Chirag Mehta
Technology, Design, and Innovation strategist at the Office of the CEO, SAP, focusing on technology and architecture strategy and strategic operational, product, and management innovation. Adjunct faculty at Santa Clara University and San Jose State University with the department of computer engineering teaching graduate classes. Frequent speaker at conferences, special events, Chirag blogs at Cloud Computing.
Designing The Next-generation Review And Recommendation System
It’s unfortunate that despite of the popularity of social networks and plenty of other services that leverage network effects, the review and recommendation systems that are supposed to help users make the right decisions haven’t changed much. Thumbs-up and thumbs-down or likes and unlikes signal two things: popularity and polarization. If a YouTube video has [...]
Data Scientists Should Be Design Thinkers
World Airline RoutesEvery company is looking for that cool data scientist who will come equipped with all the knowledge of data, domain expertise, and algorithms to turn around their business. The inconvenient truth is there are no such data scientists…
Learn To Fail And Fail To Learn
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education” – Mark Twain In a casual conversation with a dad of an eight-year old over a little league baseball game on a breezy bay area evening, who also happens to be an elementary school teacher, he told me that teaching cursive writing to kids isn’t [...]
With Yammer, Microsoft Begins Its Journey From Collaborative To Social
Confirming what we already knew, today Microsoft announced they are acquiring Yammer for $1.2 billion in cold cash. Here’s a blog post by David Sacks, the CEO of Yammer. Microsoft doesn’t report a revenue breakdown for their individual products but SharePoint is believed to be one of the fastest growing products with annual revenue of [...]
Proxies Are As Useful As Real Data
Last year I ran a highly unscientific experiment. I would regularly put a DVD in an open mail bin in my office to mail it back to Netflix, every late Monday afternoon. I would also count the total number of Netflix DVDs put inside that bin by other people. Over a period of time I [...]
I Want USPS To Think Outside The Box
Recently I had to go to a consulate to get a visa and the consulate would only accept a USPS money order and a USPS pre-paid envelope. I went to a post office to get those. That particular post office decided to change their business hours that day to open late. I hurriedly drove to [...]
Data Is More Important Than Algorithms
Netflix Similarity Map In 2006 Netflix offered to pay a million dollar, popularly known as the Netflix Prize, to whoever could help Netflix improve their recommendation system by at least 10%. A year later Korbel team won the Progress Prize by improving Netflix’s recommendation system by 8.43%. They also gave the source code to Netflix [...]
Fixing Software Patents, One Hack At Time
Software patents are broken and patent trolls are seriously hurting innovation. Companies are spending more money on buying patents to launch offensive strikes against other companies instead of competing by building great products. There are numerous patent horror stories I could outline where they are being used for all purposes except to innovate. In fact [...]
4 Big Data Myths – Part II
This is the second and the last part of this two-post series blog post on Big Data myths. If you haven’t read the first part, check it out here. Myth # 2: Big Data is an old wine in new bottle I hear people say, “Oh, that Big Data, we used to call it BI.” One [...]
4 Big Data Myths – Part I
It was cloud then and it’s Big Data now. Every time there’s a new disruptive category it creates a lot of confusion. These categories are not well-defined. They just catch on. What hurts the most is the myths. This is the first part of my two-part series to debunk Big Data myths. Myth # 4: [...]
Learning From Elevators To Design Dynamic Systems
Elevators suck. They are not smart enough to know which floor you might want to go. They aren’t designed to avoid crowding in single elevator. And they make people press buttons twice, once to call an elevator and then to let it know which floor you want to go to. This all changed during my [...]
Simple Workflow Service – Amazon Adding One Enterprise Brick At Time
This week Amazon announced a new orchestration service called Simple Workflow Service. I would encourage you to read the announcement on Werner’s blog where he explains the need, rationale, and architecture. The people I spoke to had mixed reactions. One set of people described this as a great idea and were excited that the developers can [...]
Wrong Side Of The IT Ecosystem
I find it ridiculous that people are blaming Apple for job creation in China as opposed to in the US. People are also debating how US might in-source some of these manufacturing jobs to compete with China who has sophisticated manufacturing abilities and large skilled labor force supporting these operations. They are all missing the point. [...]
To RIM: Don’t Change The Strategy, Change The Rules
A lot has been said and discussed about RIM’s downfall: indecisive leadership, inability to innovate at fast pace, and no clear path to recovery. I don’t disagree at all with the analysis and the interpretation of the situation, but I do disagree with the conclusion that many people are drawing and vehemently disagree with their [...]
Subscribe To Own As New Lease To Own
The Beatles are timeless and so is music and enterprise software. There’s been an ongoing innovation in the music services. iTunes with iPods disrupted the traditional CD business model and in the ever connected cloud world Pandora, Spotify and countless others are challenging the very concept of “owning” music. Spotify gives you access to a [...]
