Consumer Internet Trends,

Opportunities and Challenges

Jeyandran Venugopal

Image credit: Gartner Hype Cycle report for Emerging Technologies 2014.

Gartner Hype Cycle report for Emerging Technologies, 2014

Global Users of TVs vs. Mobile Phones vs. Smartphones vs. PCs vs. Tablets, 2013

Population penetration

Mobile Adoption Statistics

Smartphone Users = Still Lots of Upside… @ 30% of 5.2B Mobile Phone User Base

Credit: Digital Statistics – India 2014 by Ideate Labs.

Credit: Digital Statistics – India 2014 by Ideate Labs.

Mobile Usage = Continues to Rise Rapidly…@ 25% of Total Web Usage vs. 14% Y/Y

Mobile Technology – Driver of Social Change

Image credit: Arab Spring and Social Media by Tarik Laanani, Slide share

Mobile

Technology –

Driver of Social

Change

Mobile Technology – Driver of individual betterment

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Online Education = It's a Global Thing

• AirBnb

• Lyft, Uber, Sidecar

• Waze

• Yelp, Just Dial

• Crowd funding (Kickstarter, Indiegogo, spot.us…)

• Foldit – Crowdsourced (gamified) research!

Mobile – Crowdsourcing of content, commerce

• Quixey – Search Engine for Apps .

• App discovery and personalization/recommendations.

• App Performance, Analytics and insights.

• Cross platform app development.

• Prototyping tools, design to code technologies --

democratization of app development (andromo, appgeyser),

Enterprise Mobility (Kony).

• India opportunity – Regional focus!

Enabling Technologies for Mobile Platforms

• Programmatic buying platforms – all inventory moving to RTB

exchange mechanisms.

• Demand side platforms that can optimize Ad buy ROI’s.

• Still, advertisers are lacking unified solutions for multi-

channel ad spend management to optimize impressions for

targeted spending objectives – brand advertising,

performance ads etc.

• SMB businesses – how do we enable them to manage

marketing spends.

• Fraud management – publisher fraud, advertiser fraud,

violation of exchange terms, click fraud.

Advertising Platforms

Personalization Technology

14

Personalization – Why

• Cocktail Party Effect

• Size of the Web

• Trillion+ Unique pages

• Billion+ Domains

• Search Engine Index – Several

Hundreds of Billions of pages+

• 4 Zeta Bytes of data

(10^21 bytes)

• Users come to internet not just for

information, but to explore interests.

Personalization – What, How

• Profiling/segmentation vs Deep Personalization

• User profile – often unknown.

• Content signals – Non existent, weak or even wrong.

• Collaborative filtering

• Content Filtering

• Hybrid approaches

• Machine Learning, Large scale data analytics, Data

Mining

Personalization – Where

Personalization – Where

Credit: Recommendations at Netflix scale @ Large scale Recommendation systems workshop 2013

18

Personalization – Where

NLP, Speech (processing and synthesis), Image and

Video Processing

•Semantic Web initiatives have not taken off.

•Self Expression through blogging, video logs, podcasting, Pictures,

Tumblr etc exponentially growing.

•Exponentially increasing use of Rich Media as opposed to text.

•Deep Learning networks for image and video understanding – new

field, lots of investment going in.

•Usecases/need – comment spam/hate speech/trolls, copyright

violations, prohibited content identification, page quality analysis,

sentiment analysis, intuitive new experiences

•Technology mature => it disappears and gets out of the way and

things happen by magic. HCI will change drastically in the future.

Speech understanding/synthesis will become key.

Big Data Analytics – Enabler Technology for all of the above (Personalization, Search…)

Big Data Analytics Contd..

• Plays in – Infrastructure/platform services (vertical focus like log

analysis - splunk), enabling technologies (streamed processing via

storm, cascading, scalding), algorithms/value added insights

(stochastic processes/statistical techniques,ML etc eg: outlier

detection algorithms ).

• Commercial applications limitless – retail, financial, ad

ecosystems etc.

• Application of big-data analytics to various fields beyond

advertising/targeting - education, agriculture (e.g: climate

predictions and crop insurance), healthcare (predictive analytics

on disease likelihoods, prognosis of diseases).

Some Challenges

Some Challenges – Social implications need to be thought through ….

My Entrepreneurial journey

•India has become the new Land of Opportunities.

•Lots of untapped potential .

•Consumer spending increasing, discretionary spending of middle

class accelerating.

•Adoption cycles are shorter (younger demographic willing to try

new things as early adopters).

•Emerging Markets (and specifically India) attracting a lot of

institutional investment.

•Our Company – Early/bootstrap stage, part of the Nasscom

incubator (10K), V1 product release later this quarter,

reimagination of healthcare in India (bring in big-data/analytics,

scalable consumer internet platforms).

Thank You!

Q&A