About

Vidya Narayanan is a veteran in context aware computing with over 25 years of relevant experience. She is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rizzle, a fast-growing short video platform that enables episodic short (60-second) videos, making it the platform for user-generated, short vertical series. Rizzle is available on Android and iOS and is inspiring millions of creators to tell billions of stories. Vidya has a proven track record of building teams from scratch and shipping products that people have experienced. In 2007, she started the journey in context by ushering Qualcomm into this area. She built the context-aware research team at Qualcomm from scratch, created a scientific advisory board with some of the world's sharpest minds in academia in machine learning, context, and semantic web, and changed the way Qualcomm viewed software. If you own a phone with Snapdragon chipsets, chances are you have experienced some of this technology her team and she brought to location and other parts of the stack. Subsequently at Google, Vidya built an always-on location and context team for Android that focused on bringing 24x7 context sensing and interpretation. Among other things, she championed Google's effort on building the dedicated context hub - hardware running highly optimized algorithms for efficient sensing. If you've ever carried an Android phone, you've experienced some of this technology through location services, sensors, Google Now, Google Fit, or through some of the plethora of apps that use the APIs her team built. In her 20% time, she also played an advisory role in building the context engine that powered the original Moto X. Vidya has ~75 issued patents and over 100 pending patent applications. She is a research scientist with expertise in Android, ML, iOS, and web technologies. Before Rizzle, Vidya was the Co-Founder and CEO of urbanama: ask me anything, a video AMA platform that hosted AMAs from government officials, NFL players, renowned book authors, and thousands of others. In her free time, Vidya muses at https://medium.com/@hellovidya. She is a visionary leader and a tech guru who is passionate about building the world's best short video platform.