Director Engineering
Zomato
مجموع سنوات الخبرة :10 years, 4 أشهر
March, 2010.
Innonym is my own startup founded with the aim of creating innovative products in the web and mobile space.
Key Achievements:
•Managed to launch more than 30 products in the web and mobile space in a year’s time.
•Managed to achieve traction for quite a few products
•Managed to bootstrap self-sustaining/profitable products in the consumer and in the enterprise sector.
•Some of the products I have created are…
•trackthisnow.com - a power search tool that is quite popular with marketing professionals reviewed by more than 50 journalists/bloggers across the world.
•readevery.com - A new way to read tweets is gaining in popularity with the twitter crowd, especially in Japan.
•gumtowers.com - A way to listen to news on your phone
•webtoim.com - An intelligent answering engine for your IM.
•dealzfull.com - Semantic Twitter Deals aggregator. It also automatically ranks the deals and displays them every hour. Covers more than 30 cities in the US.
• teampinch.com - An experiment that was covered in some of the national newspapers
• updatesitenow.com - An experimental “twitter for websites” concept
•fastcandidate.com - in beta, a tool to recruit the right people, quickly.
•glerts.com - A media monitoring tool that analyses Google Alerts data
• newsgrasp.com - Video aggregator
• spendstudy.com - A way to keep track of your expenses
• quando.me - makes it easy to remember who you met and where
•nostonepr.com - one click social media monitoring tool
Pitney Bowes is a large company which is actually about 80 businesses in one. I manage one of their largest businesses called Geocoding. Geocoding can be described as a search engine for all the locations in the world. An example of this is the Facebook check-in feature (run by Pitney Bowes). The geocoding team consists of about 100 people and generates about USD 80 million in revenue a year. I also manage the big data business which has a turnover of $30 million a year.
Key Achievements:
•Grew revenues from USD 60 million to 100 million in a year
•Created the 2nd most engaged team in the company
•Faster enterprise delivery times by better understanding the market and working closely with vendors and clients
•Introduced the GTD system of productivity in the team along with more robust Agile methodologies
•Organized hack days which are now a routine, brought in the lean start-up mindset in a large company which have created 3-4 unique products across the organization
•Helped create the accelerator program and mentored startups in technology and design
•Moved the entire data infrastructure from Oracle to Hadoop and helped improve the performance of the engines by 400%
•Established automated benchmarks of our products against our competitors which run and report every time there is a release
•Moved from an “on premise” model to a cloud API based SAAS model - increasing visibility, manageability and demonstrability of our products
Webgyor.com technology division has churned out a long line of innovative software applications and services and even patentable concepts and prototypes. These applications revolved around technologies like the Internet, Networking, Desktop applications, Collaborative applications, Office applications etc.
Key responsibilities:
•Part-owner of the company.
•lead the technology division of the company.
Key achievements:
•Mediabar - Mediabar was a internet explorer toolbar plugin which would download new press releases in real-time over the internet. This was primarily used by journalists to easily access media related information.
•Developed a first of its kind desktop buddy application for Lucky Ali. We used an unique technique where the singer/actor Lucky Ali would appear on your desktop as your buddy and could sing and interact with the user.
•Collaborative applications
•Secure chat rooms.
•Secure Instant messenger for enterprises.
•Interoperable messenger (AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN all in one)
•Internet based Voice, video conferencing components
•Remote desktop sharing
•Remote application sharing
•Socks 4 and 5 firewall traversal components
•Invented ONEOffice, a technology capable of connecting remote MS Office applications (MS Word, Ms Excel and Ms PowerPoint) with each other by using the internet and thus providing the capability to share, edit, and present Office documents in Real time without the need of email.
•Developed a new internet technology called RCPL (repetitive connectivity protocol layer) which facilitated application developers to easily develop real-time applications (like chat rooms and even Instant Messengers) on web browsers by transforming ordinary web browsers into hosts capable of providing 2-way communications.
•Developed ActiveX components like a jpeg decoder, compressor etc, for various customers
Springboard Software was formed as a result of deep insights gained from years of development, understanding and experimentation in the field of software and to execute accumulated ideas for path breaking software applications.
Key responsibilities:
•Part-owner of the company.
•Lead the technology division of the company.
Key achievements:
•Created the Netreputation service which offers online news abstracting and media monitoring services for the communications and relationship management communities. The software had to be capable of skimming through more than 20, 000 online news sources like Publications, Blogs and Usenet groups and search for news articles everyday and rank them according to relevance based on search keywords supplied by the customer. The customer would receive Daily News Feeds by email which contained the most relevant matches along with intelligent 100 word summaries of the articles.
•Created a stand-alone summarizer with the capability to summarize various types of documents like web-pages, online news articles, word, rich-text, text and pdf documents to different percentages of summarization.
•Developed a web data mining software which used advanced pattern matching techniques to crawl, identify and collect important data from various online data sources. We applied this technology to successfully collect information about the UK media for a client called TNS Media Intelligence based in the UK. The software managed to collect vital information for more than 15, 000 media houses in Britain using various sources on the internet
At Zomato, I am in charge of the consumer side of the business as well parts of the business that address the merchant memberships, the sales process and the merchant advertising model
C2C Online provides companies in the areas of entertainment, financial services, public relations, and customer relationship management, services that range from creating a brand presence on the Internet to developing interactive Internet applications that can significantly improve the "stickiness" of any online initiative.
Key responsibilities:
•Part of the core team that formed the company.
•lead the technology division of the company.
Key achievements:
•Helped create an exhaustive Online Press room for journalists, PR and corporate communications managers to interact and share information on a real-time basis.
•Helped create a first of its kind "symbiotic desktop application" which was targeted at solving the perpetual problem that CorComm and PR managers face, of communicating effectively with journalists.
•We developed YorInfo, a desktop application which journalists would use to download the latest corporate press releases, event notifications, invites and other forms of communications from different companies straight onto their desktop everyday.
•We also a developed a complementary application called YorMedia, again a desktop application which CorComm/PR managers would use to upload their communications to various journalists and publications.
Joined: July, 2012.
Dealsandyou, a prominent e-commerce company, used to face many chronic issues since its inception like inability to scale, frequent server downtimes, inflexible architecture, exorbitant infrastructure costs and an ineffective team structure impacting the company’s reputation and bringing in a general lack of confidence in the technology team to hold its own any new projects. A lack of innovation and low team morale was a fall out of this.
Key Achievements:
•Cutting down infrastructure costs by 90%.
•Eliminated scaling/reliability issues by rewriting major portions of a clunky Magento platform from the ground up.
•Implementing a new team structure/culture which meant more frequent/on time delivery of projects.
•A heavy focus on innovation and design thinking helped us spawn a new business model within the company with a new mobile based project.
•Focusing on key metrics, helped the tech team play marketer for a while and we increased conversions in many places in our funnel, effectively tripling the overall revenue of the website in the space of 2 months.
•Created a semantic recommendation engine which could profile users and recommend products based on learned data. Increased email deliverability and conversions by 130%
Techgig.com, itimes.com, peerpower.com, gaana.com
Joined: October, 2006.
Times of India moved out of the classifieds businesses into the social space and I was involved from the beginning in leading that effort.
Key Responsibilities:
•To develop an agile development environment and team that competes in the fast growing social networking space.
•To achieve traction and hence scale technologically to meet the demands.
•Lead multiple teams, mitigate risk, manage mission critical infrastructure.
Key Achievements:
•Set up and managed about 4 different internet properties and teams.
•Setup and managed the technology team of Gaana.com, a music distribution platform, which is one of the fastest growing sites in India today.
•Setup and managed the technology team of Techgig.com, which has more than half a million users. Techgig is a social networking website for the Indian tech community.
•Managed to take projects to completion (almost always) ahead of scheduled time.
•Achieved immense traction in the Indian market for all 4 properties totaling more than 8 million users and growing rapidly.
•Promoted a culture of innovation and consumer focus in the development and product team
•Architected the system to preemptively scale to millions of users and to handle marketing induced spikes.
•Developed successful leaders who manage their own teams and properties from ground up
October, 2007.
Founded and lead the R&D division which was formed to supply backend components to the existing portfolio of products at the Times of India group.
Key Responsibilities:
•Develop innovative solutions to existing problems in infrastructure and product development
•Create disruptive innovations in existing/new fields.
•Discover new business models and produce minimum viable products for the same in quick time
Key Achievements:
•The Times of India labs ended up with more than 50 products in our labs some of which ended up being used as
•backend infrastructure
•innovative components for existing technology offerings
•new businesses (Example: www.techgig.com, www.peerpower.com www.gaana.com)
•Put together an accomplished team of 10 people from varied but complimenting disciplines and successfully rolled out the innovation strategy.
•Converted some of the inventions into successful businesses with millions of users