Hello.
It's that time of the year where we take a step back to reflect on who we are, what we've accomplished, and what we are looking forward to.
2023 has been a roller coaster. We outdid ourselves in some areas, but under delivered in some others. Overall, things are moving in the right direction, and as a CEO I'm grateful to be in a place where I can write with hope and optimism.
Product
Our focus this year has been on providing the best experience for Photos.
We launched Collaborative Albums, so you could build albums together with your family. We then added a photo editor, collage maker and notifications to bring more joy into sharing.
Sharing aside, reliving our best moments is at the soul of what we're trying to accomplish and a lot of our energy was spent researching on ways to make this happen.
Since we associate our memories with the places we made them, we added the ability to tag your favorite spots and a world map to visualize them.
We delivered experimental face recognition on Desktop, which enabled discovering photos with your favorite people in it.
We also launched a magical search experience, where you could find anything, by querying in your natural language.
Infrastructure
We deployed a fresh replication strategy and published a document on how we're reliably storing your data at 3 data centers, in 3 different countries, with 3 different providers.
We also successfully completed a cryptography audit of our source code and architecture with help from the brilliant folks at Cure53.
These were major milestones that ensured Ente's foundation is rock solid.
Side quests
We launched v2 of our Authenticator app, with some bells and whistles. We've more goodies planned for the next year.
We took out time to build a CLI that makes it trivial to pull your data from Ente. We also added support for continuous, incremental exports to our desktop app - all it takes is a single click.
We ran a Black Friday deal, over multi-year plans and sold them out in a couple of days. It was heartwarming to see the number of folks who were willing to place long term bets on us.
Last but certainly not the least, we launched this new website, featuring our mascot 🐣
Team
There are more of us now.
Two community members, Laurens and James joined our team this year. It's amazing to build with folks who love what they're doing.
Serendipity continued, when a stranger who helped my dad with directions 5 years ago, discovered us and came on board to infuse magic.
As a cherry on top, to close the year, we found Pragadeeswaran - who sketched this out to call it a wrap.
Looking Forward
2024 is set to be a banger.
We're pioneering Machine Learning on the Edge for Photos, and are set to launch Magic Search and Face Recognition on all platforms, including mobile.
The other focus area is videos, where we seek to provide first-class support for streaming videos end-to-end encrypted.
We're also excited about showing you a fresh new way to share and pass down your memories to your loved ones.
If there's anything else you'd like us to focus on, please let us know, we're building Ente with you, for you.
On behalf of everyone at Ente, I wish you a wonderful year ahead.
The future is bright and safe :)
Vishnu Mohandas
Founder & CEO at Ente