Product updates

As co-founder of a startup with global ambitions, I’ve travelled 170+ days in the last year – pretty much making me a nomad of sorts. And as a self –confessed foodie, the quest for memorable food experiences on my travels has certainly been interesting. First, the...

Today, there’s a lot of buzz around a few words. Data: the big, the small, the relevant. Social media, contextual marketing, going viral, and influencers. Digital advertising, mobile first, e-commerce. Everyone splashes around in the shallow end of tech trends. They...

This is the second part of Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi’s earlier post Big data analytics – Not just a matter of scale. “It is in the above context that the recent advances in recommender systems need to be viewed. The use of graph based systems for solving social and...

Some 16 odd years ago, Google made search engines famous and ubiquitous. It’s sell-by date has come. Think about it. Search was the greatest thing in the world because it achieved Google’s wonderful vison of ‘organising the world’s information’. But now… what is the...

Crayon’s product manager Ajay Kashyap explains how Crayon’s proprietary taste algorithm helps in understanding customer taste in a holistic way; not bounded by traditional constraints of category, availability, costs and location proximity, in conversation with...

Complex algorithms, ontologies, and machine-learning based classifiers are needed to separate noise patterns and spam-like comments, from genuine signals. This is where the complexity arises, and the signal strength calibration algorithm has to then be customized...

It all starts with the data…There are 2 approaches to collecting data on one’s interests, influences, and tastes: Implicit & Explicit. Companies such as Hunch and Nara have all attempted to address this by asking their users to share interests explicitly, with the...

When you build a Choice engine, I believe there are 5 key factors that have to be considered: 1. The basic ingredient: data. Is it collected implicitly or explicitly, and what is the quality of said data in its role of inferring interests? 2. Distilling ‘signals’ as...

What do Quora, Hunch, Nara, and Ness all have in common? They are all companies that generate value for their users by leveraging the power of Interest Graphs. 1. The controversy around Google’s personalised search? Based on an interest graph. 2. Facebook’s Open...

Have you ever read an autobiography and felt that the bugger is almost living your dream? One such book I read was "Don't ask any old bloke for directions" by Palden Gyatso Tenzing. Some 200 odd pages full of what I have always dreamt of doing. This book is by an IAS...