise, we built several products and components successfully. Our first was a workflow and labour management product for a Japanese organization that uses temporary workforce for manufacturing. Over the next few months we built many reusable components like an auction engine, a voting engine, a matching engine and a survey engine.

Currently, a small team is working on building an innovation management software for a US-based customer while the rest of us are building Germinait's flagship product -- a platform that analyses social media like blogs and conversations in forums and social networking sites (more on this in another post). We have launched two pilot studies on this platform -- one for analyzing employee satisfaction based on comments in employee surveys and the other for tracking the sentiment in media and blogs during the upcoming Indian elections. I'll keep you posted on how both these studies pan out. At the moment things are looking very rosy indeed.