The Fifth Elephant 2013

Why are we able to build databases that can store petabytes, algorithms that seem to have an answer for everything and yet are not able to translate these into scalable, mass adopted big data products?

Ex-Googler and Sokrati CPO Rahul Kulkarni takes you through 10 real life examples from ecommerce, ads, maps, social and sensors to highlight how simple big data ideas can be translated into high impact products.

Outline

If you are an engineer, you have most likely gone through the following life cycle of big data - someone presents a big data problem, you crack the problem, colleagues/boss give kudos, you file a patent on the technique used, go to the next problem. What gets missed in this cycle is the huge opportunity you had to turn your smart algorithms into a product with mass adoption.

Come to this session to learn from 10 real world examples on what makes the difference between a cool algorithm and a scalable product. This session skips the usual tips on building products and dives right into the nitty gritty of building a big data product - right from the sourcing and security of data to knowing where and when to expose data to including a human in the loop. The speaker will take you through examples of doing this right and wrong across domains - right from ecommerce and ads to maps and social networking to sensors.

Speaker bio

Rahul Kulkarni is the Chief Product Officer at Sokrati, a digital marketing and analytics startup on a mission to delight advertisers globally. Before jumping into the startup world, Rahul spent about six years at Google - starting out as Google’s first product manager in India and managing various products such as Google Maps and Local, cloud computing, Orkut and Google Finance. Prior to Google, Rahul was the Product Manager for LabVIEW at National Instruments Corp in Austin, TX where for five years he led new product development efforts in the areas of design, prototyping and deployment of high speed control systems. Rahul holds a Masters degree in Engineering from Georgia Tech in Atlanta and Bachelors from VJTI Mumbai.