A few of my friends have been emailing me, wondering why I haven’t posted anything for a while and I’ve been a bit cagey in my answers. Well, I can break the silence and let everyone know that I’ve just helped found new company. I’ve partnered with a couple of the world’s best computer vision experts to found a new company named Photometria. We’ll be taking a round of funding shortly and there will be a formal announcement, but the work of getting everything going has left me with zero available time for blogging, something I plan to remedy in about a month or so.

The company will be based in San Diego, so I’ll be leaving India which was a very difficult decision. I’ve actually been gone from Bangalore and jaunting around the US (sometimes with my family in tow) for the last 4 months as I charted out my future course. I’ve wanted to be part of a startup at the founder level, and I’m excited to be taking that leap. The work ahead will, no doubt, be challenging, but I love the startup environment and the technical challenges in a company like this one make coming to work a pure joy.

Now, for some blatantly self-serving abuse of my blog: we are looking to bring on two or three engineers immediately so if you are in San Diego, or know someone who is, please contact me directly (kbarnes@gmail.com). We are building a web-based product and are doing the work in several different languages (a polyglot project) including ActionScript, JavaScript, C++ (maybe D at some point), and probably Ruby (although Python is also a candidate at that layer). I’m not going to post too many details yet, but I am willing to discuss them with candidates individually. We’re not looking for a particular expertise, we want bright, hard-working people who are excited to learn new things, and are eager to take on an early-phase startup with all the challenges that implies. I’m not restricting my search to experts with many years of experience, we would take someone just out of school (perhaps even a high-school intern programmer) up through a very experienced candidate. My main interest is in finding very smart and driven people. We won’t be looking outside of San Diego (unless I have worked with you before), and our office will be located near UCSD.

Ok, enough blog abuse, I’ve actually been plugging away at a few articles, so hopefully I’ll find the time to finish one or two in the next month.