So Long CIM, Hello Comcast Innovation Labs

This post has been a little hard to write so I have been putting it off for the last few weeks.This week has been my last official week with Comcast Interactive Media, the group I have been with for the last 6 years. Its been a fantastic run, from back in Oct 2004 when I joined what was then the “Comcast Portal Engineering Team” straight out of grad school.

In the last few years I have worked with some fantastic people on products that have touched millions of users. I have had great managers throughout who have helped me grow and even experiment with what I’d like to focus on, which itself has gone from leading production applications like Comcast.net’s Flash portal and the flagship Fan product, to more recently looking into bringing technology innovations early in the product conception process within the CIM User Experience department.

But while building these products was awesome, I have always been more interested in emerging technologies often tangential to Comcast/CIM’s core business. I have also been pretty passionate about innovation within Comcast itself and even led a discussion about that at a previous BarcampPhilly event (the notes on which you can find here). It has always been challenging trying to be innovative and reactive to all the new stuff happening out there while building out products with well defined roadmaps (My former manager, friend and lead conspirator on foiling my entire office while I was on vacation Aaron Held even has a blog with that title 🙂 ). Moving to the newly formed Comcast Innovation Labs with a mandate of looking at emerging technologies and products as potential areas for Comcast to grow in has me pretty excited.

Thankfully the transition only currently requires me to switch floors, moving from the 18th to the 35th, so all you CIM readers, swing by once in a while. You know I’ll be on CIM floors almost everyday ;). The engineering team still has the best coffee machine in all of Comcast Center.

P.S: Its weirdly nostalgic to look back at all the posts on this blog tagged CIM. Must. grab. tissue…

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur