Snapdeal to invest $100 million in their research lab: Anand Chandrasekaran

Snapdeal plans to invest $100 million in their Multimedia Research Lab housed in Bengaluru, said Anand Chandrasekaran, Snapdeal's Chief Product Officer. The investment will be phased out over the next few years. The lab focuses on in-house, cutting-edge technology solutions for Snapdeal.

findmystyle.in is one of the first products to come out of this multimedia lab which Snapdeal inaugurated in September last year. The product discovery platform, which Chandrasekaran calls a "technology playground" will focus on customers who "come online to shoppknowing what exactly they want to buy." findmystyle.in is the brainchild of Gaurav Agrawal, Nikhil Rasiwasia and Deepthi Singh who came to Snapdeal when their tech startup Fashiate was acquired by the e-commerce giant.

"The scarce resource today is not bandwidth but customer attention and we want to meet customers where they are, " Chandrasekaran said. He said that Snapdeal has no plans of going mobile only as of now as they want to give their customers choice of platform. Commenting on image search, a feature which their rival Flipkart launched recently, Chandrasekaran said that image search is still nascent in India and that Snapdeal would like to expose their algorithms first to give users the best possible results. "When the novelty of a feature wears off, users want actual results and we want to make sure we can give them that before rolling out a feature." He added that fashion is a great vertical to start with a product discovery tool. "We are trying not to launch features just for the sake of launching them."

Snapdeal wants to test customer response on findmystyle.in before moving to other such products. "We are doing a lot of interesting work on niche offering in our Multimedia Research Lab," Chandrasekaran said.

(Image credits: Indiatimes)