I am an engineer by heart, entrepreneur by nature. I like to build new products which use technology and make our lives more exciting.
Build web services from scratch and scale to millions of users.
Co-founder of TheIceBreak.com, Expert in mobile, video and social products.
Invest in early startups with focus on strong core technology and team.
TheIceBreak is a service designed to help existing couples connect, communicate, and discover new things about their partners. TheIceBreak provides a private platform that helps users break down the communication barriers that can complicate real-world relationships, while providing rewarding incentives that keep your love life fresh and fun!
I have invested in / advising startups like Mashape, Viddy, Venuetastic, Internmatch, Upverter, Replybuy and others. I look for a strong product / engineering focused teams in order to get involved.
Built youtube mobile in 2006, and headed the mobile group at YouTube. Responsible for all of YouTube's efforts in Mobile, including iPhone, Android, WebOS, Symbian, Mobile Uploads, Mobile Website.
Managed the core product engineering group at Youtube, which was responsible for building all the consumer facing features like video playback, channels, groups and comments.
One of the early engineers at Youtube. Created a majority of the initial user-facing features and also responsible for the video transcoding system.
Involved in development of projects like Internationalization, System Integration and Fraud management. Volunteered on projects to improve the development environment and intranet tools. Optimized build systems and wrote Firefox extensions to improve efficiency of code development.
One of the principal engineers of Crestel, a billing and revenue management system for ISP/Telecoms. Built core parts of the application server, mediation agents, web services and reporting engine. Also maintained the RADIUS server. Awarded the "Best New Employee of the Year".
Built windows software that kept a replica of selected files/directories on different computers over the network. It automatically synced changes in files across all copies and managed conflicts.
Designing a High Speed Data Stream Recorder on a modular, scalable architecture to record multiple, concurrent streams using unified algorithms that can accommodate both recording and playback with low latency.
Patent: USC File No. 3535, U.S. provisional patent application# 60/581,888, June 22, 2004.
Publication: High Resolution Live Streaming with the HYDRA Architecture (Roger Zimmermann, Moses Pawar, Dwipal A. Desai, Min Qin, and Hong Zhu).
Published in the ACM Computers in Entertainment journal, volume 2, issue 4, October/December 2004
Book Chapter: Video Data Management and Information Retrieval (Editor: Sagarmay Deb, University of Southern Queensland, Australia)
Published by Idea Group Inc., publisher of the Idea Group Publishing, Information Science Publishing and IRM Press imprints, 2004. ISBN 1-59140-571-8
This project consists of multiple performers at remote locations able to play together in a concert, and focuses on extremely low latency audio+video streams for performers and high definition playback for audiences spread across different locations.
Publication: Report on User Experiments in the Distributed Immersive Performance Project (E. Chew, R. Zimmermann, A.A. Sawchuk, C. Papadopoulos, C. Kyriakakis, C. Tanoue, D. Desai, M. Pawar, R. Sinha, and W. Meyer.
Presented at 5th Open Workshop of MUSICNETWORK: Integration of Music in Multimedia Applications
Performed an analysis for various options available for driving a HD quality Head Mounted Display and built a PC based prototype.
Publication:Ethernet Interface for Head-Mounted Displays (Technical Report) (Roger Zimmermann and Dwipal A. Desai)
USC Technical Report USC-CS-TR05-846, University of Southern California, 2005.
Java based SNMP MIB Browser that contains its own MIB Parser supporting SNMP-V1 MIBs, and an SNMP Query Engine that supports GET and SET Methods. This software is released under GPL license.
Copy music + playlists (from iTunes) and pictures on your windows computer with any flash based device like Android, Nokia, Palm, etc. It suports playlist creation on the device, and also resizes images so that mobile phones or other devices can process them quickly.
A firefox extension that lets you remove cookies of the site you are currently visiting. It adds a right-click menu item, and an available toolbar item to do this.
Group of scripts to help manage an iTunes library like group-tagging of songs, save rating to ID3 tags, etc.
Dwipal Desai — mail@dwipal.com