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