We turn 8 today!

We turned eight today.

Last year, on this very day we said: “On the 22nd of October, we turn 7 and we give to ourselves what we have given the world all these years. A delicious pie.” (Hint hint: 22/7 = 3.14 = pi)

While we couldn’t think of any interesting numerical coincidence this year (except that today’s date 10/22/2010 adds to 8), just like last year, I would like to quickly take you down memory lane and talk about the exciting things we have been up to in the past year.

• October 21st 2010, i.e. yesterday: A major news channel came to our office to cover us. It should be on air soon. Till then, shhh…
• Oct 9th: Times of India, Economic Times (India’s leading publications) and NASSCOM covered us as the great Indian tech story. Everyone in the city was talking about us for a couple of days.
• Sep 17th: FusionCharts is now iPad ready, we thumped our chest and declared. We cleaned up our homepage and licensing. Then we partied.
• Sep 15th: The Blog, KB and Forum got a new face. Eyeliner, mascara and all those pretty things!
• Sep 13th: Released a slideshow preview of FusionCharts for SharePoint.
• Sep 8th: AllWorld recognized us as the 11th fastest growing company in India. We are pretty good after all, we thought to ourselves.
• Aug 11th: We gave a keyhole peek of the iPad-ready FusionCharts v3.2.
• Jun 7th: With the FIFA World Cup round the corner, we put together football and our pretty charts to make our first infographic ever. So cool.
• Apr 21st: FusionCharts Free Manual converted to Mandarin (Chinese) by one of our users.
• Apr 12th: The deepest darkest secrets of everyone in the team poured out on our new About page.
• Apr 7th: FusionMaps for Flex beta released.
• Mar 23rd: We released interactive codeless charts for Joomla 1.5. For FREE.
• Mar 20th: We released FusionCharts Free for jQuery charts in beta.
• Mar 2nd: Opened our booth at CeBIT Germany to the world, right opposite Google. Drinking beer in the snow is the most important lesson we learnt.
• Feb 22nd: Got downloaded half a million times.
• Feb 17th: Had the first rain of the season. Always feels so good, especially from our beautiful 11th floor lakeside view.
• Feb 8th: oomfo (FusionCharts for PowerPoint) came to the world and had a small wardrobe malfunction shortly after. But we covered it quickly.
• Jan 21st: Saw an article “Generate Graphs in Flash Using FusionCharts”. An article they pay quite handsomely for, talking specifically about how to use FusionCharts. We were honored. We could do this all day long. And we don’t mind the money either.
• Jan 19th: The wow factor coming soon to PowerPoint, we declared.
• Jan 9: Realized we had been covered in Forbes. My sleepy 2 am eyes became the biggest I have seen ever since I became the bespectacled boy 15 years ago.
• Dec 31st, 2009: 15,000 customers. What a way to end the decade. Needlesss to say, we drank to our liver’s content.
• Dec 29th: Decided on the name oomfo. No Xemoda. No Pozop. A 5-letter word that can be spelt easily with a .com domain available. Sweet.
• Nov 24th: Put together a competition to judge the most ugly visualization online. Boy we hate ugly!
• Nov 21st: We were declared the 40th fastest growing technology company in India by Deloitte. Woohoo!
• Oct 28th: Exhibited at the NASSCOM Product Conclave in Bangalore. We felt like rockstars, and not for the first time in Bangalore.
• Oct 22nd: We turned seven, a year older and wiser.
• Oct 22nd, 2008: We turned six.

Just like an eight-year old, our appetite is now growing and we are putting on weight. We are coming out with v3.2 for all our other products shortly – PowerCharts, FusionWidgets and FusionMaps. We are also releasing FusionCharts for SharePoint and an improved version of oomfo.  We have replaced the lego blocks with smarter things. About the weight, it’s just the extra cheese.

Also like an eight-year old, we would need our parents to guide and tell us what’s right and what’s wrong. That’s you. Let us know when we go wrong and what we could do better. For the time being, just drop a smile in the comments and warm our hearts!