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Flipkart's data plan Forbes India. Utkarsh Bhriguvanshi is a sort of a freewheeling one- man army at Flipkart. Formally, he is a principal architect and an ‘IC’ or an individual contributor who loves to code, offers his expertise where needed and is generally among the top tinkerers at the Bengaluru- headquartered company, India’s biggest ecommerce business.“I came here more than six years ago; people must think I’m a dinosaur,” he jokes. The self- deprecatory humour hides a razor- sharp mind that is among those constantly tapped by the company’s seniormost people, including Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Kalyan Krishnamurthy, 4. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Ravi Garikipati, 5. Bhriguvanshi, 3. 7, says Flipkart is in its third phase of technological advancement: From solving problems like ensuring a trustworthy sale of a book or a mobile accessory in the early years, to figuring out how to support scale—meaning, a very large number of transactions—“by 2.

That means personalised experience. That is the holy grail,” said Garikipati in a recent interview to Forbes India. The app experience that you see should be different from what I see.”For instance, at its five- day Big 1. May 1. 8—part of celebrating the company’s 1. Flipkart was able to target specific products at women in metros, while men were shown something else on their app home page.

Gender affinity” is what they call it. In another pilot during the sale, it experimented with providing real- time inventory information to consumers, in the midst of a buying frenzy.

Leading up to and during the Big 1. Flipkart also ran a host of social media promotions and contests: Algorithms handled 2. In another promotion, natural language processing software moderated 2 lakh reviews—such as flagging reviews that might be deliberate attempts to add negative comments about a product—on one of the sale days. Flipkart was able to do all this because of its work over the past few years at collecting data from the innumerable transactions on its website and app, and building the big- data analytics infrastructure needed to process that information.

Today, it claims to have one of the most extensive data across urban and middle- class India, and is now gearing up to go after the rest of the country with a host of other technologies. In April, Flipkart scored $1. Microsoft Corp, e. Watch The Philly Kid Online (2017). Bay Inc, and Tencent Holding Ltd, and agreed to purchase e.

Bay’s Indian operations in the bargain. All of this has brought the company some serious strategic heft—not just money, but partnerships with global companies with deep tech knowhow: From Microsoft’s depth in artificial intelligence (AI), to e. Bay’s experience in online commerce, to Tencent’s ability to exploit mobile commerce platforms that handle hundreds of millions of users. Number crunchers: (From left) Utkarsh B, principal architect, Ravi Garikipati, Ram Papatla, Anand Lakshminarayanan and Mayur Datar. Image: Nishant Ratnakar for Forbes India. At stake is nothing short of Flipkart’s position as the top ecommerce business in India, where Amazon. Inc is widely seen as a close second, but also one that is making gains.

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For instance, Amazon surpassed Flipkart in the number of app downloads in the first three months of 2. India, which cited data from App Annie, a market research company that tracks apps and their publishers worldwide. Flipkart still led the field in India on monthly active users, the reports said. Further, while Flipkart started 1. Amazon entered India only four years ago and is widely seen to have overtaken local competitors such as Snapdeal, run by Delhi’s Jasper Infotech Private Limited, to emerge as a strong ecommerce business in India. Amazon has entered the groceries segment ahead of Flipkart, and is said to be in early talks to acquire local online groceries startup Big. Basket, the largest such business in the country.

Amazon’s Prime Video service also helps it engage customers beyond ecommerce. Founder Jeff Bezos, over the past three years, has committed to spending at least $5 billion in expanding Amazon in India, where the US giant has had a development centre for nearly 1. Mumbai for its Amazon Web Services. And although big data analytics is par for the course among ecommerce companies, Flipkart is adding more muscle to its game. On an average day, Flipkart’s 1.

TB of data, says Anand Lakshminarayanan, 4. Big Data Services group.

During a sale, that volume can increase to 5. TB. That helps the company figure out users’ “affinity” for price and brands, among other habits.

With all the data it has collected over the years, the company can now say that when it shows a woman’s handbag to a user, the probability is very high that the user is a woman in a particular metro, with a propensity to buy such products. Collecting and mining data is an investment Flipkart has been making from fairly early on, recalls Bhriguvanshi, putting in place several “big data platforms” in 2. All of those have evolved and coalesced into the Flipkart Big Data Platform—a growing, changing combination of hardware and software—of today, that Lakshminarayanan’s group runs, and which is affectionately called Bigfoot within the company. Bigfoot processes all the data it is fed, runs algorithms that are constantly being built and tweaked, and brings up information like a customer’s affinity for a particular brand, times and days of purchases, and browsing behaviour. Flipkart is using this knowledge to achieve a “long- term engagement with the user and his or her family,” says Lakshminarayanan. Watch Black Snake Moan Online Fandango on this page. It is harnessing the power of machine learning (ML) and deep neural networks, and getting closer than ever to you and me and our families, friends, neighbours, colleagues and the outwardly extending network of all our touchpoints. Each of us will eventually be an open book.

The latest funding has also brought Flipkart serious strategic heft “Can we predict users’ shopping behaviour based on their ‘life stage’?” “The key is to fail fast, learn from the experience, and iterate quickly.”The flip side (pun intended) will be that we will no longer get search results or recommendations or even home pages or notifications that are apparently irrelevant to us. And AI will be at the heart of how we’re not just served, but anticipated. Flipkart already knows a lot about its users—based on a combination of their login ID, IP address and device, and even their search queries—and is in a position to recommend not just products, but specific features, based on increasingly accurate user profiles.

Ultimately what we’re trying to get to is, by looking at your past behaviour, we’re looking at building a predictive model. Predict a probability, saying ‘for this query, this product, this user, how likely is a given outcome’,” says Mayur Datar, chief data scientist at Flipkart. Datar, 4. 0, spent a dozen years at Google including two leading its research group in India, before moving to Flipkart two years ago, where he works with 2. Watch My Father The Hero Online. The scale of what Flipkart was trying to do was what attracted Datar. You have an opportunity to change ecommerce in India,” he says. Data science requires data, and for Datar, Flipkart’s petabytes of data is a bottomless, shape- shifting cookie jar throwing up never- before flavours. As his models of customer behaviour become more accurate, Flipkart can begin to exploit them to do a multitude of things—from maximising the profit on the next sale of a high- value item for a customer, to making multiple offers at very attractive rates that complement an existing sale.

This kind of predictive analysis is increasingly common in industries such as oil and gas exploration and commodity market movements, and “we are on the cusp of it”, says Datar.“At some point can we start predicting the users’ shopping behaviour based on the ‘life stage’ they are in? That’s the pivotal point,” says Ram Papatla, 4. Lakshminarayanan’s group brings up. Life at Flipkart for Papatla is a never- ending pursuit of that next bit of end- user insight.