When I speak to my parents, they tell me a number of stories about how a non- digital world used to be. Some of their favorite examples: To know how their loved ones were doing, they sent handwritten letters. These would take more than a week to get delivered....
Crayon Data's co-founder and CTO, Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi, gives us a peek into the decade ahead in terms of technology. This article was carried in the first issue of STRIDE, a journal of technology, leadership, and innovation, published by the Confederation of Indian...
Crayon Data's founder and CEO Suresh Shankar was recently on the Churn.FM podcast. Hosted by Andrew Michael, CEO of Avrio, they talk about ways to prevent churn with enterprise customers. Suresh shares how he connects the dots looking back going from an account...
Crayon Data’s flagship platform, maya.ai, features in the latest edition of Ecosystm Insights. In a piece titled ‘Personalization – The New Digital Imperative in Financial Services’, analyst Gerald Mackenzie puts the AI-led personalization platform in the...
Vidhyashankar Sriram has joined Crayon Data as Vice President - Client Solutions. In his new role, he will lead value delivery for our clients. An alumnus of NITIE Mumbai and Madras Institute of Technology, Vidhyashankar is a true-blue banker. He comes with over 15...
The indefinite lockdown due to the continuing spread of COVID-19 has been frustrating. With negative news all around and limited access to entertainment avenues, consumers are slowly turning towards over-the-top (OTT) platforms. 80% of Indian consumers have stated...
In this week’s episode of the Crayon Lighthouse Fireside Chat series, Shagufta Anurag, or Shagu, as we know her, spoke to us about rediscovering our lives at the workplace. Shagu is the founder and CEO of Saltmine, a B2B SaaS company in the workspace design-build...
Right now, banks face more competition from non-banking FinTech players than ever before. They have ushered in a new era of relevance and personalized online experiences, that has elevated customer expectations. Due to the competition, banks find it difficult to...
In the past several years, enterprises around the world have adopted digital transformation projects on various scales. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide budgets on technology and services that facilitate digital transformation is...
Customers are delighted when you exceed their expectations. . To do so, you need to always be one step ahead of them, understand and anticipate their needs. But the current COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t exactly made it easy for us to have all the answers to wow our...
We’ve shared the story of how we identified a new business opportunity and developed a product for it in 2 weeks. And we promised we’d share the second part of that story – going-to-market (GTM) in 9 days. So here it goes! A typical GTM plan takes a while to put...
Crayon’s core value proposition for maya.ai is to create personalized lifestyle experiences. Be it in dining, retail or travel, we had it all covered. Until Covid-19 changed the world. Worldwide dining and travel came to a standstill. Brick-and-mortar shopping now...
By the year 2022, the total number of credit card holders across the globe is projected to grow to 1.2Bn (from the 1.06 Bn in 2017). And these card holders will look for relevant experiences that match their interests. Be it fine dining, globe-trotting or shopping. ...
Disclaimer: The following piece of writing is not meant to cause panic, or hurt sentiments. There is no political judgement being handed out in this article. This is purely an opinion piece. I possess expertise in neither mathematical modeling nor epidemiology. The...
A story of successful product launch – Our vision here at Crayon Data is to simplify the world’s choices. We believe there is always a simpler way to do things. But the algorithms we work with aren’t always visible to the naked eye. For months we tried over and over...
The lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, while necessary, has impacted industries across the board. Travel, restaurants, luxury and fashion, amongst others, have taken a huge hit. And banks are no exception. How banks respond to the current situation...
Disclaimer: This piece of writing is meant to drive the case for social distancing and self-quarantines. It isn’t meant to cause panic. I’m in no way an expert, in neither epidemiology nor mathematical modeling. The approach undertaken below is laden with assumptions,...
We’re three months into the new decade and Crayon Data has already unlocked something very special. For awhile now, we’ve wanted to showcase the powerful AI-led personalization capabilities of our product, maya.ai in Europe. And this year, we were selected to demo...
At the start of the last decade, smartphones and social media were still in their infancy. But by the time we hopped over to 2020, with their omnipresence, they increased access to information dramatically; Choice exploded and consumer expectations ramped up,...
An outbreak of flu-like symptoms that originated from a wet market in the city of Wuhan, China has brought chaos to the world. The new coronavirus or 2019-NCoV, was first reported on December 31st, 2019, as pneumonia. The number of infected people increased...
Personalization on an eCommerce website is not unusual in today’s consumer-driven world. Customers want brands to know them; to offer products that fit in with their own needs and preferences. They want to have the same kind of experience as shopping at a store...
Coding standards are a set of guidelines, best practices, programming styles and conventions that developers adhere to when writing a piece of code for a project. All the big software companies have them. And advise their developers to embed these coding standards in...
In today’s fiercely competitive world, customer experience (CX) is often the main differentiator for banks. When it comes to choosing which financial institution to bank with, customers look at the quality of customer experience. In fact, it’s the key deciding factor....
The world is going online. Online retailers are becoming more relevant. However, they are still unable to provide the same personalized experiences as brick-n-mortar stores. (You know, like the ones which have a salesman helping customers find the perfect...
The art of forgetting. It’s been well depicted by human beings on numerous occasions. But what about machines? Are they capable of forgetting data as well? This article answers that question. As human beings, we are blessed with several cognitive skills. Including...
“Chennai is heaven,” says Girish Mathrubootham, cofounder of Freshworks. Sitting at his San Francisco home, his new residence since he relocated to the US last month, Mathrubootham is a tad emotional as he speaks on a Zoom video call one early morning. “What do...
The planet of data and analytics is spreading its empire at a fast pace leading to digital innovation which is taking the industry by boom. The widespread of technology is creating a heap of opportunities for companies and individuals as well to excel in...
Personalization is a great way for enterprises, such as online retailers, to build brand loyalty. Recommending products based on a customer’s personal taste results in higher conversion rates. But is personalization all you need to increase a client's revenues? Let’s...
When looking at the monstrous success of Google’s and Facebook’s ad businesses, most would point out that the core driving factor is their data and how they utilize it. These companies have built massive platforms around offering customized experiences to their...
Tech Talk: Volume 1 I’m a big fan of Agile practices. However, I think the traditional and rigid Agile Scrum rules may not be a good fit for data science projects. Tweaking the Scrum methodology could help in making it more adaptable for data science projects. Here’s...
In perspective: Volume 1 It’s the end of June 2019. It’s that time of the month again when you receive that dreaded message informing you about the arrival of your monthly credit card statement. Ugh. It breaks my heart every time I look at it. I can’t really complain...
There’s a new trend emerging among traditional enterprises who are going digital and embracing personalization. These enterprises are setting up innovation labs and digital teams as they gear up for what many are calling the ‘fourth industrial revolution’. One...
A friend, Lisa, told me about a new clothing store online that she is absolutely obsessed with. She was awed by the simplicity of the site, and how it populated outfits that seemed to "know her taste". That perplexed her. She was certain the site was designed...
There’s a new era of banking and financial services on the horizon. With the emergence of digital banking and fintech, the sector is facing a massive shift in the way people bank. There’s a new era of banking and financial services on the horizon. With the emergence...
Chennai is a city which has always been steeped in tradition. It’s a city where conventional business models have been tried and tested time and time again. And the organisations adopting these models were quite happy with the way things were. But that is not the...
Earlier, I’d written an article on a couple of podcasts for those interested in learning about data science and analytics. And while data science is still a relevant and booming industry today, the tech world has since then moved onto other things – artificial...
You don’t have time to read anymore. You’re too busy to attend short courses or take online classes. But you really want to learn about the tech and corporate world’s latest buzzwords – data science and analytics. For someone who isn’t a numbers geek or hasn’t studied...
Have you, as a marketer, sat back and thought about how much energy you expend in identifying keywords, creating blog rollout plans, personalizing content for marketing, creating all those social posts and overall formulating content strategies? Now, step back and...
This is the third article in a three-part series. You can read the first and second articles here. The focus of this article is to understand neural network around what it is, why it is an important learning algorithm, how it is applied, its extensions &...
This article is the second part of a three-part series on machine learning. You can read Part 1 here. The purpose of this article is to understand the details of logistic regression. What it is and how it’s used etc. Let’s start with the definition. It is a...
The purpose of this article is to understand how gradient descent works. By applying and illustrating it on linear regression. We will have a quick introduction on Linear regression before jumping on to the estimation techniques. Please feel free to skip the...
Data security is an extremely important aspect of any thriving organisation. Especially for digital and software enterprises. It’s a responsibility that falls on the shoulders of both the management as well as the individual units of an organisation – the employees....
We live in an age, where we fear isolation. The one string which connects us with the rest of the world is social media. With people being constantly on the move, social networking websites provide the most accessible and affordable medium for news and entertainment....
It’s A Bird… It’s A Plane… It’s Iron Ma…..Oh, Wait!! That’s A Major Blunder!! Wasn’t it supposed to be Superman? Well, who cares?? Iron Man’s cooler! He combines the flight of a bird and the tech behind a plane and cruises effortlessly in the sky! He may not be quite...
I recently interviewed Nitin Chugh, Country Head – Digital Banking at HDFC Bank Limited, and we discussed some hot topics in banking industry today: digital transformation, personalization, AI & machine learning, blockchain etc. HDFC Bank is an acknowledged...
Regardless of how much people earn, the jobs they have or whether they’re part of the workforce, banking is a necessary routine. It may not come to mind as one of the most technologically advanced industries, but has still undergone some significant advancements that...
The universe of banking and payments is ever evolving. 2017 has seen a number of significant changes in the payments industry, thanks to advances in technology. Consumers now have access to a myriad of ways to pay. As a result, payment and shopping habits change....
The purpose of this article is to understand how gradient descent works, by applying it and illustrating on linear regression. We will have a quick introduction to Linear regression before jumping on to the estimation techniques. Please feel free to skip the...
While it is still quite early to foretell the implications of India’s tryst with GST, there is an all pervasive air of concern in the hospitality industry regarding the same. At this very crucial juncture we will cautiously analyse how the hospitality industry aspires...
For many years, banks and financial institutions dominated the currency trading arena and money transfer services. Banks were viewed as the most credible, reliable and efficient means of conducting international money transfers. However, the costs of using banks for...