Lalitesh Katrigadda is one of the finest brains in the internet space globally. And that is by no means an exaggeration. He is the man behind Google maps and while talking to him, he almost doesn?t want you to take that fact seriously.
It was back in December 2006 that he launched Maps for India, using Map Maker. He and his team began with a hypothesis that the needs of Indians, when it comes to maps, is far more elaborate and varied compared to that of people in the US. ?For starters, you cannot build a map in India without landmarks. If I do not have RMZ Infinity and Big Bazaar on Old Madras Road (in Bangalore), you have no idea of how to get there. And when we launched our maps, we were the first country in the world to have landmarks on our maps,? he says.
Google has since then adopted landmarks on maps all over the world after they watched what happened in India. They said this is useful wondered why they have it in Indian and not in the US.Lalitesh was born Andhra. He then grew up in Bangalore for three years and then later in Mumbai. ?Most of my childhood memories are centred around Mumbai. I did my engineering in IIT Bombay. My dad was a professor there, so I grew up on campus and I got very excited by Physics very earlier on,? says the man whose interests include organic farming and martial arts. He was a very curious youngster. ?There were two aspects that were very interesting to me. How computers could control and activate the world, and how the human body was most complex machine? So there was this debate after my 12 th grade whether should I join medical or engineering, but IIT Bombay with all its strong research credentials looked a better bet.?
The years spent at IIT had a strong influence on him. Lalitesh then moved to the US for his higher education. Initially, he was an aerospace student, and Iowa had a great aerospace program. He liked a professor there, and proceeded to learn to design and build rockets. That was in 1991.
After his Masters he realised that around that time that his passion centred around robotics. Then he went to Stanford to learn Robotics, the art of designing and building an entire robot by himself. So was it a big shift from aerospace? He explains, ?Advanced aircraft are nothing but very large complex robots. So in many ways if you are schooled in aerospace, you have taken your first step towards robotics. I also did some formal training in computers, got my Masters in Computer Science, then did my PhD in robotics at Carnegie Mellon. That was the journey.?
One had to now draw him towards the subject of privacy and its boundaries. ?The aggregate of every thing I do in terms of accessing information and who I talk to and so on, that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about me. That is becoming more and more online, more and more connected, and that footprint is moving to the cloud. That creates a very legitimate question about how secure is this data, how private is this, who should access it, and more than anything else how transparent is it to the user. These are very important issues. And in many ways you are better off not having it if you don?t have all of these things in place. And I think the reason why it is now a worldwide debate is that the internet is really coming into its own.?
If one looked at people?s lives even four years ago, most of them did not do much online. ?I moved to India in 2004 and around that time we had a little kid. The first three years we went to stores to buy. Today in the US when my wife goes there or when I look at my friends? buying patterns, even the clothes are bought online, and my brother does not buy anything that is in stores today. He buys everything online, and that creates obviously an enormous amount of information about him in the online space, and the privacy of that information is far more important than four years or five years ago, which was just email.?
The other thing is the entertainment that people access, which used to be TV, has moved online. ?In the US, people don?t have cable any more, they have the cable connection, but they have discontinued the cable service of subscribing to 400 channels. Whatever you want to access, you get it when you want it and how you want it, and that is a fundamental shift. It is natural that all of this boils down to privacy, which is I think is a very healthy debate to have.?
This is the time when both companies and governments are formulating policies around privacy, and Lalitesh feels it would have been premature to have this debate even five years ago. ?This is a good time to have this debate because it will allow most of corporations like Google who really care about user?s privacy to understand what the point of view of every stake holder is and do the right thing. But there will be clashes, as can be seen in many countries.? It is a worldwide debate and people need to get involved.
?Google believes that free expression is a really important aspect of any free society, and we champion and protect that right. At the same time, we cannot be blind to cultures. There is clearly free speech and then there is clearly insightful speech, and there is child pornography which is not acceptable almost anywhere, and we need to draw the line. So, we make our best efforts to follow the local laws and be sensitive to local culture. Following the laws, is the first step. In many ways, we would like to be a company that embraces the local culture and not just follow the law,? says Lalitesh.
India?s internet penetration still hovers around the 9% mark, and that?s not good enough. ?Therein lies the reason why I get up and come to work. Even a 5% jump in the next few years, could be telling. I am betting that it is actually going to jump not by 5% but closer to 20% by 2014.?
The growth of e-commerce in India is a big opportunity. ?In many ways the consumption patterns of Indians is poised to dramatically shift in the next three years because of e-commerce. My brother-in-law does not have to come from a small town he lives into Bangalore to buy the next gadget, as he can get it sitting in his small town in Vizag, and he does not have to wait for a mall to show up there, because it won?t. It is funny that a flat screen TV is more expensive in a small town than in a big city, because there is only one supplier. Now e-commerce actually allows us to bypass all that, and you don?t have to go through this massive capital expenditure on roll-outs to reach everyone. Less than 10% of Indian retail is organised. The rest of it is unorganised and fragmented. The fragmentation is an opportunity, and in many ways an opportunity that I believe the internet will bridge.?
The 100 odd million users we have today in India are comfortable enough with English. But the next generation users who will come online will be people who have strong preference for Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and so on. Now those users how will they interact with internet? What patterns will they develop? What will they want? We don?t know the answer to that. ?India is unique. It is multilingual. The next wave is the local language one. You can actually see that on YouTube today; more than 70% of YouTube usage is not in English, but predominantly Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil etc. Having said that, a lot of it is Bollywood, but not all of it. So we are already seeing that pattern emerge on YouTube and we expect that to move to the web.?
Lalitesh, after his university days, had set up a company in robotic space called Stedio. It was Google?s first acquisition. ?That?s how I came in.? He has stayed in since then.
