Objective & Summary

To achieve excellence in product design and innovation in the field of online media and mobile technologies and feel a sense of accomplishment for a product well-designed. I would like to work in an organization wherein the work culture is conducive to nurture my creativity so that I can effectively utilize my analytical, creative and mathematical abilities to bring out world class products.

I have over six years of experience in software product design and development in the domain of mobile services and in the online media industry. All of this is in taking applications from initial conceptualization to their launch and operations. I have done many product innovations and automations during this period.

Education

Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay,

Master of Science in Physics

Professional Experience

Consultant, Online Media and Mobile Services, March 2009 – Current

Presently I am providing consultancy in the field of Online Media and mobile VAS.

Senior Software Engineer, Rediff.com (Nasdaq: REDF), Nov 2003 – Feb 2009

(Company profile: Rediff.com is India’s leading portal and online media company with about 5 million page views every day and over 100 million registered users. Rediffmail, Rediff’s flagship product (It is a web based email service) gets about 1.3 million unique logins every day.

My Role: I have designed, implemented, and deployed the software and been the team lead for almost all of the products mentioned below. And I played a vital role in designing most of these products and conceptualized many of them. After their launch, I built infrastructure for operational monitoring and maintenance. Other responsibilities included recruiting, inducting, training and mentoring new team members; interacting and coordinating the projects with multiple teams like Product management, Content management, Operations management, Editorial, sales and marketing teams and clients and vendors.

Technologies Used: Most of these products were built using Perl language. Some of the other languages and tools I have used are mentioned in the technical skills section.)

  • SMS and WAP push manager: Conceptualized, designed and developed this biggest revenue generator for rediff mobile business. This is a fully automated system for creating, scheduling, sending and managing SMS and WAP push promos. This is an excellent marketing tool for promoting Rediff’s SMS and WAP services/products. This platform includes a full-fledged web-based interface for real-time monitoring and operations, identifying and fixing push connectivity problems with mobile operators. Every day about two million SMS and WAP pushes are sent out using this platform. One of my most admired products, a special celebration was arranged in recognition and appreciation of this initiative.
  • STK/DP5/DP6 for BSNL, MTNL and Reliance (One of my first projects in Rediff)

Developed a robust content delivery platform for Value Added Services (VAS) under SIM Tool Kits for the cellular operators BSNL, MTNL and Reliance. This is a key revenue generator for the company’s mobile business. The product consists of crawlers, parsers, schedulers, and web based CMS interfaces for updating and managing content. Also developed DP5/DP6 for BSNL for similar content. The following are the services developed under STK/DP5/DP6:

o News – Breaking, National, International, etc.

o Finance – Stocks (NSE, BSE, NASDAQ), Forex

o Entertainment – dating, jokes, Contests, Games, Movie reviews etc.

o TV Schedule – Sports, Movies, Serials

o Travel - Airlines, Railways

o Downloads – Logos, Ringtones, Picture Messages

o Astrology – Horoscope, Numerology, Shubh Kaal, Birthday Forecast

o Cricket – Scores, News, Match Schedules

o Others – Rediffmail, Thought for the day, Shayari, Health Tip, Dictionary

  • Rediffmail
  • Paid accounts for Rediffmail: Architected and developed a scalable and distributed platform for provisioning, deprovisioning and sending expiry alert mailers for paid accounts of the prestigious rediffmail, ie. Rediffmail Plus, Rediffmail Mobile, POP3 and SMS packs. This system includes handling the distributed architecture of rediffmail that is spread over multiple servers in multiple data centers (like VSNL, Reliance, Bharti) in order to update data on the NFS mount points (all of them are NetApp storage devices) mounted on those servers.
  • Rediffmail on WAP: Designed and developed WAP version of Rediffmail, Rediffmail pro and Rediffmail Enterprise pro.
  • Rediffmail on SMS: Developed SMS version of Rediffmail, Rediffmail pro.
  • Rediffmail alerts: This system sends out SMS alerts to webmail users for email-summary, subject to a set of predefined constraints (Like limiting number of alerts per a calendar day to a fixed number unless and until the user sms'es back to 57333)
  • Automations: Automated most of the mobile services, which save thousands of man hours every month across multiple teams. Some of the automations are Gen Poll Activator, Command-Mapper, Op-Circ Service Manager, Chronological Services, Oneliners, Datewise Subscription Tips etc. Each of them would take a separate write up, which I am avoiding here. These automations have not only enhanced efficiency of content and product management, network operations, technology etc teams but also increased revenues and later it has become a popular trend in the company across several departments.
  • Rediff Bol mobile integration: Extended Rediff Bol, rediff’s instant messenger service into mobile domain. This consists of messaging, fetching the buddy list - online, offline, blocking, unblocking buddies, viewing blocked buddy list and Logging in and out.
  • Subscription services: Co-architected the prototype of mobile Subscription Services, for most of the mobile operators in India, which are now the most favorite VAS business for all the mobile operators as well as content providers across India.
  • Text based SMS products: Designed and developed innumerable SMS products/services for Rediff Mobile under the short code 57333. Text based SMS services include news, contests, riddles, quizzes, polls, cricket score, stocks info, jokes, astrology, health tips, Yellow Pages, Visa status, MWISH for wishing Malayalam actors, contests, polls and info services for World Cup football etc. Customized many of these services for leading news papers like Gulf News, Dainik Bhaskar, Malayala Manorama, Daily Thanthi, Sanmarg and some TV channels. Some of the other text based SMS services are mentioned below separately.
  • Smart Results Publisher: Conceptualized and designed a generic scalable platform for publishing exam results on mobile as well as rediff web search. Also, from time to time, took care of load balancing, made quick decisions regarding planning for additional servers etc. Exam results published thru this platform included results of IIM-CAT, India’s leading universities, all the major exam boards (HSC, SSC of all the states, CBSE, ICSE etc), entrance and competitive exams (like UPSC) and recruitment exams/interviews. This resulted in quick and efficient publication of exam results on SMS and/or Web search. In addition to designing the platform, I am proactively involved in implementing and coordinating various teams (mobile-product, content, web; network operations, editorial, tech, results vendors, web search) and taking complete responsibility for the major exams like CAT and Maharashtra board.
  • Festival specials (Text and premium): Developed special services (wishes, tunes, wallpapers etc) for festivals like Christmas, Valentine’s Day, New Year day, Independence Day, Diwali, Onam, Holi.
  • Financial services: Tax computation, Loan products, ATM locator etc for HDFC, HSBC, and mobile payment gateways for companies like Paymate, all thru SMS.
  • Astrology on BSNL STK, SMS & WAP and TTSL: Designed an excellent content delivery system and a web based CMS for managing the content. The CMS updates the content and synchronizes it for all the services running from a distributed network of servers.
  • Contest platform: This is a fully automated contest platform consisting of a full-fledged web based CMS, autopush system and MIS for deciding contest winners for mobile operators as well as internal content & business managers.
  • Premium SMS/GPRS products: Maintained content delivery infrastructure for premium mobile content like ring tones, wallpapers, picture messages, Java games, operator logos, animations from time to time.
  • WAP services: Developed numerous WAP services under rediff WAP site. They include most of the services covered under SMS services mentioned above. (such as news, astrology, rediffmail, cricket score card, job search and premium downloads like ring tones, picture messages, wallpapers, operator logos, Java applications, games, animations etc.)
  • Infrastructure for mobile content management: Designed many full-fledged web-based CMS interfaces for content management. One of them is cross promo manager mentioned below.
  • Cross-promo manager: Conceived, designed and developed a robust platform for creating and delivering cross promotions. Every time a user requests an SMS service, he/she is sent a random cross-promotion from a predefined set of promos customized to the requested service, operator, circle, subject to conditions like promo validity period, max number of promos sent in a given period. All these promos can be managed and controlled thru an excellent, user-friendly web interface. This was made for Rediff’s short code (57333) services and later extended for BSNL STK.
  • Operations infrastructure: Developed many tools for tech and content operations and oversaw many operational activities like short code migration, CDR generation, pricing and billing for mobile operators etc. Also helped and provided guidance to the operations team in maintaining the mobile products from time to time.
  • Indian Railways: Architected a comprehensive railways data backbone for Train Search for Indian Railways (Railway info is one of the most sought-after information on internet in India), one of the most popular rediff products. This includes train listings, schedules, seat availability etc. Also played a key role in designing the product by guiding the product management team in providing the best end user experience. Also designed excellent railway products, as mentioned above, for SMS (57333), BSNL STK, DP5/DP6 and designed an optimal mechanism for cutting the content costs charged by the vendor Indian Railways.
  • Web trigger: A generic product that triggers/renders all the mobile (SMS/WAP) services (Rediff’s 57333 services) from rediff mobile web site (Click here for an example.) to a mobile handset upon a simple confirmation-reply by the mobile user. It enhances the user experience, so it has increased revenues.
  • Nokia Gallery: This application generates and delivers content through XML feeds for Nokia Ticker fetching content from rediff pages for the following services: BIZ, CRI, INT, IYCU, SPO, MOVIES, GETAHEAD, INTERVIEWS, NEWS, COLUMNS, and PERFIN.
  • News Services for Yahoo! India: Provided a content delivery platform for various categories of news for our client Yahoo! India. Later on our internal client – editorial department started using an enhanced version of this (Rediff Backyard) as their main content publishing tool.
  • Shopping vouchers: Designed an application for e-commerce team for dispatching shopping vouchers for the users of 57333 services.
  • User profiling and analytical tools for mobile services: These tools use mathematical modeling to analyze various databases for optimizing for the purpose of sending out targeted promotions in order to maximize the conversion rates and thus enhancing the revenues. Already done is providing Amazon-like suggestions like “users who bought this product also brought so and so products”. Also I proposed analytics like:
1) Clustering users into predefined categories.
2) Ranking users in a particular category.
3) User analysis for cross-relating categories.
  • Local Ads: Prototyped the mobile version of Local Ads, rediff.com’s most ambitious product ever that aims to deliver ads that serve end user’s purpose precisely and also to help the advertisers reach out the target customers precisely. This was appreciated by the CEO and the Board of Directors.

Software Consultant, STV LLC, July-Nov 2003

  • Provided consultancy on search engine optimization, enhancing and popularizing websites.
  • Designed a software that measures a given website’s popularity on internet.

Technical Skills

  • Programming/scripting languages: Perl, PHP, C, Shell Scripting, FORTRAN
  • Web technologies: HTML, WML, XML, Web Services like SOAP, WSDL, JavaScript
  • Web server: Apache
  • Databases: Oracle, SQL
  • Version control: CVS
  • Other tools etc: CGI, CPAN etc
  • Operating Systems: Linux/Unix, HP, Sun Solaris; M.S. windows, Macintosh
  • Modern Information Systems: Did the course titled Modern Information Systems at I.I.T. Bombay under Prof. Deepak B. Phatak, then head of Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, I.I.T. Bombay.

Academic/Research projects during Master’s degree

  • Characterization of GMR Thin Films: In this project, investigation of the resistivity and GMR characteristics of La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 thin films was carried out in the temperature range 20–300 Kelvin at a very high vacuum environment of the pressure ranging from 10-5 to 10-6 torr. (GMR (Giant Magnetoresistance) is a phenomenon, discovered in 1988, that causes drastic changes in resistivity of certain magnetic materials when a relatively low intensity magnetic field is applied. Within a decade GMR revolutionized the storage technologies and led to the launch of IBM's record-breaking 16.8-gigabyte hard disk drive for desktop computers in late 90’s. Discoverers of GMR were awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in physics)

  • Simulation of Nuclear Charge Density Variation: Carried out a Study of Nuclear Charge Density Variation of various elements, using data from elastic scattering experiments as Programming Lab course project. Implemented in C language.
  • Computational Methods Course Project: Solved mathematical problems using numerical methods. Done in FORTRAN.
  • Electron Beam Evaporation: Fabricated Ni – SnO2 ferromagnetic multilayers for investigation of various physical characteristics, using Electron Beam Evaporation technique under high vacuum.

Hobbies and Extracurricular Activities

  • Hobbies and interests: Blogging, photography, videography, writing, swimming, chess, reading, solving puzzles and mathematical problems, music, Yoga, playing flute, hiking and trekking, Art of Living, Transcendental Meditation, Vipassana, passion for community service and helping the needy people.
  • Chess: Took part in intercollegiate chess tournaments. Was captain of my college team.
  • National Service Scheme: Participated in two N.S.S. camps and did two years of service.
  • Essay Writing and Elocution: Took part at various levels. Awarded many prizes.

Community Service

  • Involved in Mumbai flood relief and Tsunami relief through the international NGO - Art of Living Foundation.
  • Organized Navchetana Shibir workshops to help slum people get rid of stress and enrich their lives.
  • Involved in conducting free medical camps for the poor.
  • Organized various workshops like advanced meditation courses and other activities of Art of Living foundation.

Languages Known

English, Telugu and Hindi

Strengths and Qualities

Inquisitive mind, lateral and out of the box thinking, and creative, innovative & multi-dimensional approach to solving problems, excellent writing and documentation skills, strong mathematical aptitude, keen analytical skills, capacity for learning, adaptability to new things.