Shyam Somanadh

In the ten years that I have spent in India’s digital domain, I have helped various companies, from the miniscule to conglomerates, set up divisions, products and operations from the ground up. In effect, this is almost akin to running a start up, but within a large organization.
In 2008, I decided to go solo to help a wider range of companies, spread across various domains, to accomplish the same. Currently, I am in the process of helping a traditional business firm, an organization that focuses only on the rural content domain and a couple of more traditional digital business do the same through my company, FrontierNxt.
I have pioneered new technologies, products and paradigms, including the use of RSS for content syndication (at Indian Express, Timesofindia.com and Economictimes.com), micro-content (Twitter at CNN-IBN, which was the first Indian news organization to get on the platform in 2007) and non-traditional methods to discover and distribute content (XMPP to push/pull content at CNN-IBN).
I have also been instrumental in getting various media houses in India more receptive of blogging as a platform both internally and externally. At Times Internet Limited, I started O3, the blogging platform, which was a first a media company in India in 2004. At CNN-IBN, I conceptualized and drafted the the blogging guidelines and processes for their weblogs.
On the technical front, I have helped to build, deploy and maintain online infrastructures that serve daily page views in the order of millions and are used by millions of users. I am more than comfortable handling all aspects — technology, people, operations, products and business.