Hello! My name is Sushant and currently I serve as Head of Location Platform and Geo Spatial Data at Snap where I manage teams of highly skilled Software Engineers, GIS Engineers and Applied Data Scientists and am responsible for developing Geo based services which powers Snap Map, which is used by 350M Users every month.The Geo Services also brings revenue to Snapchat. Before that, I served as Lead Software Engineer at Vurb, a startup focusing on Local Search and Place Discovery, which got acquired by Snap, in August 2016 for $110M.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Snap Map Launches Inferred Visits
At the Annual Snap Partner Summit, Snap announces updates to Snap Map with an improved UI and inference of visits by user’s friends. This helped with user growth.
Snap Map Launches My Places for Local Place Discovery
At the Annual Snap partner Summit, Snap announces a new product called My Places which personalizes places for the user to help with Place Discovery
Snap Map Launches Layers
At the Annual Snap partner Summit, Snap announces a new product called Layers which opens a door for partners to render a layer on Snap Map to visualize a particular use case like Infatuation.
Snap Launches Promote Local Places
At the Annual Snap partner Summit, Snap announces support for Local Businesses to advertise on Snap. This helped in increasing revenue, and providing support to businesses
Snap Map Launches Places
At the Annual Snap Partner Summit, Snap announces its own custom in-house built Places Data, powered by user generated inputs. This opens up Snapchat’s understanding of User’s interaction.
Snap Map Launches Place Moderation
Snap Launches support for Users to report inaccuracies with Places data, in an effort to reduce staleness and improve accuracy of Places. Several Millions of Users report inaccuracies of Places every month.
Snapchat Acquires Vurb
Snapchat acquires Vurb, a local search and place discovery app which aggregates contents from various platforms. This ensures Snapchat’s entry in Location based discovery, Location Intelligence.
Vurb 3.0 Launches
Vurb announces launch of new Mobile search discovery and content recommendation platform with curated content from relevant influencers. User engagement and growth both spiked after the launch.
Groupon Launches Recommended Deals Widgets
Groupon announces several widgets on Deal and Home Page to better discover relevant deals which drives revenue. Several Patents are also filed as a result of this discovery