De[x]etra blog.

 So after a bit of a break, iris is coming up with a new update. Yet again, this update adds a lot of exciting features! And if you're wondering what the break was about, we were building iris's cousin Aisha, which is being bundled with Micromax phones. 

So what are the new features?

Iris gets more social. You can upload photos to facebook directly from the iris. app. And the whole social experience with twitter and facebook have been upgraded for smoother and easier access. Now add alarms, and calendar entries right from the app. Just say "remind me to buy groceries at 6 pm" and iris adds a calendar entry. Neat huh? You can even open other apps with voice. Just say, "open camera" or "open music" and iris opens the corresponding app.

Tell us what you feel about the new update. We have also killed a horde of bugs, so the experience should be much smoother!

-Narayan

We hired our first web guy, Shreyas, a fortnight back. And the first thing I wanted him to work on was the dexetra website. We had a very basic, and not-so-great homepage. I wanted to get a better and cleaner landing page. So we both sat together for days, trying out different layouts designs and concepts. One thing that was clear, was the our pages should be minimal on text, and more visual on content. 

So after weeks or rework, redesign, retweaking and what not, we have the new dexetra homepage design. Tell us what you think about it. We are also proud of the #madeinindia hashtag we have added to our page. Want to see more guys using this in their pages.

Check out the #newdexetra.

-Narayan

Last Sunday, dexetra turned 2. While traditionally on April 1st, people are fooled for fun, we thought of founding a startup that creates intelligent and useful mobile products. 

It has been an amazing journey that I've been a part of for the last two years. Starting out as a team of six, and now two years later we are a team of 13, with two of our newest rockstars, Shreyas and Sarita joining in last week. As cliched it may seem, but I can't deny that we've had our rollercoaster moments. Moments, when a normal mortal would start doubting if the journey is worth taking. But unlike rollercoasters, this journey is not going to end soon, and never on the same platform. We believe very strongly about this and hence we're still driving the coaster to newer heights. 

If having fun at office was not enough, we decided to have even morefun celebrating the completion of 2 years. So we took a trip to the nearby amusement park (Wonder La) and soaked our bodies and souls. This day I also realized that being a rockstar entrepreneur taking all those risks with his life, does not imply that he has the same guts to jump into a real rollercoaster ;)

I am really proud of the way our whole team interacts and gels together, and it was evident in the park as well. As nobody shied away from an opportunity to push someone to the pool, be it the founders or the someone who joined the pack just a week back. This cool and informal atmosphere is what makes dexetra even awesome.

The third year is going to be much more crucial and interesting, as iris is finding new markets and friday launching. I am looking forward to another wonderful year ahead with my superhero team at dexetra.

Microsoft held its first TechEd in Bangalore, we were there and it was a blast. We took part in the hackathon, the challenge was to make a Windows 8 metro app in 24 hours. To make things interesting Microsoft offered a brand new Windows 8 developer tablet (pre-release) to the top 5 apps. We were a bit skeptical about completing the app since we didn't really know C#. However a dexter does not shy away from a challenge.

The event started with some great sessions, giving us an overview of windows 8 development. After lunch we got our computers out and began the design process. The initial part was really confusing. A lot of "how do I do this?" and "what happened?" was thrown between my partner Vijith and I. We were making progress but slowly and painfully.

The Microsoft developers were helpful yet we were still not comfortable. Slightly dejected we kept pushing and then we get a call from Narayan. We confidently tell him that we will have an app ready by tomorrow, how, we didn't know, but that was not important. We were thrilled when he said that he will come there and help / motivate us.

Narayan looked at our design and exclaims "it's too confusing!". He removes everything. In about 20 minutes he chalks up a simple design that looks amazing. Narayan says "this is what I want, nice and simple". We quickly start coding and begin implementing the new design and also write our backend communication layer. We code through the night with Narayan beside us correcting the design and offering solutions whenever he could. Some red-bull's, coffee's and coke's later we have an app. Its already morning.

Through the morning we kept adding finer adjustments and cleaning up the app for the demo. We were glad and a bit surprised that we actually managed to finish the app. Our heads buzzing we had some lunch and then demoed our app. We started the demo by asking our favorite question - 'Hi iris'. Iris booms 'Hello there' though the auditorium floor, the crowd is thrilled. The questions kept coming and iris knew exactly what to answer, each time drawing applause from the crowds. The attendees and the Microsoft developers loved the app. We received compliments right from the app design to the concept of iris and the implementation.

By this time we had not slept for over 30 hours. We were happy, we made it and the crowd loved the app. To top that we won the tablet. Winning the tablet felt amazing. The tablet was good but for us it was not just winning the tablet. It was the fact that one, we made an app in 24 hours without having any knowledge in development for Windows 8. Secondly, the crowd and Microsoft developers loved it. What a crazy time, we loved it.

If you'd noticed, we have not pushed any updates for over 2 weeks now. And guess what? We've working on a lot of things which required time to implement and testing! And finally it will go live today (in a hour from now, hopefully!). So what is it all about?

First the obvious thing. The user interface. We're giving iris. a brand new sexy dress. It is going to look lighter and cleaner. And the answers will have more rich content. We would also be able to integrate rich HTML5 content in the answers. And we're talking to lots of partners to get their APIs working on iris. Tell me how you're liking the new interface!

And the revamp doesn't stop with the UI. We're completely rewritten our underlying architecture so that we can scale iris. faster, add new APIs easier and get a loads of new functionalities for you. The usability changes may not be apparent immediately, but you would see how faster we would be able to add new features in the coming days.

And would you want to see iris. on other platforms too? Post your thoughts in the comments section! 

Like Steve would say, stats first. We have now around 1.5 Million users, asking around 0.5 - 1 Million answers daily. We have served around 55 Million answers since launch. And if you are wondering, yeah. Iris. punches a deep hole in our budget every month, with our Cloud servers, API partners etc sharing the pie.

We've not compromised on our growth just because we're losing money, we're aggressively trying to add more and more APIs to iris. all the time. At the same time, we are also thinking of ways to cut the losses. Now, we have two options here. Ads and premium version.

Ads.

Personally as a heavy smartphone user myself, I would, in general be okay for the apps I use to have ads, if they remain free, as long as the ads are not very intrusive and diverting me from my normal workflow. But, if it is an app which I love the most, which I use all the time, I wouldn't mind paying for it. I think from the feedback I got from you all, most of our users wouldn't mind ads, if they're not too much. We're dedicating a row on the top of the app for ads. Hope these users would approve this, considering the fact that we burn thousands of dollars every month.

Iris. plus+

Now, some users would disagree. They would say that they're ready to pay for the app as long as we maintain the quality, and have no ads. So we're also bringing an in-app purchase to the app, which would do the following.

• Removes ads.
• Premium response time. (Dedicated server which would get responses faster)
• Better support.

I hope this would make all our users happy. This move is not to make huge profits from iris. app but to make sure, we are able to keep the balance sheet green.

On other news, iris now loves the twitter bird. You can update the status and read tweets from iris. app. Some other exciting APIs are being baked, which we will bring out in the coming updates. Feel free to give your feedback here in the comments section!!

I am writing this blog post just after pushing the latest update to iris. (v3.1). If you have downloaded it already, you should have already found something new in it. A tiny little white bar on the top, with text scrolling on it. It is the new ticker in iris. 

Ticker is where we want to share with you some interesting news, feeds and other topics which you may find worth reading. Right now, we show there top trends from the internet, something similar to the trending topics in twitter, but the only difference being it is the trending topics from the whole internet and not just twitter. This awesome information is aggregated by topsy. We want to push more and more interesting and relevant news to you there in the ticker bar. We are always open to suggestions.

Why are we showing ads on ticker?

Let me first give you some stats. Iris. is serving between half a million to a million answers every day. This involves handling large amounts of data, maintaining the servers, and the related running costs. We also have to pay many of our partners for every answer they provide. All this amounts to over tens of thousands of dollars every month. Having said that I am really proud and grateful every user who has downloaded iris. We really owe it you, the users; for whatever success we've achieved. That is why we want to keep iris. as clean and uninstrusive as possible. We spent many weeks thinking on how to get iris pay our bills without degrading its quality or making it a paid application. Keeping all this in mind, we have built the ticker/adbar on the top which takes less than 30 pixels of the screen area. At the same time, rather than making it just an ad bar, we're also trying to make ticker a place where we could roll very relevant news, information, and top trends which could be of interest you.

I really hope you would support us going forward; we would never want to charge you for using iris. We want to keep iris. free always and make it richer with more features with each update. Thanks a lot for all your support and great reviews. 

It nothing just than a phenomenal ride, that Dexetra's had in the last few months. Yesterday we just crossed 1 million users for iris. The feeling was just inexplicable, as users you just gave us the best Christmas gift we could have ever thought of. Thanks for that.

Now, its our turn. After weeks of planning and designing we are presenting you with our new update for iris. Now iris includes real world rewards powered by kiip. What are real rewards? You can claim the rewards for yourself from the application, or you can even gift the reward to your dear ones. We give you rewards each feature you use/unlock. For example, for the first call you make with iris, first restaurant you find with iris, or when you use iris more. There are lot os surprise gifts to unlock. More you use iris, the more gifts you will see. Right now gifts only work for US users. Being in India, I myself know how sad this is for non-US users. But we're working hard to get simil

ar gifts for people outside US as well. Please give us some more time.

Apart from rewards, we have also added duckduckgo to the list of answer providers. DDG is arguably one of the best search engines around. It aggregates result from popular engines like Google, Bing etc, but also gives you zero click answers for searches. You can also play music from iris. We are trying hard to give you more and more services directly from iris. Our goal with iris is to integrate as many services into iris so that you have just a question away from any informati

on you want. Next in our agenda to add services to book tickets, flight, taxis, movies, restaurants etc through iris. Better voice recognition and support for different languages are the next one. 

Hope you enjoy using iris. We will keep improving iris, in return we just need your love. Hope you all are having a great time this holidays. Wishing you all the best on my personal behalf and behalf of the whole dexetra team.

Download the latest version here.

-Narayan

When the news about iris. was broken by techcrunch, we were blank. We didn't expect such a huge cheer from the crowd and hardly could think properly. It was crazy. Like when you're expecting for a child and twins are born, we were actually working hard on Friday, but iris was born. It was of course a pleasant surprise. But, since it was not planned we jittered a little on iris, going forward.

I am proud that we showed everyone that it is possible to do something like Siri in a short time, and inspired half a dozen other personal assistants that came later to Android market. It is fun to have competition, as we could learn from each other, it only pushes innovation forward. Hopefully, we could push the bar higher with each update.

Right now we are serving close to a million users and around half million answers daily. We are pushing an update later this weekend and iris would able to show you videos, recipes, news, song lyrics, movie reviews, stock quotes all from inside the app. 

Another bottle neck we have is support for foreign languages and better support for various accent. The latter issue is something that we have least control on. We are dependant on Google's Speech to Voice engine to transcribe voice, but supporting foreign languages is something we are trying to work upon.

In the meanwhile please talk to us and let us know how we could improve iris, better and bigger things are being planned and hope we could bring smiles to more and more faces.

All along, we are inching closer to a release as far as friday is concerned. Iris has rekindled the interest in friday and we are happy for that. Let me tell you that friday is so much more fun and interesting to play with!! But I will talk about that in another post.

I have great news to share with you today. One97, a pioneer in the Mobile Internet Services in India has invested in Dexetra through the one97MobilityFund. And this was not a knee-jerk investment that happened because of the success of Iris, but something that happened well before we launched iris. 

This is how Vijay sums it up in the One97 Blog,

Very rare times you meet a person whom you connect in first 10 minutes and decide to invest in first hour of conversation. Exactly that’s what happened when I met Narayan of Dexetra.

In actuality, I only carried the confidence bestowed upon me by my small yet extremely capable team. We have remained focused and adamant all this time and it has come to fruition at last. Obviously I am really proud to be associated with such a team and now with One97.

We see this investment as a nitroboost to our existing efforts so that we can scale and accelerate the development of iris and Friday. It also brings us more opportunities and possiblities to find and connect to the world of Mobility better with the help of One97's reach and presence.

I would also like to take this opportunity to share some statistics with you. It is almost a month since we launched iris to Android market (18th Oct 2011). In this period we have made half a dozen of minor and major updates (including iris2.0). 

• Iris has now around 0.8Million downloads from Android Market .
• Iris serves around half a million answers daily.
• We have served altogether over 10 million answers in the last 30 days.
• We have been in the top new free, trending (#2).
• We are adding around 50k users daily. 

And last, I would like to thank all of our users who have cheered for us, supported us and motivated us to go this far. We will keep up the spirit in the coming days. Hopefully with your help iris would hit a million downloads by this weekend. Friday launch is also nearing the corner and we hope you receive it with the same enthusiasm and love.

[Full press release]

-Narayan